Poetry and the Child

MY daughter is eight. When she was one, I began reading aloud to her the greatest imaginative poetry available. With as much expression as if I were reading to a grown person, I went over and over lyric passages of Shakespeare. Through baby ears, she listened with that curious unwavering attention small children are capable of. I had no especial theories of psychology. I merely knew that primary impressions on neurones are perhaps most influential. I was attempting to teach her ear first the cadences of really fine poetic rhythm as opposed to the mere metronomic beat of nursery rhyme. I varied the reading from ancients to moderns, — Keats, Marvell, Blake, Coleridge, Robinson, — always avoiding the second-rate or ordinary.

By the time my little girl was two and a half, she began reciting back to me certain things I had read most frequently. At the time children usually learn ‘Hickory, Dickory, Dock,’ she was with apparent gusto reciting aloud: —

The lines had no meaning for her, of course. But I am not of the opinion that the words of nursery rhymes yield any especial meaning to a child at this age. Sound is the intriguing factor. Why not have the sound of Shakespeare rather than the sound of Mother Goose or Milne? As the imagery and emotional content of Shakespeare are superior to the imagery and emotional content of Mother Goose, so is the fluent, broken, sophisticated rhythm of Shakespeare superior. Why not present it first to the sensitive ears of childhood?

When my little girl was three, I went, further with her. She began asking at intervals: ‘What does this word in the poem mean?’ I knew she was becoming aware of words as valuable for their content as well as their sound. She was ready for the next step in entering the enchantment of poetry. I reiterate at all costs that poetry is an enchantment. The sleight of mind required to create it demands a similar sleight of mind to receive it. The process is simple if understood. The first step is rhythmic movement. Like accompanying music, it lulls the conscious mind into acquiescence of the magic. The next step is the important one. This is the creation and acceptance of a symbol. The symbol is the poem. Once teach that to a child, and the battle is won. To my amazement I find most adults are under the impression that poetry is rhyme or metre or moral or emotional message. They do not know that poetry can exist where neither rhyme, regular metre, nor message occur. The one indispensable element in imaginative poetry is symbol, or metaphor: direct or implied substitution of one object or idea for another.

This point I wished to make clear first of all to my little daughter. Nature was the starting point for our adventure. She was familiar with the changing seasons; we went walking in the park; we tried to make symbols for everything we liked best. At first the images were all made on my part, and they were simple indeed. Any parent can make such symbols — if not from original thought, then from memory of other people’s thoughts. It was autumn on our first day. I pointed to the yellow leaves lying sparsely on the ground and said without preliminary: ‘Those are the footprints Autumn leaves on the ground when she goes walking by.’ A look of amusement dawned over my little girl’s face; something in her responded instinctively to this game. I believe something in any intelligent child will respond to the game of imagery. Poetry is one of the most primitive arts, peculiarly similar to the natural workings of a child’s mind. Day after day I made images for her from nature: —

The small white cloud yonder is a duck.
The lake is a cup for the swan to drink from.
The goose is a feather pillow lying on the grass.
The lilac is a little girl in a purple dress.
The cow is a train for the butter to ride in.

At last came the day when my child looked at the lamp just lighted in our living room and said: ‘The lamp shade is a skirt for the light to wear.’ In that moment I felt as triumphant as a god. My child had made her first image; she had crossed over the imaginary line into poetry; she knew the secret of the enchantment.

The next step was to show her the link between the spoken image and the written poems. We went back to poetry in books again, still the best adult poetry. Now and then we came across images simple enough for her to grasp and enjoy, such as Carl Sandburg’s ‘The fog comes on little cat feet,’ or Christina Rossetti’s ‘My heart is like a singing bird.’ She did not yet require that the full consecutive content of the poem present itself to her intelligibly. The perception of meaning in its accepted sense is not at all necessary to great enjoyment of a poem. At this stage my daughter would listen almost indefinitely to the reading of great imagistic poetry. She genuinely received pleasure from its rhythm and from occasionally grasped items of symbolism. In Emily Dickinson’s ‘I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed,’ she apparently grasped only one image, yet she received acute enjoyment from memorizing the whole four verses. That one image was: ‘When landlords turn the drunken bee out of the foxglove’s door.’ My daughter remarked: ‘I think it’s funny about the bee being an old man and getting drunk on honey. Except for this I don’t know why I like the poem; it just sounds pretty.’ In Mr. Allen Tate’s ‘The Wolves,’ there is the following image for fear: —

Always at the approach of this favorite symbol, a gathering excitement lit my daughter’s face. She rolled the simile like a lollipop under her tongue. I was constrained to remember how tamely after this magnificent spider image would fall on her ears later the nursery lines in regard to Little Miss Muffet: —

At the age of six, my daughter began reading for herself. I presented her with her first Mother Goose, illustrated. The book received one reading. She announced firmly: ‘These are just good little stories; they are not really poetry at all.’ She valued them for what they are: memorable tales in rhyme, charming but largely irrelevant to poetry itself. I do not wish to imply that Mother Goose is negligible; but I do wish to go on record as feeling that its presentation first to children as poetry can vitiate a later concept of poetry as imagery and can train a child to believe poetry is primarily a rhymed narrative.

At six and a half, my little girl began insisting at last on knowing: ‘What is this whole poem about?’ I felt she needed now for a little while to read poems written especially for juveniles, poems that could be understood entire by the child mind from its own experience. We went to Stevenson’s Garden of Verses, De la Mare’s Peacock Pie, Elizabeth Roberts’s Under the Tree. There were a few other poets who presented imagery as well as whimsy to children. We made symbols for ourselves and put them into rhyme. The same results could be achieved by selecting good but simple imagistic poetry anywhere it may be found. Explain carefully to the child the symbol to be used; enter into the game of make-believe with him. Your own communicated excitement and relish will rouse an answering excitement and gusto in the child’s imagination.

Personification is easiest: —

After personification, the most appealing form of imagery to children is the substitution of one concrete object for another concrete object somehow akin.

I wished to teach my little girl to accept a concrete symbol for an abstract idea. As a clinical description of the method I used, I present the experience.

I asked her: ‘What do you feel when you hear the word “forever”?’ She answered: ‘“Forever” has n’t got any end; so it makes me feel frightened and lonesome to think about it.’ ‘ What else makes you feel the same way?’ I asked. ‘When somebody jumps at me in the dark,’ she answered. ‘Then let’s make a symbol for “forever,”’ I proposed.

Or I carried her into a subtler form of imagery: the substitution of an abstract idea for another abstract idea. Here was our dialogue. It was winter. I said: ‘Look out the window at the bare branches and see if you can imagine spring.’ ‘Yes,’ she replied; ‘with my mind I can see green leaves on the trees.‘ ‘Let’s pretend our thoughts are keys to unlock Springtime,’ I proposed.

Or I suggested to her, when someone sent her a large conch shell from the ocean: ‘Little sea animals live in these shells; when the shells are thrown up on the sand, they tell us something about the life in the bottom of the ocean. Let’s think of an image.’

Now, at eight, my little daughter goes to Emily Dickinson, the greatest adult poet America has produced, with a gathering comprehension that is delightful to see. She reads with charming excitement the description of Morning: ‘Has it feet like water lilies? Has it feathers like a bird?’ Or she thumbs absorbedly through the volume to find ‘The dust did scoop itself like hands and throw away the road,’ or ‘Bring me the sunset in a cup,’ or ‘Split the lark and you’ll find the music, bulb after bulb in silver rolled.’ She reads with real enjoyment Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg. She grows intent over Archibald MacLeish’s ‘Think that this silver snail the moon will climb all night upon time’s curving stalk.’ Yet this does not shut her off from the enjoyment of rhyme and nonsense. No child relishes more completely the ‘ Jabberwocky ’ in Through the Looking-Glass or ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ of Edward Lear. But she has learned to stand in the ring with the watchers of invisible tops.