Elizabeth Madox Roberts grew up in rural Kentucky, and much of her work records the textures of that world: farm life, church services, family rules, and the small oddities of neighbors. “Mr. Wells,” first collected in her 1922 book *Under the Tree*, belongs to a group of poems that view ordinary adult life through a child’s alert, slightly mischievous eyes. Here the speaker is a young churchgoer who knows Mr. Wells not by his face but by the cloud of scent that enters before him. That sensory detail becomes the poem’s engine, turning a local eccentric into a figure both comic and strangely dignified.
The central situation is simple: on Sunday morning Mr. Wells comes to church, and “everybody smells / The blacking and the toilet soap / And camphor balls.” The smells are so specific that they act as an announcement. Blacking, the old-fashioned shoe polish, suggests careful grooming; toilet soap carries a strong floral or medicated sweetness; camphor balls are the sharp, mothball odor used to preserve Sunday clothes. Together they make an odd, layered perfume. The child does not need visual proof: “I do not have to look to know / That Mr. Wells is coming in.” The nose, not the eye, creates recognition. That is the poem’s central idea—that people can become known by the atmosphere they carry, and that a child’s memory often works through such intimate, physical traces.
Roberts shapes the poem in three compact quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme and a bouncy, hymn-like rhythm. The form quietly mirrors the setting: church hymns and children’s verse share a regular beat, so the poem sounds both reverent and playful. The first and third stanzas repeat the three smells almost like a refrain. That repetition imitates the way a young mind fixates on a pattern, and it also gives Mr. Wells a kind of signature chord. The second stanza turns to visual details: “He wears his whiskers in a bunch, / And wears his glasses on his head.” Those lines are deliberately funny, picturing an absent-minded or old-fashioned man whose accessories seem to live in the wrong places. Then the child’s voice breaks in with a remembered rule: “I mustn’t call him Old Man Wells— / No matter—that’s what Father said.” The dash and the phrase “No matter” capture a private inner rebellion. The child obeys the rule aloud but still holds onto the forbidden nickname in thought, and that tension between good manners and honest observation animates the poem.
The repeated key words—“blacking,” “toilet soap,” “camphor balls”—are not glamorous, yet they fix Mr. Wells in memory more firmly than a physical description could. They are old-fashioned smells, tied to a time when people polished shoes, packed clothes with mothballs, and used strongly perfumed soap. Roberts turns those humble household scents into character traits. The poem is significant because it shows how a child’s point of view can make a small moment literary. It does not judge Mr. Wells harshly; instead, it preserves him as a sensory fact of Sunday life. The speaker knows the social rule about respectful naming, but the real portrait of Mr. Wells is built from what the nose catches and the eyes find funny. That blend of decorum and curiosity gives the poem its charm. Ultimately, “Mr. Wells” argues that identity can enter a room before a person does—and that children are often the best witnesses to that truth.