The Ambleside Poetry Collections
The AmblesideOnline website offers six downloadable volumes collectively identified as AmblesideOnline Poetry Anthology, edited and annotated by The AmblesideOnline Foundation. According to the “Introduction to the Series,”
Researchers at the University of Liverpool found that reading poetry provides a "rocket-boost" to the brain that cannot be matched by straightforward, simple paraphrases. The research also found that poetry, in particular, "increased activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with ‘autobiographical memory,’ which helped the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they had read" (Daily Mail, Jan. 13, 2013).
I’m not all that convinced the measuring physical activity in the brain translates directly into specific kinds of mental activity occurring, but let’s assume for a minute it actually does. So, then: because poetry can do this important work,
“AmblesideOnline students read a variety of poems which offer them word pictures and ideas to reflect on, and to help them interpret their own experiences.
Poetry is what you reflect on in order to better understand yourself.
But not surprisingly, it has to be the right poetry—the kind that isn’t twaddle:
Charlotte Mason said that poetry is an instructor of the conscience, and that children "must grow up upon the best... There is never a time when they are unequal to worthy thoughts, well put; inspiring tales, well told. Let Blake's Songs of Innocence represent their standard in poetry.." and the result will be readers who demand the best, "the fit and beautiful expression of inspiring ideas and pictures of life" (Parents and Children, p. 263).
But just what does Mason intend in recommending Blake as a model for children of “the best” poetry? Yes, Blake did write his Songs of Innocence, poems that represent the voices and views of the young. But then he also accompanied them with his Songs of Experience, which often offer less innocent understandings of the same subjects in ways that can easily be read as deflating the validity of what innocence sees.Is that what Mason intended to recommend? Poetry for children that makes them question the value of their childlikeness? I doubt it: that would mean she approves of the vast body of anti-childlike poems for children across the centuries that chastise them for not living up to adult standards of behaviour. Poems like this one by Abraham Chear:
To my youngest Kinsman R. L.
(from A Looking-glass for Children, being a narrative of God's gracious dealings with some little children, 1673)
MY little Cousin if you'll be,
your Uncles dearest Boy;
You must take heed of every deed,
that would your Soul destroy.
You must not curse, nor fight, nor steal,
nor spend your time in games,
Nor make a lie, what e're you aile;
nor call ungodly names.
With wicked Children do not play,
for such to Hell will go;
The Devils Children sin all day,
but you must not do so.
Begin, I pray, to learn that way,
that doth to Heaven tend:
O learn a little, day by day,
which leadeth to that end.
For God and good men love such Boyes,
and will them good things give;
Father and Mother will rejoyce,
and I in comfort live.
Beyond the songs of innocence and experience, furthermore, the bulk of Blake’s poetry consists of long, convoluted allegories about mythical creatures of his own invention that represent a highly complex interpretation of what it means to be human that seems to be anything but childlike. Mason clearly isn’t recommending these Blake works as the standard for children’s poetry. There may never be a time when children are “unequal to worthy thoughts,” then—but only as long as the worthy thoughts are the relatively simple (and relatively childlike) ones to be found in the songs of innocence.
Furthermore, Blake produced those songs in the late eighteenth century—a time that, in the light of the complexities of life as it has developed more than two hundred years later, might itself seem relatively innocent: a life without many machines or much industrialization, a world long before the daycares and Nintendos that help to define the lives of children now. I have to ask if children who grow up in the increasingly multicultural communities of Europe and North America and elsewhere can indeed “reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they had read" in a poem like this one by Blake:
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O my soul is white!
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereaved of light.. . . . . . . . . .
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Are but a cloud, and like a shady grove.‘For, when our souls have learned the heat to bear,
The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His voice,
Saying, “Come out from the grove, my love and care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.”’Thus did my mother say, and kissed me,
And thus I say to little English boy.
When I from black, and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee;
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.
Fans of Charlotte Mason might well delight in the way Blake’s poems take that faith—and possibly even its insistence on identifying blackness as a problem to be transcended—for granted. But these aspects of the poem surely would and should make it seem alien to many other children and parents in our time. There’s no reason children can’t or shouldn’t enjoy them—but I hesitate to agree that their doing so might and should lead to children basing their understanding of themselves or others on this enjoyment of them—to conclude, for instance, that people with black skins are, thank goodness, white inside.
The AmblesideOnline folks are aware of a problem here. They say,
We have tried to be sensitive to the changing language and ideas of our present day, while presenting these poems from the past as faithfully as we were able. However, it is beyond our capabilities to anticipate every new word meaning that exists or that arises in the future. We can only give the same advice and disclaimer that we would suggest for other studies, from literature through science: please preview this material, and then use it with care and discretion.
But I find it hard to imagine how you could both do that and encourage children to understand the language and meaning of poems like thus one as being centrally about themselves You could, I suppose say, “all this stuff about black and white is just symbolic”—but that would mean sliding over the implications of the specific language that the Ambleside people want to insist poetry forces us to pay attention to.
And that suggests a major problem with the poetry that appears throughout the six volumes of the AmblesideOnline Poetry Anthology. Most of it was written not just before the current century, but even before the century before that. The vast majority of the poems in these six volumes are from the reign of Queen Victoria. If these poems do indeed allow children to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences, then they might end thinking of themselves as young Victorian ladies and gentlemen.
They might also end up with a concept of poetry that includes none of the wide range of new forms of poetry developed from the eighteen-nineties and on. There is no e.e. cummings here, no Dylan Thomas, no W.B. Yeats, no Beat poets or rap poets—sand these are all poets whose work appears in many other children’s poetry anthologies. The poets included here who did write in the first half of the twentieth century are more conventional ones, like Robert Frost and Walter de la Mare.
In fact, and despite the age most of the poems in there volumes share, the range of experiences they offer is even more limited. According to Mason, “Collections" of poems are to be eschewed”—apparently, experiencing just one or two poems by the same poet in the context of one or two poems by a variety of other poets does not offer the sort of in-depth experience that encourages the reflecting and leads to the self-reappraising. Instead, for Mason asnd the Ambleside gang, “some one poet should have at least a year to himself.” As a result, only the first volume of the Ambleside Online anthology, identified as Beginnings, covers a wide range of poems, apparently because young children needs a taste of lots of things before they can settle down to really taking poetry seriously and shaping themselves with it. The remaining volumes each include a number of works by each of only four poets.
As a group, the poets in these volumes form a sort of canon of acceptable poetry:
Walter de la Mare
Eugene Field
James Whitcomb Riley
William Blake
Sara Teasdale
Hilda Conkling
Helena Hunt Jackson
Alfred Tennyson
Emily Dickinson
William Wordsworth
Rudyard Kipling
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
John Greenleaf Whittier and Paul Laurence Dunbar (note the additional poet, added perhaps as the only Black person on the list but, as such and as in the U.S. constitution labelling of Black Americans as each being just 3/5ths of a person, credited as being just half a poet?)
Robert Frost
Carl Sandburg
Langston Hughes
This is a curious group. After a lifetime of learning and teaching English language literature, I had never heard of some of these poets before encountering them here: Hilda Conkling and Helena Hunt Jackson.
While it’s interesting that they beef up the female representation on the list, Jackson’s poems read like sermons, finding ways of consoling thoughts that emerge from a close look at things like strawberries and summer. Conkling is a somewhat different matter: most of her poems included here are purported to have been produced in her childhood and dictated to her mother, beginning when she was four and resulting in three volumes published before she ended her career in her early teens. While both Conkling and her mother insisted that the poems were all her work, the extent to which they follow the pattern of Jackson’s poems in finding meaningful solace in a thoughtful consideration of specific aspects of the natural world suggests a surprising familiarity in one so young with conventional adult assumptions about how children see and think. Either this one children really did see and think in that narrowly conventional way, or else her mother did. I suspect the latter.
While somewhat more daring in her choice of ways of describing the natural objects she focuses on, the somewhat better known Sara Teasdale writes pretty much in the same vein—and that these three poets with a similar way of looking at and understanding the world occupy the same volume of the AmblesideOnline anthology as Blake implies a shared assumption that looking at the world in this specific way is the essence of childlikeness, either what children naturally and inevitably do or what adults admire them for doing and work consciously or unconsciously to encourage them to see and think in that way.
The other poets included in the AmblesideOnline anthology are by better known poets, all but one of them male. Have the poems included by these poets been selected with a similar focus on the same ore similar ways of seeing and thinking about what one sees? I’ll consider that in a later post.