Today’s Poem: Over the Way

Mary Mapes Dodge’s editorial vision and lighthearted verse

German Postcard, My Wife and My Mother-in-Law,1888 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Over the Way

by Mary Mapes Dodge 

Over the way, over the way, 
I’ve seen a head that's fair and gray; 
I’ve seen kind eyes not new to tears, 
A form of grace, though full of years, 
Her fifty summers have left no flaw, 
And I, a youth of twenty-three, 
So love this lady, fair to see, 
 I want her for my mother-in-law! 
 
Over the way, over the way, 
I’ve seen her with the children play; 
I’ve seen her with a royal grace 
Before the mirror adjust her lace; 
A kinder woman none ever saw; 
God bless and cheer her onward path, 
And bless all treasures that she hath, 
And let her be my mother-in-law! 
 
Over the way, over the way, 
I think I'll venture, dear, some day 
(If you will lend a helping hand, 
And sanctify the scheme I've planned); 
I'll kneel in loving, reverent awe 
Down at the lady's feet, and say: 
"I’ve loved your daughter many a day, 
Please won't you be my mother-in-law?" 

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We think of literary magazines as both emblems and shapers of a given period. The Dial, for example, began as the print voice of Transcendentalism. The Poetry magazine of Harriet Monroe, circa 1912, functioned in the same way, as an instrument for the early-20th-century Modernists. We don’t necessarily consider children’s magazines in the same light. But maybe we should, especially if a magazine for children delivers poetry and fiction as artistically serious, on their level, as the contents of any magazine meant for the adults they will grow up to be.

Though best known today for Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, Mary Mapes Dodge (1831–1905) was, as editor of the popular St. Nicholas Magazine for children, a one-woman cultural force. Thanks to her gift for persuading famous authors to contribute to St. Nicholas, 19th-century American children, from 1873 forward, could read not only Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) and Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) in the magazine’s pages, but also Twain, Tennyson, Longfellow, and other luminaries who didn’t ordinarily write for children. 

Kipling’s The Jungle Book first appeared in the St. Nicholas Magazine. Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), and E.B. White (1899–1985) numbered among the winners of the magazine’s contests for young writers, under the St. Nicholas League program, begun in 1899. White later wrote that “the fierce desire to write” that “burned” in his own time was “directly traceable to St. Nicholas.” 

Dodge, who died in 1905, might not have predicted that the fruit of her editorial labors would be an entire generation of writers whose work would define their own era — but so it was. St. Nicholas Magazine’s influence long outlived the magazine, which ceased publication in the early 1940s. The publishers of Cricket magazine, which launched in 1973 and in its early days published such children’s writers as Lloyd Alexander and Arnold Lobel, but also Ursula K. LeGuin, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Richard Wilbur, and John Ciardi, conceived of their project, exactly a century later, as “a new St. Nicholas.”

Mary Mapes Dodge, from the memorial issue of St. Nicholas Magazine, 1905 (Wikimedia Commons)

Dodge herself had begun to write for children long before the first issue of St. Nicholas ever appeared. Widowed in 1858, in need of some means to support herself and educate her sons, she began to write short sketches for children, then followed these with Hans Brinker in 1865 and, in 1874, the children’s-verse book Rhymes and Jingles. She was also the author of magazine articles, stories, and poems for an adult audience. 

Today’s Poem, “Over the Way,” appears in Poems and Verses, the 1883 revision and reissue of Dodge’s 1879 verse collection for grownups, Along the Way. Though it’s not exactly a comic poem, its lighthearted charm prompted us to select it for what one of our readers has termed “Whimsy Wednesday.” The repeated first line, which the classical-minded among us might read as two choriambs, or else as a trochee and an iamb times two, bounces us into each stanza of this sunny tetrameter poem, with its aabbcddc rhyme scheme.

For all its good cheer, this is a funny kind of love poem. Its young swain extols the virtues not of his girlfriend, as you might expect, but of her mother. He asks the girl, his “dear,” to “sanctify” his plan: to fall on his knees before her sainted mother and make her a proposal. “Please won’t you be my mother-in-law?” 

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