Some Words of Wisdom, But Then...

I was just reading poems from A Children's Book of Verse for Maddie before her afternoon nap, and came across this fine piece:

A wise old owl lived in an oak;
The more he saw the less he spoke;
The less he spoke the more he heard.
Why can't we all be like that wise old bird?

They're not all as pleasant as that one, however. For one thing, there seems to be a whole lot of corporal punishment going on, particularly the final line from a version of "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe" which I had never heard before, and probably for good reason:

She whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.

Gender equality is generally an unknown concept, as well. It's not too difficult to tell who the "little hen" actually represents in the following:

I had a little hen;
The prettiest ever seen;
She washed up the dishes,
And kept the house clean.
She went to the mill
To fetch me some flour
And always got home
In less than an hour.
She baked me my bread,
She brewed me my ale,
She sat by the fire
And told a fine tale.

While at first I was impressed by a wife who brews her own ale, I quickly realized the rest of this ode wasn't particularly enlightened. I would imagine that feminist moms just skip this poem and read the next one to their impressionable youngsters.