Give me something to eat,
Good people, I pray;
I have really not had
One mouthful today!
I am hungry and cold,
And last night I dreamed
A scarecrow had caught me—
Good land, how I screamed!
Of one little children
And six ailing wives
(No, one wife and six children),
Not one of them thrives.
So pity my case,
Dear people, I pray;
I’m honest, and really
I’ve come a long way.
Source: She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (University of Iowa Press, 1997)
Poet Mary Mapes Dodge was born into an academic family in New York, and was educated at home by tutors. At 20 she married a lawyer with whom she had two children. After her husband’s death seven years later, Dodge began her writing career to support her sons.
Dodge’s most famous children’s novel, Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates (1865), was inspired by historian John Lothrop Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic and The . . .
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Poems by Mary Mapes Dodge