display’d/and on me made to dwell/’ Tis pity, such a pretty Maid/as I should go to Hell.
Poetry for children, then, was mainly devotional writing, lullabies, fables or lessons in
verse until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Fortunately, there were some
excellent hymnists.
Isaac Watts (1674–1748), author of well known hymns like ‘Jesus shall reign where’re
the sun’, published Divine Songs Attempted in easy Language for the Use of Children, in
- As Pafford, editor of a recent edition makes clear, this was ‘an early and
outstanding attempt to write verses for children which would give them pleasure, but at
the same time point and urge to the paths of virtue’ (Pafford 1715/ 1971:1). Watts urged
kindness in education and understood the power of verse in learning: ‘what is learnt in
Verse is longer retained in Memory, and sooner recollected...this will be a constant
Furniture’. Although he is little read today, Watts was extremely popular in his own
lifetime and for more than a century after his death: Divine Songs had run to 550
editions by 1918. One of his most famous poems, How doth the little busy bee/Improve
each shining hour/And gather honey all the day/From every opening flower was notably
parodied by Lewis Carroll.
Charles Wesley (1707–1788), brother of the evangelist John Wesley, followed the same
tradition by writing some of the most beautiful hymns in the English language,
including ‘Hark! the herald-angels sing’. His Hymns for Children appeared in 1763.
Another talented writer of hymns was Christopher Smart (1722–1771), perhaps best
remembered for ‘My cat Jeoffrey’ (from Jubilate Agno), who wrote Hymns for the
Amusement of Children (1771), while in prison for debt:
A lark’s nest, then your playmate begs
You’d spare herself and speckled eggs;
Soon she shall ascend and sing
Your praises to the eternal King.
‘Hymn for Saturday’Smart’s verse displays a humanity and a sweetness of touch that was singularly lacking
elsewhere, although his hymns never deviate from praising God. Anna Barbauld (1743–
1825) was one of the best writers for children of the eighteenth century. Her work
conformed to the standards of her day: anything too fanciful was repressed, and moral
tales were her forte. However, her Lessons for Children (1778) demonstrated a new
approach to the teaching of reading, and her Hymns in Prose (1781) made her justly
famous:
Come, let us go forth into the fields; let us see how the flowers spring; let us listen
to the warbling of birds, and sport ourselves upon the new grass. The winter is over
and gone, the buds come out upon the trees, the crimson blossoms of the peach and
the nectarine are seen, and the green leaves sprout.We have to move to the middle of the nineteenth century to consider our last notable
hymnist, Cecil Frances Alexander (1818–1895) who was married to the Archbishop of
Armagh. She wrote many verses for children despite a busy family and pastoral life.
190 POETRY FOR CHILDREN