Eletelephony
Once there was an elephant,
Who tried to use the telephant—
No! No! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone—
(Dear me! I am not certain quite
That even now I’ve got it right.)
Howe’er it was, he got his trunk
Entangled in the telephunk;
The more he tried to get it free,
The louder buzzed the telephee—
(I fear I’d better drop the song
Of elephop and telephong!)
This poem is in the public domain.
Laura Elizabeth Richards
Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards was born in Boston on February 27, 1850, to poet Julia Ward Howe who composed the Civil War-era song, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in 1861, published in Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. Richards’s father was the physician and abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe, who was the first director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind (now, Perkins School for the Blind) in Massachusetts. Richards was named for the educator Laura Bridgman, whom her father had taught to communicate at Perkins.