Poem of the Day: ‘Oracles for Youth’ 

On this second day of our poems for graduation week, we turn from the elevated rhetoric of Mr. Longfellow to the tongue-in-cheek prophesying of Mrs. Gilman. Caroline Howard Gilman (1794–1888) was one of those lady authors who seemed to proliferate in nineteenth-century America, editing small magazines and pouring forth well-intentioned verse and prose. Lydia Maria Child, whose most famous poem ran as the Sun’s Thanksgiving Poem of the Day this past year, is the obvious exemplar of this type. We may also remember Frances Sargent Osgood, whose “Calumny,” another Sun Poem of the Day selection, hints at the consequences, especially among gossipy poetic ladies, of being singled out for admiration by Edgar Allan Poe.

Gilman, a native of Boston, relocated to Charleston, South Carolina, with her Unitarian-minister husband in 1819. It was there that she spent most of the rest of her long life and founded a children’s newspaper called the Rosebud, which featured many of her own works. Under the name “Mrs. Clarissa Packard,” she was also the author of a series of humorous novels on domestic themes. As much of the humor turns on the behaviors of servants, for some of whom, in the South, “servant” was a euphemism, the jokes have not worn especially well.

But today’s excerpt from Gilman’s 1852 “Oracles for Youth: A Home Pastime,” prefigures the modern comic “senior-class prophecies” that we may remember from our high-school days. While the standard class prophecy names names, not always kindly, Gilman’s oracle is content to drop general predictions, mostly in rhyming tetrameter couplets: The sun will shine on some people. The rain will fall on others. California is an iffy proposition. Nobody wants to be like her number eighteen, but for her fortunate number forty-three, the future is a garden of flowers. The real winner, however, is her number thirty-seven, bequeathed an entire sestet, not to mention buried treasure. How this person gets so lucky the oracle does not say.