Silverstein is clever. I like his Crocodile’s Toothache:
The Crocodile
Went to the dentist
And sat down in the chair,
And the dentist said, “Now tell me, sir,
Why does it hurt and where?”
And the Crocodile said, “I’ll tell you the truth,
I have a terrible ache in my tooth,”
And he opened his jaws so wide, so wide,
The the dentist, he climbed right inside,
And the dentist laughed, “Oh isn’t this fun?”
As he pulled the teeth out, one by one.
And the Crocodile cried, “You’re hurting me so!
Please put down your pliers and let me go.”
But the dentist laughed with a Ho Ho Ho,
And he said, “I still have twelve to go-
Oops, that’s the wrong one, I confess,
But what’s one crocodile’s tooth more or less?”
Then suddenly, the jaws went SNAP,
And the dentist was gone, right off the map,
And where he went one could only guess…
To North or South or East or West…
He left no forwarding address.
But what’s one dentist, more or less?
If you have children, read poetry to them and then you can start with poets that are easier to understand and not feel silly about it. My favorite with kids, having been quoted And read to us throughout my childhood, is a a Milne. One of my other favorites is James Whitcomb Riley.
Well it’s the blind leading the blind here… I would say Kipling, Tennyson, Browning and Longfellow. I just like Longfellow. And GKC has some poetry that I read here and there and liked as well.
Shel Silverstein was my only childhood exposure to poetry. It was good for me; but, **unsupervised **, I only memorized and too often recited one poem, one very disrespectful to my younger sister. I should call her and apologize.
Not that I think it’s irrelevant, but it’s a pretty hard thing to figure out what to do with. He was bad. Some of his poems are good. Some are “sketchy.”
The bookening deals with this sort of problem somewhat regularly. Dickens was wicked, too, and you can’t expect it to not affect his writing entirely. But we still read Dickens.
But the extreme end of this spectrum is the Donatist heresy, which insisted that the sacraments were invalid if performed by pastors that repudiated the faith under persecution.
Right. I just think a lot of Christians know him from The Giving Tree and might think he’s on our side. Definitely don’t need to burn everything he did, but also don’t want to blithely consume just anything by him.
I bought a copy of the Giving Tree last year at the used bookstore and read it to my kids. Then I noticed someone had written in the back inside cover “This is bad theology.” I got a kick it off that. It also has an inscription in the front about how inspirational it was when it was given to the previous owner.
Bit of trivia gleaned tonight from my brother: Shel Silverstein wrote Johnny Cash’s classic “A Boy Named Sue.” I figured y’all needed to know that, too.
