Pater’s Bathe
A charming children’s rhyme that is also a test of the clearest speaker’s diction.
1895
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
A charming children’s rhyme that is also a test of the clearest speaker’s diction.
1895
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Sir Edward Abbott Parry had recently been appointed one of her majesty Queen Victoria’s judges when he published Katawampus (1895), a book of tales and rhymes for young children. It all began, it seems, when Pater (Latin for father), in despair over his fractious children, took a Christmas Day dip in the sea... but before telling that extraordinary story, Pater gave these little verses from his ‘book of rhymes’.
YOU can take a tub with a rub and a scrub in a two-foot tank of tin,*
You can stand and look at the whirling brook and think about jumping in,
You can chatter and shake in the cold black lake, but the kind of bath for me,
Is to take a dip from the side of a ship, in the trough of the rolling sea.
You may lie and dream in the bed of a stream when an August day is dawning,
Or believe ’tis nice to break the ice on your tub of a winter morning,
You may sit and shiver beside the river, but the kind of bath for me
Is to take a dip from the side of a ship, in the trough of the rolling sea.
From ‘Katawampus’ (1925) by Sir Edward Abbott Parry (1863-1943).
* Fans of tongue-twisters will recognise the rhythm of ‘How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”. Fans of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings will have been put in mind of Pippin singing Bilbo’s ‘favourite bath-song’, which is strikingly similar.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.