Misrepresentative Women

Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy

Have you a pain all down your back?
A feeling of intense prostration?
Are you anæmic, for the lack
Of proper circulation?
With bloodshot eye and hand unsteady?
Pray send at once for Mrs. Eddy.

The Saint and Prophetess is she
Of what is known as Christian Science;
And you can lean on Mrs. E.
With absolute reliance;
For she will shortly make it plain
That there is no such thing as pain.

The varied ailments on your list
Which cause you such extreme vexation
Are nothing more, she will insist,
Than mere imagination.
’Tis so with illness or disease;
Nothing exists … except her fees!

A friend of mine had not been taught
This doctrine, I regret to say.
He fell downstairs, or so he thought,
And broke his neck, one day.
Had Mrs. Eddy come along,
She could have shown him he was wrong.

She could have told him (or his wraith)
That stairs and necks have no existence,
That persons with sufficient faith
Can fall from any distance,
And that he wasn’t in the least
What local papers called “deceased.”

Of ills to which the flesh is heir
She is decidedly disdainful;
But once, or so her friends declare,
Her teeth became so painful
That, tho’ she knew they couldn’t be,
She had them taken out, to see.

Afflictions of the lame or halt,
Which other people view with terror,
To her denote some moral fault,
Some form of mental error.
While doctors probe or amputate,
She simply heals you while you wait.

My brother, whom you may have seen,
Possessed a limp, a very slight one;
His leg, the left, had always been
Much shorter than the right one;
But Mrs. Eddy came his way,
And … well, just look at him to-day!

At healing she had grown so deft
That when she finished with my brother,
His crippled leg, I mean the left,
Was longer than the other!
And now he’s praying, day and night,
For faith to lengthen out the right.

So let it be our chief concern
To set diseases at defiance,
Contriving, as the truths we learn
Of so-called Christian Science,
To live from illnesses exempt, —
Or else to die in the attempt!

Mrs. Grundy

When lovely Woman stoops to smoke
(A vice in which she often glories),
Or sees the somewhat doubtful joke
In after-dinner stories,
Who is it to her bedroom rushes
To hide the fervor of her blushes?

When Susan’s skirt’s a trifle short,
Or Mary’s manner rather skittish,
Who is it, with a fretful snort
(So typically British),
Emits prolonged and startled cries,
Suggestive of a pained surprise?

Who is it, tell me, in effect,
Who loves to centre her attentions
On all who wilfully neglect
Society’s conventions,
And seems eternally imbued
With saponaceous rectitude?

’Tis Mrs. Grundy, deaf and blind
To anything the least romantic,
Combining with a narrow mind
A point of view pedantic,
Since no one in the world can stop her