Familiar Lines
(Arranged so that the little ones can always remember them.)
THE boy stood on the burning deck,
- His fleece was white as snow;
He stuck a feather in his hat,
- John Anderson, my Jo!
"Come back, come back," he cried in grief,
- From India's coral strands,
The frost is on the pumpkin and
- The village smithy stands.
Am I a soldier of the cross
- From many a boundless plain?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
- There is a land of pure delight
Ye banks and braes o' bonny Doon
- Across the sands o' Dee,
Can you forget that night in June --
- My country, 'tis of thee!
Of all sad words of tongue or pen,
- We're saddest when we sing,
To beard the lion in his den --
- To set before the king.
Hark! from the tombs a doleful sound,
- And phoebus gins arise;
All mimsy were the borogroves
- To mansions in the skies.
Anonymous (publishing date unknown)
I found this on the web at The Poet's Corner (http://www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/) a site I often begin my poetry quests from. It's used by teachers and students alike and features a work from Steve Spanoudis' invaluable collection of poems daily. I thought the readers here might enjoy reading about this one because it's quite clever. Mr. Spanoudis speculates the composition date to be somewhere around the 1890s, with a 15-year margin of error either way. A compilation of verses from other well known works the author has put together from a variety of poems in iambic meter Familiar Lines begins with a hint that the verses are from poems that children would know very well. Mr. Spanoidis relates his view:
The "where" question is pretty easy: there are enough lines from Whittier, Riley, and Longfellow to convince me that this is an American production. "When" is tougher. The joke isn't good enough for me to draw any conclusions from the anthologies that don't include it. All the referenced poems I've identified were well-known by 1875. The emphasis on Isaac Watts' hymns suggests an earlier rather than later date, and the whole has a 19th- more than a 20th-century "feel".
From well known English poems the relevant lines are pipelinked as a key many haven't been noded yet so help yourself if you'd like to node them. If you identify any more of the verses or node a missing one, /msg me and I'll add them.
Sources:
Text taken from The Poets' Corner:
http://www.geocities.com/~bblair/anonfamiliarlines.htm
Key to poem lines taken from
www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/ 7086/anonfamiliarlinesol.htm
CST Approved | 
