Perverted Proverbs

The Model Child must keep his fingers white, surrender his best toys, and swallow his scathing retorts. Harry Graham asks what sort of reward such virtue can possibly deserve.

In this early-20th-century collection, familiar maxims meet a poet with a mischievous taste for turning them upside down. Graham’s rhymes pit the dutiful child against the naughty one, then set the righteous man beside the shameless schemer who seems to win at everything. Their comic complaints make virtue look less like a prize than a tedious rulebook—and vice, uncomfortably, like a very good bargain. But how far can a proverb be bent before its wisdom snaps?

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