FullReads

Perhaps one of the most enjoyable occasions was the night when the members of the Re-Echo Club discussed the merits of the classic poem:

Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater,
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her;
Put her in a pumpkin shell,
And there he kept her very well.

In many ways this historic narrative called forth admiration. One must admit Peter’s great strength of character, his power of quick decision, and immediate achievement. Some held that his inability to retain the lady’s affection in the first place argued a defect in his nature; but remembering the lady’s youth and beauty (implied by the spirit of the whole poem), they could only reiterate their appreciation of the way he conquered circumstances, and proved himself master of his fate, and captain of his soul! Truly, the Pumpkin-Eaters must have been a forceful race, able to defend their rights and rule their people.

The Poets at their symposium unanimously felt that the style of the poem, though hardly to be called crude, was a little bare, and they took up with pleasure the somewhat arduous task of rewriting it.

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Mr. Ed Poe opined that there was lack of atmosphere, and that the facts of the narrative called for a more impressive setting. He therefore offered:

The skies, they were ashen and sober,
The lady was shivering with fear;
Her shoulders were shud’ring with fear,
On a dark night in dismal October,
Of his most Matrimonial Year.
It was hard by the cornfield of Auber,
In the musty Mud Meadows of Weir,
Down by the dank frog-pond of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted cornfield of Weir.

Now, his wife had a temper Satanic,
And when Peter roamed here with his Soul,
Through the corn with his conjugal Soul,
He spied a huge pumpkin Titanic,
And he popped her right in through a hole.
Then solemnly sealed up the hole.

And thus Peter Peter has kept her
Immured in Mausoleum gloom,
A moist, humid, damp sort of gloom.
And, though there’s no doubt he bewept her,
She is still in her yellow-hued tomb,
Her unhallowed, Hallowe’en tomb
And ever since Peter side-stepped her,
He calls her his lost Lulalume,
His Pumpkin-entombed Lulalume.

This was received with acclaim, but many objected to the mortuary
theory.

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Mrs. Robert Browning was sure that Peter’s love for his wife, though perhaps that of a primitive man, was of the true Portuguese stamp, and with this view composed the following pleasing Sonnet:

How do I keep thee? Let me count the ways.
I bar up every breadth and depth and height
My hands can reach, while feeling out of sight
For bolts that stick and hasps that will not raise.
I keep thee from the public’s idle gaze,
I keep thee in, by sun or candle light.
I keep thee, rude, as women strive for Right.
I keep thee boldly, as they seek for praise,
I keep thee with more effort than I’d use
To keep a dry-goods shop or big hotel.
I keep thee with a power I seemed to lose
With that last cook. I’ll keep thee down the well,
Or up the chimney-place! Or if I choose,
I shall but keep thee in a Pumpkin shell.

This was, of course, meritorious, though somewhat suggestive of the cave-men, who, we have never been told, were Pumpkin Eaters.

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