We have already run, as Poem of the Day, two “Cautionary Tales for Children” by Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953). As you have no doubt surmised, having met both Jim and Lord Lundy, we here at The New York Sun greatly appreciate Belloc’s clever inversions of a particular Victorian genre of texts given to children. Oswald Bastable, adolescent narrator of E. Nesbit’s “The Story of the Treasure-Seekers,” deprecates this genre as the “goody-good book.” In such “goody-good” stories, long-suffering child saints endure trials and emerge victorious with all their treacle-coated virtue intact. But in Belloc’s “Cautionary Tales,” misbehaving children (and occasionally adults) meet wildly catastrophic ends, to the delight of the non-treacly child reader with a sense of justice.

In today’s Poem of the Day, however, the joke is a little more subtle. George suffers, as the title says, “a Catastrophe of Considerable Dimensions,” but what has George done to deserve it? Reader, George has been good. That’s what he’s done. He’s been good, and now the balloon which his grandmamma gave him for being good has blundered into a candle and burned the house down with the staff in it, while George himself has incurred “a nasty lump behind the ear.” Just as George has been a completely passive wreaker of havoc, so the story’s moral, too, is passive. Little boys simply should not be given dangerous toys. Let that be a lesson to us all.  

George, Who Played With a Dangerous Toy, and Suffered a Catastrophe of Considerable Dimensions 
by Hilaire Belloc 

When George’s Grandmamma was told 
That George had been as good as gold, 
She promised in the afternoon 
To buy him an Immense BALLOON. 
And so she did; but when it came, 
It got into the candle flame, 
And being of a dangerous sort 
Exploded with a loud report! 
The lights went out! The windows broke! 
The room was filled with reeking smoke. 
And in the darkness, shrieks and yells 
Were mingled with electric bells, 
And falling masonry and groans, 
And crunching, as of broken bones, 
And dreadful shrieks, when, worst of all, 
The house itself began to fall! 
It tottered, shuddering to and fro, 
Then crashed into the street below —  
Which happened to be Savile Row. 

When help arrived, among the dead 
Were Cousin Mary, Little Fred, 
The Footmen (both of them), the Groom, 
The man that cleaned the Billiard-Room, 
The Chaplain, and the Still-Room Maid. 
And I am dreadfully afraid 
That Monsieur Champignon, the Chef, 
Will now be permanently deaf —  
And both his aides are much the same; 
While George, who was in part to blame, 
Received, you will regret to hear, 
A nasty lump behind the ear. 

Moral: 
The moral is that little boys 
Should not be given dangerous toys.

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.