January/Bitter very/February damp, Sir/March blows/On April’s nose/May has caught
the cramp, Sir. The Fairies came out in 1883 and the gorgeous picture book, In
Fairyland, illustrated by Richard Doyle in 1870.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was, perhaps, the first poet for the young to write
effectively ‘as if by a child in the first person’. A Child’s Garden of Verses (1887) first
appeared as Penny Whistles in 1885. John Rowe Townsend identifies a ‘shifting
perspective...between the author as a child and the author as a man’ (Townsend 1987:
122). Indeed, it is clear that Stevenson himself was aware of this and spoke to Edmund
Gosse of his unusual ability in remembering what it felt like to be a child:
At evening when the lamp is lit,
Around the fire my parents sit;
They sit at home and talk and sing,
And do not play at anything.
‘The Land of Story Books’Perhaps it was because Stevenson’s Edinburgh childhood was dogged by poor health
and confinement to house and bed, a lonely life cut off from normal activities, that he
had such empathy for children. His poems still mesmerise them today, with their
memorable images, evocative rhythms and narrative suggestion. Most moving of all to
adults is the poem ‘To any reader’—it is about childhood and growing up, and what
adults lose and try to hold on to: So you may see, if you will look/Through the windows
of this book/Another child, far, far away/And in another garden, play. Stevenson made
no claims for himself as a poet: ‘These are rhymes, jingles; I don’t go in for eternity’
(Stevenson 1883:285). He was wrong.
‘The Ordinary Rituals of Life’: Poetry for Children in the Twentieth
CenturyWalter de la Mare’s (1873–1956) first book of poetry for children, Songs of Childhood,
was published in 1902, and followed by many others, the most popular of which was,
perhaps, Peacock Pie (1913). Most of his work for children can be found in Collected
Rhymes and Verses (1944). He is also famous for one of the finest anthologies ‘for the
Young of all ages’, Come Hither (1923). His gift was to write with a tremendous eye for
detail, and he emphasised the importance of the particular. Like Blake and the
Romantics, de la Mare shared a wonder at the beauty of the world, but in his case he
rarely chose to tackle the harsh or unpleasant side of life. His poetry, though a little out
of vogue at present, has timeless qualities: is there a better narrative poem than ‘The
listeners’?
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:TYPES AND GENRES 197