Elizabeth Madox Roberts grew up in rural Kentucky at the turn of the twentieth century, and her early collection *Under the Tree* (1922) turns remembered small-town moments into verse that sounds plain but stays resonant. In “Mr. Pennybaker at Church,” she sets a child in a Sunday service, watching an adult neighbor sing bass. The scene is small, yet Roberts expands it to hold a child’s curiosity, humor, and half-formed awe.
The poem hangs on a child’s close observation: Mr. Pennybaker holds his songbook “very low,” stretches down his face, and makes his voice go “walking down.” The repeated downward movement makes the bass line almost physical, as though the music is descending a staircase. When the mother says, “You mustn’t watch, / He’s only singing bass,” the word “only” tries to shrink the moment into something unremarkable. But the child keeps watching, and the poem sides with that stubborn attention.
The verse itself has the marching ease of a hymn tune. Its quatrains rhyme in a simple ABCB pattern—face with bass, fast with last, all with Saul—and the short final line of the first stanza, “He’s only singing bass,” gives the mother’s correction the sound of a gentle hush. The second stanza then turns to tempo. Mr. Pennybaker “hurries twice as fast / As all the rest, but even then / He finishes the song the last.” The paradox is funny and exact, like a child’s honest report of congregational singing, where sound and speed refuse to line up.
The final stanza asks the only real question. Watching the singer, the child wonders “if he knows it all / About Leviticus and Shem / And Deuteronomy and Saul.” The Old Testament names roll with weight, but they are also a child’s list—memorable sounds more than connected stories. Pairing Shem with Saul and Leviticus with Deuteronomy gives the ending an incantatory feel. The word “all” carries the mystery: does Mr. Pennybaker know all the songs, all the scripture, all the hidden rules of adult worship? Roberts leaves the question open, and that openness feels close to reverence.
What makes the poem significant is its balance of affection and restraint. Roberts does not mock Mr. Pennybaker or sentimentalize the church. Instead she preserves a real texture of rural Protestant life: the hymnbook held low, the bass line that wanders, the child fidgeting in the pew. The speaker’s wonder is comic but also philosophical. Behind the stretched face and off-tempo singing is an early brush with the strangeness of religious knowledge. Faith here is not explained; it is glimpsed through a low voice and a list of old names. The poem suggests that children first meet such mysteries through their senses—what they see, hear, and half-remember—and that the mystery may outlast the explanation.