The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children

PART I

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

C. F. CLAY, Manager

London: FETTER LANE, E.C. Edinburgh: 100 PRINCES STREET

Bombay, Calcutta and Madras: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.

Toronto: J. M. DENT AND SONS, Ltd.

Tokyo: THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA

Copyrighted in the United States of America by G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS, 2, 4 and 6, West 45th Street, New York City

All rights reserved

The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children

Edited by KENNETH GRAHAME

Author of The Golden Age, Dream Days, The Wind in the Willows, etc.

PART I

Cambridge: at the University Press 1916

NOTE

The Editor is indebted to the following authors and publishers for leave to reprint copyright poems: Mr W. Graham Robertson and Mr Norman Gale; Messrs Longmans Green & Co. for a poem by Walter Ramal and for a poem from Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verse, Messrs Chatto & Windus for an extract from Swinburne’s Songs Before Sunrise and for a poem from Walter Thornbury’s Ballads and Songs, Messrs G. Routledge & Sons for a poem by Joaquin Miller, Mr Elliot Stock for an extract from a play by H. N. Maugham; and Mr John Lane for the Rands, Eugene Field, and Graham Robertson poems, and for two extracts from John Davidson’s Fleet Street Eclogues.

PREFACE

IN compiling a selection of Poetry for Children, a conscientious Editor is bound to find himself confronted with limitations so numerous as to be almost disheartening. For he has to remember that his task is, not to provide simple examples of the whole range of English poetry, but to set up a wicket-gate giving attractive admission to that wide domain, with its woodland glades, its pasture and arable, its walled and scented gardens here and there, and so to its sunlit, and sometimes misty, mountain-tops—all to be more fully explored later by those who are tempted on by the first glimpse. And always he must be proclaiming to the small tourists that there is joy, light and fresh air in that delectable country.

v Briefly, I think that blank verse generally, and the drama as a whole, may very well be left for readers of a riper age. Indeed, I believe that those who can ignore the plays of Shakespeare and his fellow-Elizabethans till they are sixteen will be no losers in the long run. The bulk, too, of seventeenth and eighteenth century poetry, bending under its burden of classical form and crowded classical allusion, requires a completed education and a wide range of reading for its proper appreciation.

Much else also is barred. There are the questions of subject, of archaic language and thought, and of occasional expression, which will occur to everyone. Then there is dialect, and here one has to remember that these poems are intended for use at the very time that a child is painfully acquiring a normal—often quite arbitrary—orthography. Is it fair to that child to hammer into him—perhaps literally—that porridge is spelt porridge, and next minute to present it to him, in an official ‘Reader,’ under the guise of parritch? I think not; and I have accordingly kept as far as possible to the normal, though at some loss of material.

vi In the output of those writers who have deliberately written for children, it is surprising how largely the subject of death is found to bulk. Dead fathers and mothers, dead brothers and sisters, dead uncles and aunts, dead puppies and kittens, dead birds, dead flowers, dead dolls—a compiler of Obituary Verse for the delight of children could make a fine fat volume with little difficulty. I have turned off this mournful tap of tears as far as possible, preferring that children should read of the joy of life, rather than revel in sentimental thrills of imagined bereavement.

There exists, moreover, any quantity of verse for children, which is merely verse and nothing more. It lacks the vital spark of heavenly flame, and is useless to a selector of Poetry. And then there is the whole corpus of verse—most of it of the present day—which is written about children, and this has even more carefully to be avoided. When the time comes that we send our parents to school, it will prove very useful to the compilers of their primers.

vii All these restrictions have necessarily led to two results. First, that this collection is chiefly lyrical—and that, after all, is no bad thing. Lyric verse may not be representative of the whole range of English poetry, but as an introduction to it, as a Wicket-gate, there is no better portal. The second result is, that it is but a small sheaf that these gleanings amount to; but for those children who frankly do not care for poetry it will be more than enough; and for those who love it and delight in it, no ‘selection’ could ever be sufficiently satisfying.

KENNETH GRAHAME.

October 1915.

RHYMES AND JINGLES

We begin with some jingles and old rhymes; for rhymes and jingles must not be despised. They have rhyme, rhythm, melody, and joy; and it is well for beginners to know that these are all elements of poetry, so that they will turn to it with pleasant expectation.

Merry are the Bells

Safe in Bed

Jenny Wren

Curly Locks

Pussy-Cat Mew

4

Draw a Pail of Water

I Saw a Ship a-sailing

The Nut-Tree

My Maid Mary

The Wind and the Fisherman

Blow, Wind, Blow

All Busy

7

Winter has Come

Poor Robin

I have a Little Sister

8

In Marble Walls

FAMILIAR OBJECTS

Here are some poems about things with which we are all quite familiar: the Moon and the Stars that we see through our bedroom window; Pussy purring on the hearthrug, the spotted shell on the mantelpiece.

The Moon

Eliza Lee Follen.

The Star

Ann and Jane Taylor.

Kitty

Mrs E. Prentiss.

Kitty: How to Treat Her

Kitty: what She thinks of Herself

W. B. Rands.

The Sea Shell

Amy Lowell.

COUNTRY BOYS’ SONGS

The Cuckoo

The Bird-Scarer’s Song

Cradle Song

GOOD NIGHT!

Ann and Jane Taylor.

For Those a Little Older

A BUNCH OF LENT LILIES

Here three Poets treat the same flower each from his own distinct and delightful point of view. To the first it appeals as the flower of courage, the brave early comer; to the second it is the early goer, the flower of a too swift departure—though daffodils really bloom for a fairly long time, as flowers go; the third is grateful for an imperishable recollection.

Daffodils

Shakespeare.

To Daffodils

Robert Herrick.

Daffodils

William Wordsworth.

SEASONS AND WEATHER

The Months

Sara Coleridge.

The Wind in a Frolic

22 William Howitt.

[1] nice: particular.

The Four Sweet Months

Robert Herrick.

Glad Day

W. Graham Robertson.

Buttercups and Daisies

Mary Howitt.

The Merry Month of March

William Wordsworth.

What the Birds Say

S. T. Coleridge.

Spring’s Procession

Sydney Dobell.

The Call of the Woods

Shakespeare.

A Prescription for a Spring Morning

John Davidson.

The Country Faith

Norman Gale.

The Butterfly’s Ball

William Roscoe.

TASTES AND PREFERENCES

A Wish

Samuel Rogers.

Wishing

William Allingham.

Bunches of Grapes

Walter Ramal.

Contentment

Eugene Field.