Elizabeth Hough Sechrist (1903–1991)

A few gems in here, but oh my. So very American, so very jingoistic. Well, now that America Is Made Great Again, perhaps this book’s day has come again. It contains poetry chosen for every holiday on the American calendar, including many which – despite spending my elementary school years in the USA from 1960-69 – were completely unknown to me.

This collection includes poems for not only the expected birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, but also for Robert E. Lee, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano as well. Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, Armistice Day all call for military-themed poems and there is a surprising plenitude. There are extremely patriotic poems for Flag Day, for I Am An American Day (here venturing into the holidays I’ve never heard of), even more patriotic poems for Patriot’s Day, and positively jingoistic poems for Pan-American Day (explaining why it was so right for the Americans to seize the Canal Zone – why, it would have been a sin and a shame NOT to!).

Perhaps the most breathtakingly ghastly poem in the collection was “Indian Names” (American Indian Day, 4th Friday in September), which starts with the lines “Ye say they have all passed away, that noble race and brave” (WHAT??), elaborates at length on the complete and utter disappearance of the Indigenous peoples, but lauds the persistence of the place-names they bestowed on the landscape. Reading this poem is so deeply horrifying that it could almost give a person PTSD all on its own.

The chapter collecting State Songs was illuminating in various ways. I was disconcerted to find On, Wisconsin omitted, as apparently the author did not consider it even an unofficial state song (but really, we sang it in school in 1966; and even if it is a college song, it’s less so than Idaho’s official state song: And Here We Have Idaho “A pioneer State built a College to share”) and alarmed to find that The Old Kentucky Home was the official state song of its eponymous state and Swanee River the official song of Florida – dialect, “darkies”, and all. Carry Me Back To Old Virginny (“that’s where the old darkey’s heart am long’d to go, There’s where I labored so hard for old massa”) is in a similar vein, and it was a relief to find that Mississippi’s state song doesn’t get around to mentioning darkies until the third verse – hopefully they stop singing before then. Michigan’s state song is slightly tactless in the opposite direction; nine of the ten verses praise the feats of Michigan’s soldiers against the South in the War Between the States. Just sing the first verse, Michiganders! Kansans too (“Home on the Range”) would do well to stop singing before they get to the part about how “The red man was pressed from this part of the West”. I do hope some of that has changed in the 21st century.

Why as many as three stars? Some of the Christmas poetry is quite wonderful and hard to find elsewhere. G. K. Chesterton is represented. Robert Herrick's A True Lent is here and so is his A Ceremony for Candlemas Day. I copied a few poems and sent the book on its way.… (meer)