Our Whippings

Eugene Field was a wonderful poet whom I never had the opportunity to read growing up, but his works are delightful. I thought I'd share a few of my favorites over the next weeks:

Our Whippings

Come, Harvey, let us sit a while and talk about the times

Before you went to selling clothes and I to peddling rimes-

The days when we were little boys, as naughty little boys

As ever worried home-folks with their everlasting noise!

Egad! and, were we so disposed, I'll venture we could show

The scars of wallopings we got some forty years ago;

What wallopings I mean I think I need not specify-

Mother's whippings didn't hurt, but father's! oh, my!

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The way that we played hookey those many years ago-

We'd rather give 'most anything than have our children know!

The thousand naughty things we did, the thousand fibs we told-

Why, thinking of them makes my Presbyterian blood run cold!

How often Deacon Sabine Morse remarked, if we were his

He'd tan our "pesky little hides until the blishters riz"!

It's many a hearty thrashing to that Deacon Morse we owe-

Mother's whippings didn't count - father's did, though!

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We used to sneak off swimmin' in those careless boyish days,

And come back home of evenings with our necks and backs ablaze;

How mother used to wonder why our clothes were full of sand,

But father, having been a boy, appeared to understand.

And after tea, he'd beckon us to join him in the shed

Where he'd proceed to tinge our backs a deeper, darker red;

Say what we will of mother's, there is none will controvert

The proposition that our father's licking always hurt!

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For mother was by nature so forgiving and so mild

That she inclined to spare the rod, although she spoiled the child;

And when at last in self-defence she had to whip us, she

Appeared to feel those whippings a great deal more than we!

But how we bellowed and took on, as if we'd like to die-

Poor mother really thought she hurt, and that's what made her cry!

Then how we youngsters snickered as out the door we slid,

For mother's whippings never hurt, though father's always did.

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In after years poor father simmered down to five feet four,

But in our youth he seemed to us in height eight feet or more!

Oh, how we shivered when he quoth in cold, suggestive tones:

"I'll see you in the woodshed after supper all alone!"

Oh, how the legs and arms and dust and trouser buttons flew-

What florid vocalisms marked that vesper interview!

Yes, after all this lapse of years, I feelingly assert,

With all respect to mother, it was father's whippings hurt!

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The little boy experiencing that tingling 'neath his vest

Is often loath to realize that all is for the best;

Yet, when the boy gets older, he pictures with delight

The buffetings of childhood - as we do here tonight.

The years, the gracious years, have smoothed and beautified the ways

That to our little feet seemed all too rugged in the days

Before you went to selling clothes and I to peddling rimes-

So, Harvey, let us sit a while and think upon those times.