You can't see fairies unless you're good.
 That's what Nurse said to me.
 They live in the smoke of the chimney,
 Or down in the roots of a tree;
 They brush their wings on a tulip,
 Or hide behind a pea.

 But you can't see fairies unless you're good,
 So they aren't much use to me.

A followup of sorts to the recent Dorothy Parker poem…

Amidst the plethora of insipid, saccharine or just-plain-dull children’s poems, it was refreshing to come across one as unexpectedly and delightfully subversive as ‘Fairies’.

Of course, there are a lot of brilliant poems out there too, but too many writers seem to take writing for children as a license to churn out the most awful dreck. Sturgeon’s law apart, I can’t help but feel that some writers take distinct advantage of the fact that their target audience and their target market are entirely separate.

Today’s piece is a clear dig at the preachy variety of poem - starting off with a solemn moral injunction, throwing in a few cliches about fairies, and then delivering the unrepentant punchline. Took me totally by surprise - I laughed out loud.

Biography

B. 08-16-1909, Marchette Gaylord Chute - UK author. MC broke the retelling mode of historical writers and did actual source research. She is best known for With Shakespeare of London (1950) and Geoffrey Chaucer of England (1946).

– http://www.undelete.org/woa/woa08-16.html

Links

The Dorothy Parker poem referred to: poem #638

We’ve run several children’s poems on Minstrels, but nothing particularly reminiscent of today’s.

— Martin