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  • The Paris Review

    ’Tis Pity Such a Pretty Maid As I Should Go to Hell

    by Anthony Madrid Jul 12, 2017 5 minutes

    From the cover of the NYRB reissue of The Fire Horse.

    1

    I have just closed Isaac Watts’s once-famous book of children’s poetry, Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children. This book came out in 1715 and went through nobody-knows-how-many editions. Billions. Apparently there was a very long period during which it could reasonably be expected that any English-speaker could recite every one of these twenty-eight poems backward, under any conditions, including hanging upside-down drunk on two hits of acid.

    Today, most people only know of the book’s existence because two of its pieces are parodied in (Watts: “ ’Tis the voice of the sluggard … ” and “How doth the little busy bee … ” versus Carroll: “ ’Tis the voice of the lobster … ” and “How doth the little crocodile … ”). Modern readers(“From a Fairy to a Child”). Read his diary. 

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