POETRY FOR CHILDREN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 819, 7 April 1955, Page 13

POETRY FOR CHILDREN

ALL DAY LONG, an Anthology of Poetry for Children, compiled by Pamela Whitaoe Oxford University Press, English price PAMELA WHITLOCK’S anthology of poetry for children has the great virtue of freshness. It can include Yeats without "Innisfree"; it recognises ~that Hopkins can be suitable for the young; and it makes such welcome discoveries or rediscoveries as Morton’s "Dancing Cabman," De La Mare’s "Daybreak," Dorothy Wellesley’s "Horses" and Gogarty’s "Sung in Spring." There are felicities of arrangement in the various sections -in the bringing-together, for example, of "Lepanto" and MHardy’s "Trafalgar," with Day Lewis’s "Watching Post" and, an extract from Martyn Skinner. None of the selections are in bad taste, and only a few are trivial: but not all are equally happy. Rose Macaulay’s "Baffled," for instance, is a sinister poem and strikes me as singularly unchildish; and so does the closehauled metaphysic of Traherne’s "Salutation." Several of the poems have that condescending "happiest days of ourlives" attitude which children, I’m sure, find most irritating. As Professor Day Lewis has remarked, a child wants "a poem which will accord with his own kind of fantasies about life or support his fragmentary knowledge of it." For what kind of.."fantasies" and "knowledge" is this book designed? In spite of some vigorous sections, the general tone is set by gentle, romanticGeorgian, tather elegiac poetry of the kind which makes the English appear, deceptively, to be a nation of birdwatchers. As one reads, @ picture appears in the mind, of the child who will read this book; and it is precisely the demure afd charming young lady whom Joan Hassall has drawn for the cover. So I do not mean ‘to be uncomplimentary in describing this as an intelligent anthology for older girls. For boys (and some girls, too) a companion-volume would be : needed with the emphasis reversed, much of the rural-contemplative poetry replaced by the heroic and adventurous, with much stronger infusions of, say,’ Belloc, Kipling, Campbell and the earlier Auden and Day Lewis, for a start.

M.K.

J.