CHILDREN AND POETRY

To those who believe that children and poetry are the loveliest things in the world it seems natural that they should belong together. Yet we are often told that children do not like poetry. The truth of the matter probably is that they do not like what is frequently offered to them under the name of poetry, or that they do not like the way poetry is offered. For this they are not to blame. For, if we stop to consider the nature of children, and the things which they thoroughly enjoy, we shall realize that very often children are not interested in poetry because we have made interest in it impossible for them.

We do not need to be psychologists to know what things give children pleasure. We have all been children. We have all watched children at play. Unless we are just seventeen years old and have forgotten what childhood is like, we know that children love play better than anything else. They love vigorous physical play-tag, hide-an-seek, pom-pom-pull-away, pussyin-the-corner. And they love imaginative play, the perennially interesting games of "school," "house," "pirates," "hospital," and "dress-up-and-pretend." And before any game is begun they have a little ritual of choice which they call "counting out" and which determines who shall be the leader or that mysterious person called “it.”

Now in all of these activities children are very close to poetry. Tag is a very primitive game and seldom played for long at a time. It is a game to play on your way home from school, not a game for a whole Saturday morning. But the more elaborate 'running games" are often accompanied, as we know, by little "singsong" calls that might be called "refrains" if we wanted to be solemn about it. In playing "pom-pom" one side taunts the other, from time to time, with this little bit of rhythmical speech.

In still more elaborate games children use verses set to tunes that are probably many generations old, and these verses are said or sung with dances or marches, usually as the accompaniment of a story. In the game called "Drop The Handkerchief," or "Itiskit, Itaskit," the leader walks around a circle of children chanting the famous little song:

"Itiskit, Itaskit,

A green and yellow basket,
I wrote a letter to my love
And on the way I dropped it,
I dropped it, dropped it,"

And this goes on until the singer does drop the handkerchief behind another child who must pick it up and catch the leader before he runs around the circle. In "Oats, peas, beans" the children tell the story of the farmer and how he goes to housekeeping, and they imitate him when he

"Stamps his foot,
And claps his hands,
And turns around
To view his lands."

In all games which are a part of our folklore are all the elements of poetry; story, dramatization, lyrical expression, rhythm, strongly and effectively stressed, and rhyme. And children learn these games almost as soon as they begin to play with other children and repeat them again and again, apparently with great pleasure. By their repetition of the cadences again and again they show their love of strong rhythms. By their enjoyment of the story, the imitative action, or the dramatic suggestion, they show their love of imaginative activity. In their games, then, we must admit that children enjoy, in a primitive form, the beginnings of poetry. But we shall be wise if we

remember that they enjoy taking part in poetry. They like to act the story, or dance to the rhythm, or chant or sing it.

In their "counting out" rhymes, children show more than the love of story and rhyme and rhythm. They show a very decided interest in the flavors and sounds of words. Take one of the best known rhymes, which has variants in all parts of this country, and, for all that I know, in all parts of the English speaking world:

"Onery, ewery, ickery, Anne
Filasy, folasy, Nicholas, John,
Squeeby, squawby, Irish Mary,

Stickerum, stackerum, buck-you're it!"

and notice the sound echoes-how one word passes on part of its sound, but not the whole of it, to the next one. And notice also the delicious comedy of the combination "Squeeby, squawby." We do not know what they mean, but if we have any sense of humor, we know that they are funny words. This same power to play with words, when used for beauty and not for amusement, produces some of the finest lines of poetry that the language can boast.

When children play games in the house on rainy days, rhythm and bodily movement give place, to a large extent, to the exercise of the imagination. "The play's the thing" for them then. They live in the story which they are making. Sometimes, with a sure dramatic instinct, they will enact the great tales of the Bible or of mythology, if they have read any. "Daniel-in-thelion's den," "Aaron-the-High-Priest" and "Moses-with-hisarms-up" have become classical dramas in certain nurseries. Children have even been known to quarrel about who should be David and kill Goliath, in spite of the "counting out" rhyme which, the nursery code says, should settle such difficulties. And when such play is natural and spontaneous, not that horrible modern substitute called "supervised play," children share an excitement close akin to creative lyrical emotion. Have we forgotten it all, we who were children only yesterday?

One other capacity of the poet children possess in a remarkable degree, the ability to name things for their flavors and qualities. We laugh when the baby calls the ocean "the big bath tub." We do not see, always, that, in so doing, he has made a poem, or what is a poem for him. It was the little children on the Pacific Coast who called the white forget-me-not the "popcorn-flower" because its tangle of blossoms heaped together in patches in the canyons, look like pop-corn. And that, in its own way, was a poem. In his admirable book, "The Enjoyment of Poetry," Max Eastman pays tribute to children's ability to make poems of this kind.

"Children are often intolerant of poetry in books," he says, "because they have it in reality. They need no literary assistance in getting acquainted with the live qualities of objects, or endowing them with their true names. Their minds are like skies full of floating imagery, and with this they evoke the inmost essences out of common things, discovering kinships in nature incredible to science and intolerable to common sense. The toast is a 'zebra.'

'Nothing with a tail' is a snake.

The cat purring is a 'bumblecat.'

The white eggs in the incubator have 'blossomed.'
But education soon robs them of this quaintness."

In other words, education robs them of a part of the joy of making poems. Children are poets. And when a very naughty boy is very angry the vivid iniquity of his "calling names is as masterly as any of those impolite passages in Shakespeare that begin or end with references to a "lily-livered knave” or the like.

If we think about childhood long enough and honestly enough, we shall be willing to admit that children are poets and that they love poetry as poets love it. Although their knowledge of life is less than ours, although the range of their interests is limited to a certain extent by the walls of the nursery or the fence around the garden, their minds, in promise of capacity, are

as good as ours. Their taste is sometimes better than ours, for it is the result of natural and sincere reactions, not of prejudice and unfortunate training. But they are not ready to enjoy all of the kinds of poetry which please or edify grown up people. And grown up people should be wise enough and tactful enough to offer them what they can enjoy, or at least not to make a burden of what should be a pleasure, by insisting that a child must like something which, it is quite evident, he does not like.

What kind of poetry is usually offered to children? Do we offer them good vigorous ballads that satisfy the craving for stories and strong rhythms? Do we give them good folk poetry, folk songs and folk games, which are nearer than anything else to the kind of thing that children make for themselves? Or do we give them heavy moral treatises in prim meters, "rhymed ethics," clumsily versified "uplift?" These are questions that we must answer before we can say that they do not like poetry. "Evangeline" is all very well. Some children like her very much. But how many children have liked "The Psalm of Life" with its dreary and formal stanzas beginning, "Tell me not in mournful numbers"? Many children learned that poem in the schools of twenty years ago who never learned another poem unless they were made to learn others by the force of will of their elders. Many worse poems are offered to children. Many worse poems are assigned for memory work.

Something can be said, of course, for the educational value of what poets call "rhymed ethics." When moral maxims are set before us in verse they tend to be remembered rather better than when they are set before us in prose. But such didactic verses are seldom poetry. Why not be quite frank with children and say, "Here is a lesson or sermon written in verse. We want you to learn it and remember it because we believe that these ideas will be good ones to live by. They have been put into verse because verse is easier to memorize and to remember than prose." If this were done children would get a clear-cut and true conception of the thing as it is. But harm is done when