FullReads

My infant lips muttered the meaningless words while my poor little brain and imagination tried to find some joy, some picture, some tangible delight, some inspiration in the mournful, oppressive poem. If I had then been assigned intelligible verses to copy, an Elizabethan lyric, a song that sang because it had to, a bit of imagery, my childish fancy would have been fired, and I should not have had to wait till I was eighteen years old before I read a single poem voluntarily. And I should not have detested The Psalm of Life all the rest of my days–at least I don’t think I should. Longfellow when I was a child was a particularly prolific mine of memory gems, running as high as three thousand quotations to the ton. I never had a teacher who didn’t know her Longfellow with an intimacy almost as great as her ignorance of Keats, Shelley, Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Herbert, Campion, Coleridge, Burns and the rest of the kings who lived before Agamemnon. Longfellow was a lovely soul, and, within his limits, a very true poet. But I was fed on his platitudes. I was daily informed that–

The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight.–

Just as if I cared, at ten, whether they were or not. I was told in tripping measures of the village chestnut tree, to the total exclusion of the linden and ilex; and as for the land where the citrons bloom, and golden oranges are in the gloom, and the long silences of laurel rise–“Kennst du das Land?” Not I! The spreading chestnut tree alone cast its oppressive shadow across my childish fancy.

Another memory gem that I remember with a lasting grudge was–

Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.

This I knew was false, and to be forced glibly to chatter the words before the class shamed and angered me. Had not a maiden aunt of mine, after many trips to the library of the New England Genealogical Society, traced back our line to William the Conqueror? Was there another boy or girl in the school who had descended from William the Conqueror? No, sir! Several of them had kind hearts, and doubtless simple faith–whatever that was–but side of my Norman blood this counted for nothing. It is a vastly superior thing to have Norman blood, and as for coronets–well, it may be that the new age will wipe them literally out in a surge of Democracy–some of us hope so–but to the romantic heart of childhood they are a symbol not of caste and oppression but of dignity and beauty and the heroic. Certainly they are not to be eliminated by throwing at the child’s head such adult platitudes in rhyme as these, and telling him it is poetry. Alas! he believes you, and that is why he hates the very word poetry all the rest of his days.

My memory-gem book lies before me as I write, saved I know not how out of the wreck of boyhood. I have searched it in vain for a single quotation of lyric song, a single scrap of verse that paints the world in rosy colors and lets moral platitudes go hang, a single strain of “Celtic magic.” Instead, I learn that as a boy I was taught that–

We are living, we are dwelling
In a grand and awful time.

I find that at eleven years of age–

I held it truth with him who sings
To one clear harp of divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

Indeed, I must have been a very remarkable child, how remarkable I had not hitherto suspected! Evidently, too, I displayed an early tendency to melancholia, for I find I was admonished in the following words, with their incontestable statement of fact:

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining,
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.

Whether my sadness was caused by too much reflection on the fact that life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal, or on the fact that Bill Carter’s air-gun cost more than mine, I cannot now recall. Either cause would have been sufficient. At any rate I apparently braced up and smiled once more, for the next page is blank. That means I went fishing!

Poor kiddies! Shall we grown-ups never learn that their minds don’t work as ours do, and what may be poetry for some of us is cod-liver oil for them? Why must we be forever nagging them at home with “Don’t do this” and “Don’t do that,” and forever preaching at them in school with ponderous prose platitudes cut up into lengths? How much wiser than we they are, who know that life is free and pleasant and full of melody and beautiful things, and dreams more real than reality, and reality born of the dream! Yet we try our best to convince them that they are wrong. We see to it that Longfellow lies about them in their infancy.

But perhaps all this is changed since my day, and the nightmare this battered memory-gem book recalls to my mind is no longer a load on the children of the present. I profoundly hope so. Can it be that the present revival of poetry is due to the passing of the memory-gem book? At least, no teacher would have the courage to set her class the task of copying Amy Lowell or The Spoon River Anthology!