Today’s Poem: Mr. Nobody
A genuine mark of poetic success? The power to stick in the mind.
In 1868, in the Riverside Magazine for Young People, Elizabeth Prentiss (1818–1878) published a poem called “Mr. Nobody” — a light-verse tale of family members all denying responsibility for the mishaps that plague the household: every plate we break was cracked / By Mr. Nobody.
Unfortunately, the magazine left her name off the page with the poem (though “E. Prentiss” is listed in the magazine’s index). The next year, Prentiss would put the poem in one of her books, with a character reciting the comic verses in Little Lou’s Sayings and Doings, an 1869 collection of linked prose stories, but the damage was done.
“Mr. Nobody” would be republished here and there in subsequent decades, labeled as from “Unknown” or “Riverside Magazine.” The poem gained its first boost up into the national scene, however, when it appeared in The Golden Book of Poetry, a 1947 anthology edited by the influential children’s author, Jane Werner Watson. And Watson ascribed it to “Anonymous,” the attribution favored thereafter (although, for reasons I can’t pin down, the internet sometimes claims the poem is by Walter de la Mare, 1873–1956, who wasn’t even born when “Mr. Nobody” appeared).
“Mr. Nobody” is minor light verse, but it’s competently done and its long survival proves its memorability — a memorability for which Elizabeth Prentiss deserves a credit she hasn’t received. The power to stick in the mind is a little-analyzed attribute in poetry, but we need to acknowledge it as a mark of genuine poetic success.
Besides, Prentiss was an interesting woman, of a type that’s faded from cultural memory: a New Englander who melded her Puritan inheritance with the dynamic activism and missionary fervor of the nineteenth century.
The daughter of one distinguished minister and wife of another, she wrote dozens of volumes, mostly uplifting and evangelizing fiction. Her popular 1856 hymn “More Love to Thee, O Christ” is still sometimes sung. After her death, her husband published an 1882 memorial volume, The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss, which showed her wit, religious common sense, and amazing productivity.
With four eight-line stanzas of ballad meter, alternating four- and three-foot lines rhymed abcb defe, “Mr. Nobody” combines two genres of popular nineteenth-century poetry — the didactic moral lesson and the nonsense logic puzzle — to create a memorable entry in the canon of light verse from which we draw each Wednesday here at Poems Ancient and Modern.
Mr. Nobody
by Elizabeth Prentiss
I know a funny little man,
As quiet as a mouse,
Who does the mischief that is done
In everybody’s house!
There’s no one ever sees his face,
And yet we all agree
That every plate we break was cracked
By Mr. Nobody.
’Tis he who always tears out books,
Who leaves the door ajar,
He pulls the buttons from our shirts,
And scatters pins afar;
That squeaking door will always squeak,
For prithee, don’t you see,
We leave the oiling to be done
By Mr. Nobody.
He puts damp wood upon the fire
That kettles cannot boil;
His are the feet that bring in mud,
And all the carpets soil.
The papers always are mislaid;
Who had them last, but he?
There’s no one tosses them about
But Mr. Nobody.
The finger marks upon the door
By none of us are made;
We never leave the blinds unclosed,
To let the curtains fade.
The ink we never spill; the boots
That lying round you see
Are not our boots, — they all belong
To Mr. Nobody.
"The power to stick in the mind is a little-analyzed attribute in poetry, but we need to acknowledge it as a mark of genuine poetic success." So true. Thank you for sharing this. I have never heard of this poem or poet!
You appear to have left out the first stanza? Wonderful little poem I remember from childhood, and I enjoyed this commentary on it; it was interesting to learn about the poet.