While most of the poems in The Works are ones written specifically for audiences of children and published in the last half-century for so, there is a section labelled Classic Poems that consists mostly of works not originally or specifically intended for youngsters. In addition to these fifteen “classics,”there are also another ten or so other poems scattered under various headings elsewhere among the almost four hundred poems in The Works that were not originally written for children. In the light of how few of The Works are poems not originally intended for young readers, I have to ask why there are any at all. What’s special about these few adult poems that might make them necessary for a school experience of poetry that consists mainly of poems made to fit adult views of what children’s poetry ought to be?
One possible answer, of course, is the identification of them as “classics.” Classics are important. Everyone who claims to know something about poetry ought to be aware of them, right? Well maybe right—although I’ve read a lot of classics in my long life as a student and teacher and scholar of literature that I could quite happily have done without. But even if classics are necessary, how do you choose a short list of so few of them to include in a collection intended for children?
The answer, of course, is the chooser’s ideas about what children might like, or perhaps, ought to like. So what did this chooser, the editor of The Works Paul Cookson, think children do or should like?
I found a possible answer to this question while first browsing through The Works and coming upon this poem:
Bee! I’m expecting you!
Was saying Yesterday
To Somebody you know
That you were due—
The Frogs got Home last Week—
Are settled, and at work—
Birds, mostly back—
The Clover warm and thick—
You’ll get my Letter by
The seventeenth; Reply
Or better, be with me—
Yours, Fly
What struck me as I was browsing was not the poem itself. In point of fact, it seemed to fit quite naturally and expectedly into The Works as a whole and into the section of The Works called Letters that its appears in. What made me pause was noticing the name of the poet who write this poem: Emily Dickinson.
Because here’s the thing: As far as anyone knows, Emily Dickinson never wrote a poem specifically for children. For that matter, nobody really knows quite who she imagined as an audience for the vast majority of the almost two thousand poems she wrote but never had published, unless its consisted entirely of Emily Dickinson. In any case, what we now identify and publish as children’s poetry was a kind of poetry that had hardly even begun to be written in the eighteen eighties when Dickinson probably wrote this one. In that period, most children’s poetry in England or America consisted of warnings about bad behaviour and sinfulness and encouragements toward good behaviour or being a devout Christian. But this poem seems to fit quite naturally in The Works because it seems pretty indistinguishable from the majority of the poems surrounding it there.
It does so for a number of reasons. First, it does some of the things we conventionally expect literature written for children to do. Most obviously, it imagines creatures other than human acting like humans. A fly writing a letter to a bee is impossible enough to seem ridiculous anywhere but in a children’s poem or picture book, but would be perfectly and unquestionably ordinary there—to the extent that Emily Dickinson imagining it makes her seem, well, kind of childish. Charmingly so, maybe, but undeniably immature. It’s not a characteristic I would associate with most the other poems by her I’m aware of.
But then that “childishness” is another thing that might potentially identify “Bee! I’m expecting you!” as a children’s poem. Imagining a fly writing a letter to a bee seems like something a child might do. But note, please: I’m not all that convinced that children do intuitively and always imagine the creatures and objects around them as somehow possessing human personalities and characteristics. I’m met and talked with many children who seem devoid of even an iota of that kind of imagination; and in any case, the sizeable number of adults I know who lack it suggests that if it did exist in their childhood, its certainly didn’t last and that therefore, it might have never actually existed.
But it’s unquestionable that much writing and other entertainment for children does imagine creatures and objects in possession of human personalities. Instead of being an inherent aspect of childlikeness, then, thinking of non-human creatures and objects as having human personalities and capabilities might be something taught to many children in specific cultural contexts like our own—contexts in which countless stories, TV shows, and toys that represent things in that way. Think of teddy bears and SpongeBob Squarepants. Think of rabbits in suit jackets and brave little toasters. Would children be imagining such bizarre things if adult writers and toy manufacturers hadn't so consistently taught them how to? Would they imagine flies writing letters to bees without having access to books like The Works?
And for that matter just how might they imagine a fly writing a letter anyway? Flies don’t have hands to hold pens or pencils in. Or desks or paper to write on. Or pens, for that matter.
But I wasn't surprised that adults have imagined exactly that. Admittedly, when I did a Google search of “fly writing a letter image,” I found none. But after remembering that the fly in the poem wanted the bee to write back, I searched for “bee writing a letter image” and lo and behold, came upon a wide variety of conventionally childlike cartoon bees with pens and pencils, many of them on stock photo websites—and none of them had anything to do with the Dickinson poem.
It seems that imagining a bee using a writing instrument is conventionally childlike enough that doing so was bound to occur individually to a sizeable number of producers of images.
Even so: I fail to understand why writing flies are so much less desirably imaginable in terms of cartoon images that look like much of the visual imagery produced for children. But come to think of it, we tend to think of bees in positive ways and flies in negative ones. Bees are admirably industrious and sociologically organized. Flies are downmarket free agents, disorganized nuisances who hang around raw meat and stinky garbage. And if illustrators are imagining creatures for audiences of children, they might well prefer that the creatures are more admirable ones. Sometimes defined as a kind of literature that leaves things out, writing for children exists primarily for that reason: it supposedly offers young readers and viewers a less dangerous, less frightening, less confusing view of the world. It tends to be a safe haven that protects young readers and viewers from the complications and confusions adults assume that many adults believe children can’t, or maybe just shouldn’t, have to handle. And it often creates that safe haven exactly by assuming the presumably childlike view of a world of animals and objects accounted for by easily understandable human motivations it then imposes on. young readers as, if not what life is really like, at least what’s adults would like children to think or pretend to think it’s like.
“Bee! I’m expecting you!” then seems to fit so seamlessly into a volume like The Works because it shares the somewhat sanitized view of reality the many of the poems in the volume that were specifically written for children offer. It is, certainly, more optimistic and straightforward than the many poems by Dickinson that explore themes of death, isolation, and loss.
I have to admit, however, that not all the poems in The Works not specifically written for children are as much like the poems that were specifically written for children as this Dickinson poems is. I’ll consider how some of the other non-children’s poems might or might not be thought of as appropriately childlike in my next post.