This three-volume anthology, which, I believe, began to appear as one volume in 1937 and was complete as three volumes by 1943, is subtitled simply as “An Anthology of Verse.” \But as the Forward in the first volume asserts in its first sentence, “This anthology is designed for boys and girls of eleven to fourteen years of age.” The rest of the Forward offers a brief laundry-list of the kinds of things that appear regularly in the Forwards and Introductions of many different anthologies of poetry for children—and since this is the first one I’ve written about here in this Substack, I’ll list them here:
A statement about what kinds of poems children need: “no poem should be included which did not seem to me good in its kind. . . . the reader should be offered poems of every kind. He will only learn "taste" after he has followed out the natural process of tasting everything. Once the appetite is aroused, his own curiosity and his teacher's tact and enthusiasm will help him to approach again poems that seemed indigestible or even poisonous at the first trial.”
A comment on the order the poems appear in: “the least formal arrangement of poems is the best one. Where poems are classified, the primitive virtues of incongruity and surprise will largely disappear. Classification also is apt to create prejudice. . . . The poems are printed therefore in alphabetical order of first lines.”
A comment about the presence or absence of frequently anthologized poems: “the question whether a poem is ‘hackneyed’ in the ordinary sense is irrelevant here. The children, more than likely, will be meeting it for the first time, and they are the ones who are going to have this book. Anyway, one cannot see too much of a good poem.” On the other hand, however, “A poem may have appeared in every anthology that has ever been published: or in not a single one. I have tried to remain uninfluenced by either consideration.”
A comment about reciting poetry and reading poems aloud: “when I have mentioned " the reader" of this book, I have always thought of him primarily as a reader-aloud. That dismal monster born of pedagogic laziness and incompetence, the " repetition-hour," is now fortunately on its last legs. But the speaking of verse, solo and in chorus, the reading aloud by a sympathetic teacher, are still the main channels through which poetry can enter the lives of boys and girls.
The choice of organizing the poems in alphabetical order does indeed offer the virtues of incongruity and surprise, as lengthy story poems about knightly battles and pied pipers are preceded and followed by brief carols, epigrams, and nursery rhymes, and heroic ballads appear before and after nonsense poems, descriptions of beautiful landscapes and heartfelt emotions, and excerpts from Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. Thus, because they all begin with the word ”when, Shakespeare’s “When icicles hang by the wall” is preceded by Tennyson’s “The Farewell” (“When cats run home and light is come”) and followed by a scene from King Lear (“When shall I come on the top of that same hill?” in Book 1; and Shakespeare’s “When I do count the clock that tells the time” is preceded by Milton’s “When I consider how my light is spent” and followed by Walter de la Mare’s “When I lie where shades of darkness” in Book III. There are no poems beginning with “when” in Book II. Incongruity and surprise is everywhere.
On the other hand, after looking at a sizeable number of anthologies of poetry for children lately, I have to say that the specific poems Day-Lewis has chosen for this one are anything but surprising. As I turned the pages of these books, I found myself saying, “Oh, yes, that one again” time after time. Among other old favourites:
Tennyson’s “The Revenge” (“At Flores in the Azores”)
Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin”
“In the bleak midwinter”
Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees”
Byron’s “The Destruction of the Sennacherib”
Gray’s “Elegy” (in part)
Lear’s “Pobble Who Has No Toes”
Belloc’s “Jim”
Allingham’s “The Fairies” (“Up the airy mountain”)
Carroll’s “You Are Old, Father William”
Carroll’s “A-Sitting on a Gate”
“Oh God, our help in ages past”
“Lord Randal”
Keats’ “To Autumn”
Frost’s “Mending Wall”
“Sir Patrick Spens”
Blake’s “Tyger”
Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”
Herrick’s “Fair Daffodils”
Shelley’s “Skylark”
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”
Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner”
Tennyson’s “Ulysses”
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”
As I look over this list now, though, I realize that, while I’ve seen these poems repeated in may anthologies for children, I first encountered most of them myself in the courses I took as a college student as part of my undergrad English major. Almost none of them were written with child readers in mind, and I certainly wasn't;t taught them as children’s poems. The exceptions are the nonsense poems by Carroll and, maybe, Lear, which I first encountered in terms of the satiric aspects that would have appealed to the knowledgeable adults in their original audiences.
While Day-Lewis claims that “the reader should be offered poems of every kind,” he is also determined to offer nothing but poetry he considers to be “good in its kind.” But some kinds are noticeably absent. They are, presumably, kinds Day-Lewis would consider incapable of goodness. So what kinds does he include and exclude?
While the poems he includes describe a range of different places across history, they offer a fairly consistent view of a decidedly pre-nineteenth century world of forests and fields and farms—a world with not much in the way of cities and not much sense of machines and electricity and other aspects of the industrial world that Day-Lewis’s young readers actually occupied—not to mention the war their country was in the midst of in those years. In doing so, they tend to confirm and celebrate a long-standing connection between childhood innocence and a pastoral life close to and connected with animals and the outdoors. In this view, childhood tends to be viewed as a form of Eden, a paradise, and children are assumed to be most interested in Edenic settings—in natural landscapes like the ones their human ancestors usually occupied. This is a vision of the past as appropriately child-like, maybe.
But the other kind of poem that is especially noticeably absent is the kind written specifically for children. Apparently none of that kind of poem is good either.
I can see why Day-Lewis might think that. More traditional poetry for children—poems by writers like Isaac Watts—tends to be admonitory, to assume that being childlike is a matter of being young and ignorant, and therefore eternally being tempted to be bad in various unproductive ways and constantly in need of warnings to be better:
Against Scoffing and Calling Names
Our tongues were made to bless the Lord,
And not speak ill of men:
When others give a railing word,
We must not rail again.
Cross words and angry names require
To be chastised at school;
And he's in danger of hell-fire
That calls his brother fool.
But lips that dare be so profane
To mock, and jeer, and scoff
At holy things, or holy men,
The Lord shall cut them off.
When children, in their wanton play,
Served old Elisha so,
And bade the prophet go his way,
"Go up, thou bald head, go!"
God quickly stopped their wicked breath;
And sent two raging bears,
That tore them limb from limb to death,
With blood, and groans, and tears.
Great God! How terrible art thou
To sinners e'er so young:
Grant me thy grace, and teach me how
To tame and rule my tongue.
On the other hand, a lot of more recent poetry for children celebrates or simply takes for granted the lives of city and suburban children and celebrates their rebellious resistence to be controlled by parents, teachers, and other annoying adults.
The Youngest
Michael Rosen
I'm the youngest in our house,
so it goes like this:
My brother comes in and says,
"Tell him to clear out the fluff out from under his bed."
. . . .
So I say,
"There's fluff under his bed too you know?"
So father says,
"But we're talking about the fluff under your bed."
"You will clear it up, won't you?" Mum says.
So now, my brother—all puffed up—
says,
"Clear the fluff
out from under your bed,
clear the fluff out
from under your bed!"
Now I'm angry. I, am, angry.
So I say,—what shall I say?
I say, "Shut up stinks! You can't rule my life!"
None of the children in The Echoing Green are all that rebellious or all that likely to call someone “Stinks.” They are, indeed, relatively few in number, for few of the poems are actually about children. or being childlike, and the badness of the few children who do appear is rarely if ever celebrated. As in the Rosen poem, a lot of poems written specifically for children since the days of Watts have been by adults adopting what they present as being childlike points of view, their vision of childlikeness often seemingly based more in Romantic ideas about childhood like those found in Blake and Wordsworth than in any interaction with actual children. Since it’s highly likely that many children are nothing like these ones being represented, these poems are in fact teaching children how to be appropriately childlike. On the other hand the poems Day-Lewis has chosen are more interested in teaching children how to enjoy the poetry adults have written primarily for an audience of other adults—poems that encourage their readers to see people and events as their adult poets see them.
One final point, about the presentation of this anthology in three separate volumes. At one point in the introduction, Day-Lewis suggests that the volumes represent a progress from simple to more complicated works: “For the grading of these volumes I can claim no authority beyond the measure of intuition and experience which any teacher of English will be able to draw upon after eight years' work with children of eleven to fourteen. Their individual development makes overlaps inevitable.” But in fact, I can find no evidence of an intention that the anthology was marketed to be used specifically in classrooms, and despite this comment in the Foreword, the individual volumes seem more like each other in the arrangement and scope of what they include than like a series off ever more advanced steps from poems for eight-year-olds to poems for twelve-year-olds.