Showing posts with label Imrie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Imrie. Show all posts

27 June 2023

Canada's First Telefome Pome?


These past few weeks have been remarkably busy, which explains how it is that I've read and reviewed just one old, forgotten book this month. Sadly, that volume is John Wesley White's The Man From Krypton.

Heaven help me.

And yet somehow, despite it all, I found time yesterday to thumb through Sacred Songs, Sonnets and Miscellaneous Poems, an 1886 collection by John Imrie (1836-1903).

I wonder what the poet, a staunch Presbyterian, might've made of White's interpretation and misrepresentation of the Holy Bible and Superman: The Movie. I expect he would have been mystified. Imrie died in Toronto three years before the first motion picture was screened in that city, thirty-eight years before Action Comics #1, and long before televangelists took to the air.

John Imrie was obviously of a very different time, as reflected in his Sacred Songs, etc. Amongst the 210 pages – referencing orphan boys, newspaper boys, Sunday school teachers, and the Knights of Labour – is this unusual and unexpected verse. It's not brilliant, but it is delightful. To think that when 'A Kiss Through the Telephone' was published, Bell's invention had been available commercially just six years.

Enjoy!

A Bonus (for the musically inclined):

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01 December 2019

'The Drunkard's Fate' by Teetotal John Imrie



In this month of December, with its festivities and excesses, let us pause to consider this verse from Sacred Songs, Sonnets and Miscellaneous Poems by John Imrie (1846-1902). A subscription salesman for the Canadian Presbyterian turned printer, the poet published the work in 1886 through his firm Imrie & Graham. 28 Colbourne Street, Toronto.
THE DRUNKARD'S FATE 
      For the drunkard there's no such place as "home,"
      Though over the face of the earth he roam,
      Till Death shall unfetter the drink-bound slave,
      And he findeth "rest" in the silent grave;
      His untimely death — "the wages of sin," —
      Satan's reward for the worship of Gin!
      He gave up his wife and his children dear
      For the drink which he thought his heart could cheer;
      But the more he drank the lower he sank,
      From the highest grade to the lowest rank.
      Till for shame, his name a bye-word became,
      And he lost for ever his once fair name: —
      For the pleasure of drink, which he loved so well,
      He barter'd his soul to the lowest hell!

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