Hush Little Baby, Momma’s at a Meeting

This poem popped up somewhere in the labyrinth of the intertubes. In honor of the close of Mother’s Day (after which time I shall remove my hair shirt until next year), here is a poem of G.K. Chesterton’s written for the thoroughly modern mother and child.

His real target was education and “women’s rights” — both favorite totems of the Left.

The Song Of Education
III. For the Creche

Form 8277059, Sub-Section K

I remember my mother, the day that we met,
A thing I shall never entirely forget;
And I toy with the fancy that, young as I am,
I should know her again if we met in a tram.
But mother is happy in turning a crank
That increases the balance in somebody’s bank;
And I feel satisfaction that mother is free
From the sinister task of attending to me.

They have brightened our room, that is spacious and cool,
With diagrams used in the Idiot School,
And Books for the Blind that will teach us to see;
But mother is happy, for mother is free.
For mother is dancing up forty-eight floors,
For love of the Leeds International Stores,
And the flame of that faith might perhaps have grown cold,
With the care of a baby of seven weeks old.

For mother is happy in greasing a wheel
For somebody else, who is cornering Steel;
And though our one meeting was not very long,
She took the occasion to sing me this song:
“O, hush thee, my baby, the time will soon come
When thy sleep will be broken with hooting and hum;
There are handles want turning and turning all day,
And knobs to be pressed in the usual way;

O, hush thee, my baby, take rest while I croon,
For Progress comes early, and Freedom too soon.”

The Imaginative Conservative says:

The absurdity of the modern academy’s attempt to build a university in the absence of universals was a topic to which Chesterton would return often. “Take away the supernatural,” says Chesterton, “and what remains is the unnatural…

Chesterton is nothing if not quotable. He is also very out of fashion, and we shall have to wait until theistic pedagogy comes back into fashion… which it will, as the Wheel of Fortune turns again… which it is sure to do.

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This squib was inspired by Dennis Sevakis, who sent us this.

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