Rarely has a poet’s given name so perfectly described his work as is the case with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Almost all of his best-known poems are long. Whether the subject is Paul Revere, the village blacksmith, or the fate of an unfortunate schooner named Hesperus, Longfellow churned out the rhymes, line after line, stanza after stanza, page after page. In this he was very much in keeping with both his times and the preferences of his audience. In the nineteenth century, Americans demanded the longest rail and telegraph lines, the longest political speeches, and the longest poems of an uplifting nature that could be drummed into the heads of frontier kids of middling intelligence in one room school houses. Longfellow produced just that and rose to prominence. My own Longfellow favorite is "Excelsior," which I parody under the title "Alka-Seltzer" in an upcoming book (see: ‘The Definitive Book of Financial Verse’ link on this website). Here, I take a whack at rewriting what might well be his shortest poem, "There Was A Little Girl." The original goes like this:
There was a little girl, she had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
And when she was good, she was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid.
Anyone who can successfully rhyme ‘forehead’ with ‘horrid,’ by the way, deserves our immediate attention.
I Owned A Penny Stock
I owned a penny stock, it lay there like a rock
It hardly ever got traded;
And when it took off, I got very, very rich
And when it dropped dead, I got spayded.
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