The Blue Poetry Book. Lang Andrew
as the man’s life is to the child. The Editor can remember having been more mystified and puzzled by ‘Lucy Gray’ than by the ‘Eve of St. John,’ at a very early age. He is convinced that Blake’s ‘Nurse’s Song,’ for example, which brings back to him the long, the endless evenings of the Northern summer, when one had to go to bed while the hills beyond Ettrick were still clear in the silver light, speaks more intimately to the grown man than to the little boy or girl. Hood’s ‘I remember, I remember,’ in the same way, brings in the burden of reflection on that which the child cannot possibly reflect upon – namely, a childhood which is past. There is the same tone in Mr. Stevenson’s ‘Child’s Garden of Verse,’ which can hardly be read without tears – tears that do not come and should not come to the eyes of childhood. For, beyond the child and his actual experience of the world as the ballads and poems of battle are, he can forecast the years, and anticipate the passions. What he cannot anticipate is his own age, himself, his pleasures and griefs, as the grown man sees them in memory, and with a sympathy for the thing that he has been, and can never be again. It is his excursions into the untravelled world which the child enjoys, and this is what makes Shakespeare so dear to him – Shakespeare who has written so little on childhood. In The Midsummer Night’s Dream the child can lose himself in a world familiar to him, in the fairy age, and can derive such pleasure from Puck, or from Ariel, as his later taste can scarce recover in the same measure. Falstaff is his playfellow, ‘a child’s Falstaff, an innocent creature,’ as Dickens says of Tom Jones in David Copperfield.
A boy prefers the wild Prince and Poins to Barbara Lewthwaite, the little girl who moralised to the lamb. We make a mistake when we ‘write down’ to children; still more do we err when we tell a child not to read this or that because he cannot understand it. He understands far more than we give him credit for, but nothing that can harm him. The half-understanding of it, too, the sense of a margin beyond, as in a wood full of unknown glades, and birds, and flowers unfamiliar, is great part of a child’s pleasure in reading. For this reason many poems are included here in which the Editor does not suppose that the readers will be able to pass an examination. For another reason a few pieces of no great excellence as poetry are included. Though they may appear full of obviousness to us, there is an age of dawning reflection to which they are not obvious. Longfellow, especially, seems to the Editor to be a kind of teacher to bring readers to the more reflective poetry of Wordsworth, while he has a sort of simple charm in which there is a foretaste of the charm of Tennyson and Keats. But everyone who attempts to make such a collection must inevitably be guided by his own recollections of childhood, of his childish likings, and the development of the love of poetry in himself. We have really no other criterion, for children are such kind and good-natured critics that they will take pleasure in whatever is given or read to them, and it is hard for us to discern where the pleasure is keenest and most natural.
The Editor trusts that this book may be a guide into romance and fairyland to many children. Of a child’s enthusiasm for poetry, and the life which he leads by himself in poetry, it is very difficult to speak. Words cannot easily bring back the pleasure of it, now discerned in the far past like a dream, full of witchery, and music, and adventure. Some children, perhaps the majority, are of such a nature that they weave this dream for themselves, out of their own imaginings, with no aid or with little aid from the poets. Others, possibly less imaginative, if more bookish, gladly accept the poet’s help, and are his most flattering readers. There are moments in that remote life which remain always vividly present to memory, as when first we followed the chase with Fitz-James, or first learned how ‘The Baron of Smaylho’me rose with day,’ or first heard how
All day long the noise of battle roll’d
Among the mountains by the winter sea.
Almost the happiest of such moments were those lulled by the sleepy music of ‘The Castle of Indolence,’ a poem now perhaps seldom read, at least by the young. Yet they may do worse than visit the drowsy castle of him who wrote
So when a shepherd of the Hebrid isles
Placed far amid the melancholy main.
Childhood is the age when a love of poetry may be born and strengthened – a taste which grows rarer and more rare in our age, when examinations spring up and choke the good seed. By way of lending no aid to what is called Education, very few notes have been added. The child does not want everything to be explained; in the unexplained is great pleasure. Nothing, perhaps, crushes the love of poetry more surely and swiftly than the use of poems as school-books. They are at once associated in the mind with lessons, with long, with endless hours in school, with puzzling questions and the agony of an imperfect memory, with grammar and etymology, and everything that is the enemy of joy. We may cause children to hate Shakespeare or Spenser as Byron hated Horace, by inflicting poets on them, not for their poetry, but for the valuable information in the notes. This danger, at least, it is not difficult to avoid in the Blue Poetry Book.
NURSE’S SONG
When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.
Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies.
No, no, let us play, for it is yet day,
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides in the sky the little birds fly,
And the hills are all covered with sheep.
Well, well, go and play till the light fades away,
And then go home to bed.
The little ones leap’d and shouted and laugh’d;
And all the hills echoèd.
A BOY’S SONG
Where the pools are bright and deep,
Where the grey trout lies asleep,
Up the river and o’er the lea,
That’s the way for Billy and me.
Where the blackbird sings the latest,
Where the hawthorn blooms the sweetest
Where the nestlings chirp and flee,
That’s the way for Billy and me.
Where the mowers mow the cleanest,
Where the hay lies thick and greenest;
There to trace the homeward bee,
That’s the way for Billy and me.
Where the hazel bank is steepest,
Where the shadow falls the deepest,
Where the clustering nuts fall free,
That’s the way for Billy and me.
Why the boys should drive away
Little sweet maidens from the play,
Or love to banter and fight so well,
That’s the thing I never could tell.
But this I know, I love to play,
Through the meadow, among the hay;
Up the water and o’er the lea,
That’s the way for Billy and me.
I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER
I remember, I remember
The