RAINBOW GOLD

RAINBOW GOLD

POEMS OLD AND NEW SELECTED FOR BOYS AND GIRLS By SARA TEASDALE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS By DUGALD WALKER NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1922 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Copyright, 1922, By THE MACMILLAN CO. Set up and published September, 1922 CONDÉ NAST PRESS GREENWICH, CONN. TO THE BEAUTIFUL MEMORY OF MY FATHER JOHN WARREN TEASDALE

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PREFATORY NOTE

Every anthologist must adopt some plan for making selections. Mine has been very simple. I have made a small collection of poems that would have pleased the child I used to be and the boy who was my playmate. Above all things I have striven to keep the book small, for the big books of poetry on our shelves were always left to themselves. It was the little books that became our intimate companions.

To make a selection for boys and girls from the countless riches of lyric poetry in our language, and to reduce that selection to the contents of so small a book as this one, is a grave task. It involves the exclusion on the grounds of mere lack of space, of so much that one loves. I should have liked to make a book of this size containing only Elizabethan songs and early English ballads, another entirely devoted to Georgian and Victorian poets, a third to living writers, and a fourth to {6}child-rhymes, parodies, nonsense verses and the like. If the grown-up reader regrets omissions, I beg him to be sympathetic toward the compiler, who has been a prey to those same regrets constantly during the year in which she has been at work on the book. Alas that a volume cannot have the advantages of being both a big book and a little one at the same time!

In selecting the poems for the girl and boy who used to be, I have tried always to read with their eyes. I have been guided from first to last by their enjoyment or their boredom. The poems that they loved best had highly accented rhythms, and took them into “a land of clear colors and stories.” They enjoyed certain sad poems as much as merry ones, but meditative, moralistic and gloomy poems were never read but once, if they were read at all. And I am glad to say that poems full of sentimentality fared no better. I have brought together much that has been written since they were children, and boys and girls of to-day will find among these poems many of the most enjoyable things in the book. To mention only one recent poet that they would have loved, Walter de la Mare, is to realize how much a child has missed who does not possess his inimitable “Peacock Pie.”

A child’s enjoyment, as I said above, is what I have striven for in this collection. We who have seen how poetry has come to our rescue with its delight, its healing, and its new courage in times of stress and sorrow, know that it is an inestimable possession. We cannot come to the knowledge of it too early. If we can have a clear personal realization while we are children, that we love poetry, no amount of well-{7}meaning but sometimes tactless and uninspired teaching of it in schools and colleges can shake us in the knowledge of that love. I remember that the first poem I was condemned to learn by heart in school was “The Builders” by Longfellow. I say condemned, but it was not as a punishment. Every child in the class had to learn it. It is one of the poems that I am sure the poet himself would never have given to a child to learn, beginning, as grown-up readers will remember:

After committing the nine stanzas of this poem to memory, it took me a long time to grow willing to read the stirring things that the same poet has written, poems as interesting as this one is humdrum.

But education is better managed now than then. Teachers and parents alike have come to feel that the love of poetry in general is more to be desired for children than the knowledge of certain “well known” poems, no matter how good, or even how great, these poems may be. Besides a more tactfully managed education in the schools, there are children’s rooms in the public libraries. I have wished many times during the months spent in making this book, when visits to these rooms were an inspiration, that I might have browsed among the low shelves long ago in childhood, and talked with the same delightful librarians. I should like to express my thanks to these librarians, who have been so kind in various{8} ways. I want especially to thank Annie Carroll Moore, Supervisor of Work with Children in the New York Public Library, who knows the heart of a child from long travelling on “The Roads to Childhood.”

In closing I shall quote briefly from the introduction by Andrew Lang to his anthology for children, “The Blue Poetry Book,” for he speaks my own thoughts better than I can express them: “It does not appear to the Editor that poems about children, or especially intended for children, are those which a child likes best. A child’s imaginative life is spent in the unknown future, and in the romantic past.... The poems written for and about children rather appeal to the old, whose own childhood is now to them a distant fairy world, as the man’s life is to the child.... 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 a great part of a child’s pleasure in reading.... The child does not want everything to be explained. In the unexplained

is great pleasure.”

A number of my friends have been kind in giving me the names of poems that they liked best when they were children. The small compass of the book has made it impossible to use all of the poems suggested in this way, but it has been a pleasure to include as many of them as I could. I want to{9} acknowledge very gratefully my indebtedness for counsel and suggestions to John Gould Fletcher, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Jessie B. Rittenhouse, Louis Untermeyer, Jean Untermeyer, John Hall Wheelock and Marguerite Wilkinson.

Sara Teasdale

New York City, 1922

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due the following publishers for permission to include the poems enumerated below:

To Messrs. Constable & Co., for “Berries,” “Jim Jay,” and “Off the Ground,” by Walter de la Mare.

To Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Co., for “A Prayer,” by Edwin Markham, and “O Captain! My Captain,” by Walt Whitman.

To Messrs. Harper & Brothers for “When the Hounds of Spring,” by Algernon Charles Swinburne.

To Messrs. Henry Holt & Co., for “Good Hours,” by Robert Frost; and “Berries,” “Jim Jay” and “Off the Ground” from “Peacock Pie,” by Walter de la Mare.

To Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Co., by whose permission and by special arrangement with whom the following poems are included: “Fable,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson; “The Fountain,” by James Russell Lowell; “My Lost Youth,” and “The Skeleton in Armor,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; and “A Song for My Mother,” by Anna Hempstead Branch.

To Mr. Alfred Knopf for “Nature’s Friend,” by William H. Davies.

To Messrs. Little, Brown & Co., for “The Snow,” by Emily Dickinson.

To The Macmillan Co., for “The Fairies,” and “The Lepracaun,” by William Allingham; “The Forsaken Merman,” by Matthew Arnold; “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” and “Song: The Year’s at the Spring,” by Robert Browning; “The Terrible Robber Men,” by Padraic Colum; “Moon Folly,” by Fannie Stearns Gifford; “Time, You Old Gipsy Man,” by Ralph Hodgson; “Sea Fever,” by John Masefield; “A Christmas{12} Carol,” by Christina Rossetti; “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” by William Butler Yeats; and “The Ghosts of the Buffaloes,” by Vachel Lindsay.

To Messrs. Macmillan & Co., for “The Fairies,” and “The Lepracaun,” by William Allingham; “The Forsaken Merman,” by Matthew Arnold; and “A Christmas Carol,” by Christina Rossetti.

To The Poetry Bookshop for “Star-Talk,” by Robert Graves.

To Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons for “Song of the Chattahoochee,” by Sidney Lanier from “Poems of Sidney Lanier”; copyright 1884, 1891, 1918 by Mary D. Lanier, by permission of the publishers; and “Escape at Bedtime,” and “Romance,” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

To Messrs. Frederick A. Stokes Co., for “Tree-Toad,” by Hilda Conkling; and “A Song of Sherwood,” by Alfred Noyes, from his Collected Poems, Volume I.

To the living poets who have generously allowed their poems to appear in this book, the compiler expresses grateful thanks.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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KUBLA KHAN A Vision in a Dream

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MEG MERRILIES

BERRIES

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ROMANCE

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HYMN OF PAN

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