Yeats, Tewksbury Road and Sea-fever from "The Story of a Round House" and twenty six lines from The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield; Dodd, Mead and Company for Faeries' Song from "The Land of Hearts Desire" by William Butler Yeats; the George H. Doran Company for The Fairies Have Never a Penny to Spend from "Fairies and Chimneys" by Rose Fyleman; and the Frederick A. Stokes Company for Fairies, Hills, Spring Song and Tree-toads from "Poems by a Little Girl" by Hilda Conkling, Forty Singing Seamen, and Song from The Forest of Wild Thyme, in "Collected Poems, Vol. I" by Alfred Noyes and A Catch for Spring from A Faun's Holiday in "Ardours and Endurances" by Robert Nichols. A FOREWORD Because real lovers of poetry know that time and place are of little importance, the poems in this book are brought together with no sense of the period in which they were written. From "The Song of Solomon" to Hilda Conkling's "Spring Song" they are here because they are beautiful, with a beauty that neither years nor events can change. It is this aloofness, this independence of circumstance that gives poetry its great value. From childhood, almost from infancy, through womanhood we may carry it with us, turning to it constantly and finding in it always something to satisfy our need. My own love for it dates back to a mother who read and repeated poetry to us children as naturally as she breathed; to early mornings when we younger ones cuddled into bed beside her and listened to "Kallunborg Church," always associated in our minds with the old folk-tale of "Rumpelstilkskin," or "The Skeleton in Armor"; to winter evenings around a blazing fire where we roasted apples hung on strings from the mantel above while she read to us from "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" or "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." She knew Whittier, visited at his house as a schoolgirl and quoted him to us until the ideas and ideals of the Quaker poet became unconsciously a part of our philosophy. And how well I remember her enthusiasm over Kipling when his poems began to appear in the late eighties! Her quick response to the strange rhythm, the surge and vigor of his verse brought us stumbling behind her, eager to see and hear all that she saw and heard in this new singer. This response to poetry comes to different people differently, but if we live our lives without it we lose one of the good things that the world has to give. This book is only a taste of that good thing. It is suggestive rather than complete, a stimulus to appetite rather than a satisfying meal. It was made in the hope that through it the modern girl would find a key to the treasures that the poets of to-day and yesterday are giving and have given us. MARY GOULD DAVIS. New York |