Melody, mystery, majesty, and mirth
Poems for Children and Other People, edited by George Hornby
Salutations, bibliophiles.
Today, I’m very excited to bring you
.Tara writes
, where her mission is to inspire confidence in our complex humanity through close attention to story and language.Here, she shares the poetry that made her. Enjoy!
Before the words made any sense, I read the pictures.
There were horses, birds, a squirrel, a snail; anemones, chrysanthemum, a chickadee, a quail; girls sitting down, stately women robed, dancers, dreamers, queens, a toad.
I looked longest at the fragile porcelain women and girls.
When I unwrapped the book on Christmas morning in the split-level house we rented in Spokane, I did not know what to make of the gift. Eight years old, I enjoyed story books and the rhymes of Dr. Seuss, but had never held a poetry anthology.
My mother sat beside me and helped me unlock the mysteries. Cybis porcelain was special, she told me while I browsed the pages. People collected it the way my grandmother collected teacup and saucer pairs in a glass case. The way I would soon collect rocks in an egg carton.
See-bis, she pronounced it. See this.
She read the humorous poems and the plain ones aloud to raise my confidence:
I know a funny little man, As quiet as a mouse. He does the mischief that is done In everybody’s house. Though no one ever sees his face, Yet one and all agree That every plate we break, was cracked By Mr. Nobody. (p. 77)
I gravitated toward anything about cats:
It’s very nice to think of how In every country lives a Cow To furnish milk with all her might For Kitten’s comfort and delight. (p. 40)
The book became a prized one on my little shelf. I took it down often and read the same poems over and over. At each reading I ventured a little farther into unexplored pages. For years, I remained mostly mystified when I tried to extend my reach beyond simple quatrains and ballads and marvelous, memorable characters like the Owl and the Pussycat, who went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat: They took some honey, and plenty of money Wrapped in a five-pound note. . . . They dined upon mince and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon, And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon,-- The moon, They danced by the light of the moon.– Edward Lear (p. 67)
I did not understand at the time that Poems for Children and Other People was a cushioned brougham come to carry me from Dr. Seuss to Emily Dickinson and William Blake, and from them to William Shakespeare, Umberto Eco, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Toni Morrison.
The more I read, the more I came to understand that words conjured things out of thin air. One moment I was in my room with the flat, benign animals on my Noah’s ark bedsheets; the next moment, a “Tiger! Tiger!” had joined me, “burning bright / In the forests of the night.” An awesome creature, it never settled down to domesticity like the elephants and lions walking two by two across my pillow.
Six blind men taught me an indelible lesson in humility when they formed “stiff and strong” opinions about the nature of an elephant (calling it, from their limited perspectives, a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan, or a rope), while all along the speaker of the poem and the reader could see that “each was partly in the right, / And all were in the wrong!” (p. 52)
Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” was possibly the strangest of the large number of poems that simply baffled me. Eventually, it made sense to my ears and blood, bypassing cognition. I could not paraphrase “‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves,” but I liked the roll of it, slightly silly, slightly intimidating. Sometimes, language wanted to be clear and understood; other times, it wanted to skitter away like the last chip of soap in the dish (p. 57). The syllables combined to make music, either way.
In high school, charged with memorizing a poem, I chose fourteen lines from the anthology titled Portia’s Speech that hinted at depths of character and story beyond Poems for Children and Other People. How I found out that Portia was the leading character in a Shakespearean play called The Merchant of Venice, I no longer remember, but I read the play to understand who she was and why “mercy” was important to her. “The quality of mercy is not strain’d,” she argued nobly.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes: ‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown; . . . And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice. (p. 86)
Rereading the lines enough times to commit them to memory, I felt certain that Portia was right about “mercy,” so that when the family discovered my politics were to the left of everyone else’s, I might have pointed to my poetry anthology for explanation.
It dignifies a child to receive a new picture book all her own. This dignity settles deep and changes the way everything looks and seems. If she should also happen to learn that no one of firm opinions ever sees the whole elephant, that something is always left unknown and unknowable, and that mercy seasons justice, could any work satisfy her but the profession of education, where she could pass books of mystery into hundreds, thousands of other hands?
The Illustrated Anthology
I am umber, sienna, chili-red, bone. I am chandelier- gold on a porcelain throne. I am color, mystery, mirth, and song. Come play in my worlds where you belong.— Tara Penry
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If a gifted book meant something to you as a child, I hope you'll leave a comment about it. Do tell!
Sadly, I cannot recall the name of the children’s book, but it contained Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘From a Railway Carriage’. This was the beginning of my lifelong love of poetry. I very much enjoyed your essay.