Poetry and Childhood
The following is an essay by Padraic Colum, transcribed from the final volume of one of those delightful literary anthology series that the last century put together so well.
Poetry and Childhood
Padraic Colum
Poet and Critic
Plato put music amongst the subjects that it was important to have youth trained in. Nowadays we do not look upon music as Plato looked upon it–as a foundation for knowledge; to us music is a special and separate course of study. And yet, when I think of what poetry can give to childhood, I begin to feel that I understand why Plato put music with the few important things that youth should have a training in.
I know that both poetry and music have something underlying them that holds our attention, that helps us to bring our minds to a focus. That underlying something is rhythm. The holding in our minds of certain rhythms–the rhythms of certain tunes, the rhythms of certain poems–gives us foundations for building on in our imaginative and intellectual life. Take a poem such as:
THE LAKE-ISLE OF INNISFREE
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dripping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
This is a piece of human speech that can be mastered, whole or in passages, and kept in the memory. Its rhythms, its rhymes, are holds that we have on it. And when we have it in our memory we have something that our thoughts can focus themselves on. The youth who has a dozen or so of poems in his or her memory has charms against straying thoughts. If he or she knows by heart Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” or Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark” his or her thoughts can be held by a rhythm, a structure, and they will not be hopelessly scattered. And by holding our thoughts from being scattered, we win a victory for our mind.
The poems we hold in our mind are points of focus, patterns of order. Perhaps it was to give such points, such patterns that Plato advocated a training in music as a foundation for general knowledge. Of course there are other means than by poetry or music to get points of focus, patterns of order into our minds. A technical or professional training that would ignore music and poetry could supply them. But the patterns of order left by poetry or by music are imaginative, and therefore, creative. Our minds become aroused by going over them; in a poem the rhythm, the rhymes, the images, suggest other rhythms, rhymes, and images. More than this: the great thing that a poem gives is when we refer to it in memory is a sense of something begun and finished–a thing complete.
As I wandered the forest,
The green leaves among,
I heard a Wild Flower
Singing a song.
“I slept in the earth
In the silent night,
I murmured my fears
And I felt delight.
“In the morning I went,
As rosy as morn,
To seek for new joy;
But I met with scorn.”
In this little poem–”The Wild Flower’s Song” by Blake–there is everything that gives a pattern of order; there is a rhythm that is carried through; there is a structure–something begun and finished. And every word used in the poem can arouse us, making our own imagination creative.
There are public occasions on which we make addresses to young people, telling them that they are about to go into the world. The world that we are thinking of on those occasions is the world of business, of social relations, of mature interests. Beside it or over against it there is another world–the world that is within each of the young people that our address is being made to–the world of thought, meditation, intuition, imagination. The world of business, of social relationships, mature interests, impresses boys and girls at a certain stage in their development, and it is not difficult to prepare them to live in it. And it should not be difficult to show them–not so much as to how to enter into–but how to keep native in the other world–the world of thought, mediation, intuition, imagination.
To be popular and sought after, to make a mark at sports, to earn a commendation from one’s teachers, to be able to arrange a household and run everything in it smoothly and agreeably, is to do well; to be able to make combinations in business that gain the attention of one’s chief and secure promotion–all that is well. But it is well, too, to have something in one that responds to the gathering of the clouds before nightfall; to have a feeling about the magnificent lines of an ocean-going ship; to be able to cherish this of that poem; to be able to read history intelligently and relate it to the events of our own time; to keep one’s mind clear from the passions that take hold of crowds; to be able to communicate with the great people of the age, men and women, should we ever come near them actually. And we lose the power to feel, or to be able to do these things, if our minds are set too exclusively upon the world of practical affairs, social relationships, mature interests.
We do not enter this world–the world of imagination, thought, and intuition–at any definite time. The problem, so far as a child is concerned, is not, I repeat, the problem of entering it, but of keeping one’s self native in it, of making stronger and stronger attachments to it. There is no ready way of dealing with this problem. But those who have children in their charge, whether as parents or as teachers, are called upon to consider it.
One can only go some way towards solving this problem. One should keep open the ways that are in the children themselves, the ways into the world of imagination, thought and intuition. The faculty of reverie should not be destroyed by dragging children out of it and insisting on their becoming too active in their practical tasks. There should be times and places where and when the children might turn towards meditation. In some religious schools it is part of their training–and a good part, too–that they might be led to a deliberate meditation. I have been in Quaker schools where they had arranged for what might be called indeliberate mediation. It was a room derived from the Friend’s Meeting House where all could sit silently for half or three quarters of an hour; no doubt some of the children who sit there feel thoughts stir in them, have intuitions wake in them.
There are no rules for getting on in the world that is alongside of or over against our practical world; that world is in ourselves, and we can only get on in it by individual impulse, individual seeking, individual enlightenment. A little can be done to strengthen the impulse, to prevent the enlightenment from going out. To learn poetry is to find one way. Children should be taught, not merely to read and to know poetry, but to possess some part of the heritage of poetry. They should know poems by heart–a dozen, twenty, forty, fifty poems. These poems should be there so that at any time they might well up within their minds. Through this possession they can enter the world that has been spoken about–the world of imagination, thought, and intuition. It would be well if they could receive this poetry orally and from someone who had regard for the rhythm of verse, and was able to impart a delight in the rhythm and in the structure of the verse. This possession of poetry is a possession that lasts, a possession that no one can take away from whoever has it; it is a talisman that gives an entrance into that world that we may not be separated from without loss to our humanity. For without some ability for making themselves at home in the world of thought, imagination, mediation, intuitions, a boy or girl will never be able to understand all that is summed up in art and philosophy, will never have any deep feeling for religion, and will not be able to get anything out of the reading of history; in short, unless they are somewhat at home in that world, they will live without any fineness in their lives.
