A Gobolink is like an inkblot, but it’s made for fun, not for psychological analysis! To make a gobolink, you drop a little ink on a sheet of white paper. Fold the paper in half and press down the ink on the two halves of the paper. Then you open the paper and you have a unified image. (You’ll have a mirror image on each side of the folded paper.)
You can see an old book of these images online at the Library of Congress. It’s called Gobolinks, or Shadow-Pictures for Young and Old, by Ruth McEnery Stuart and Albert Bigelow Paine. (New York: The Century Co., 1896). The authors wrote poems and limericks to go along with their gobolinks.
Here are a couple of my favorites from the book…
The Tail of Taddy Pole
There was a little polliwog
His name was Taddy Pole.
He lived within a little bog
Beside a crawfish hole.
And all the day did Taddy play,
Around a sunken log.
Until he lost his tail one day,
And then he was a frog.
*****
The Faithful Notes
An old guitar once broke its strings,
And all the musical notes took wings;
They hurried away to lands afar
But two of them stayed with the old guitar.
Enjoy!
Mama Lisa
This article was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Arts and Crafts, Books & Stories, Countries & Cultures, English, Gobolinks, Languages, Limericks, Online Books, Poems, Poetry, USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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