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My Father. In Imitation of Cowper’s Mary. With fourteen Illustrations.

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Sole edition of this very rare (unique?) chapbook. ‘My Father’ is an anonymous poem, written in imitation of the metre and stanza of Cowper’s ‘[To] Mary’, a poem first published in 1803, lamenting the ‘sad decline’ of the poet’s long-time companion Mrs Mary Unwin. ‘My Father’ had already appeared in The Spirit of the public Journals: or Beauties of the American Newspapers for 1805 and presumably also in the British press (‘the Juvenile Library of John Arliss produced little that was original’ – E. W. Pitcher in PBSA vol. 76). Ann Taylor used the same verse structure for her much-reprinted poem ‘My Mother’.

‘My Father’ traces a child’s experiences from infancy to manhood, beginning: ‘Who took me from my Mother’s arms, / And smiling at her soft alarms, / Show’d me the world and nature’s charms? / My Father … / Who made me feel and understand, / The wonders of the sea and land, / And mark, thro’ all, the Maker’s hand? / My Father …’ The boy climbs a mountain with his father, gathers flowers, and is introduced to tales from the Odyssey. ‘O teach me still thy Christian plan, / Thy practice with thy precepts ran, / Nor yet desert me now a man, / My Father.’

Not in OCLC or Library Hub. There were possibly (although it is not easy to tell if these are the same poem) chapbook editions by Knevett in 1811 (attributing the poem to William Drennan) and Hodgson & Co in 1824. Arliss also included the poem in an undated work The Parents’ Present to their happy Family, containing the Poems of my Father, Sister, and Brother.