Improve Your Recitation Skills

Young’s New Juvenile Speaker by Henry A. Young (DeWolfe, Fiske & Co, 1887)

The New Juvenile Speaker is a book of really awful moral poems for children to teach them how to act (with humility, diligence, grace, quietness, and hard work), as well as to teach them how to speak with proper enunciation and pronunciation in public. Most of the poems appear to be written either by the author or credited to newspapers who would fill empty columns with goofy poems made to poke a smile into the staunch Victorian faces of their readers. Some poems are explicitly racist, such as The Watermillon. The first stanza: ”There was a watermillon / Growing on a vine, / and there were a pickaninny / A-watching it all the time.” One can guess how the rest proceeds. It’s not particularly surprising to find a piece like this in a book so old, but there’s no wonder that racisim was perpetuated throughout the 1900’s and continues today. Poems like this create a chain reaction among generations: a child reads the piece and very well may write another piece reflecting the views they believe to be true, thus indoctrinating more poor defenceless children with the distgusting views of their forefathers. I learned that the term “pickaninny” is racist. Apparently, it’s out of style these days. Luckily, I’d never heard this one before. The one shining poem amist a sea of mediocrity and sugar-sweetness was the poem The Mountain and the Squirrel by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The Mountain and the Squirrel
Had a quarrel,
And the former called the latter, “Little Prig.”
Bun Replied:
You are doubtless very big:
but all sorts of things and weather
Must be taken in together
To make up a year
And a sphere;
And I think it no disgrace
To occupy my place.
If I am not so large as you,
You are not so small as I,
And not half so spry;
I’ll not deny you make
A very pretty squirrel track.
Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;
If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you crack a nut.”

Thanks to my friend Jazz for giving me this book earlier this year.