REELY'S
AUDIO POEMS

Hilaire Belloc
Contemporaries
Amy Lowell
Lucy Maud Montgomery
Robert William Service
Robert Frost

MORE AUDIO

Custard the Dragon
Ogden Nash
Hope is the Thing
with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
Little Orphant Annie
James W. Riley
St. Peter at the Gate
Joseph Bert Smiley
The Pied Piper
Robert Browning
Matilda
Hilaire Belloc
Owl and the Pussycat
Edward Lear
Wynken, Blynken
and Nod
Eugene Field

Selections from
The Bad Child's Book of Beasts
by Hilaire Belloc (1896)

The Lion

The Lion, the Lion, he dwells in the Waste,
He has a big head and a very small waist;
But his shoulders are stark,
and his jaws they are grim,
And a good little child will not play with him.

The Marmozet

The species Man and Marmozet
Are intimately linked;
The Marmozet survives as yet,
But Men are all extinct.

The Dromedary

The Dromedary is a cheerful bird:
I cannot say the same about the Kurd.

The Elephant

When people call this beast to mind,
     They marvel more and more
At such a little tail behind,
     So large a trunk before.

The Big Baboon

The Big Baboon is found upon
The plains of Cariboo:
He goes about with nothing on
(A shocking thing to do).

But if he dressed up respectably
And let his whiskers grow,
How like this Big Baboon would be
To Mister So-and-so!

Much attention is focused upon the love stories of Edgar Allan and Virginia Poe and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning when discussing great love stories of the 19th century, while the love story of Anglo-French writer, Hilaire Belloc and his Irish-American wife, Elodie Hogan, is often overlooked. It is, however, a touching and romantic tale and the Bellocs actually faced more obstacles than the Poes and the Brownings. For one thing, they lived on two different continents when they met. continued here

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