I was thinking about the very first poetry I read. It was not in the Bible–though Psalms were among my first adult poems to read–or the Brownings or even Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. It was as a very small child in The Tall Book of Make-Believe. Although I will not do a lot of quoting, my favorite poem at a mere five years of age was “Mr. Nobody,” and these are the first and last stanzas:
I know a funny little man,
As quiet as a mouse,
Who does the mischief that is done
In everybody’s house!
There’s no one ever sees his face,
And yet we all agree
That every plate we break was cracked
By Mr. Nobody…
The finger marks upon the door
By none of us are made;
We never leave the blinds unclosed,
To let the curtains fade.
The ink we never spill; the boots
That lying round you see
Are not our boots,—they all belong
To Mr. Nobody.
The clear implication is that child or adult alike when asked, “Now who did this?” says “Nobody,” insisting it had nothing to do with them. Yet in my childish imagination, there really was a Mr. Nobody, a being who was not mere shadow, who went around doing naughty things, for which I and other children were wrongly judged responsible. Though probably not intended, it is still my favorite slant on the poem.
Even in my High School years, I could not seem to get into real “adult” poetry (I had a particularly bad time with Keats’ “Endymion,” although I did find the poets Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot appealed to me. It was only later that I discovered the early poets Geoffrey Chaucer and Sir Philip Sidney; the English Renaissance types like John Donne and Mary Wroth; the Romantics including Shelley, Robert and Elizabeth Browning; the dark romantic Christina Rossetti; and black poets Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. It’s true, my knowledge of French and German poetry is not great: though I have names like François Villon and Heinrich Heine on my shelf, so far I have only read Heine’s “The Lorelei.” I have longed to memorize haiku, tanka and ghazals, too. Yet as late as High School, my main poetry immersion was in the Hebrew and in poems I learned as a child. I found my heart in both the Hebrew and the childlike verse echoing an earlier time in my life. I recall in high school reading over the following, wishing like J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis that I could recapture the flame of childhood fantasy:
In a great big wood in a great big tree,
there’s the nicest little house that could possibly be.
There’s a tiny little knocker on the tiny little door,
and a tiny little carpet on the tiny little floor…
There’s a tiny little peg for a tiny little hat
and a tiny little dog and a tiny little cat…
You may not ever see him (he is extremely shy)
But if you find a crumpled sheet –
Or pins upon the window seat –
Or see the marks of tiny feet –
You’ll know the reason why.
I have one adult fantasy (Oz Revisited) and one children’s book (Jeanie and the Gentle-Folk) on the back burner in which I try to capture that flame–but I fear that the ethereal nature of elves and dwarves elude my work. Yet in poetry, whether “The Little House” as well as the greater works of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen; Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream; Sir Walter Scott’s “Tam Lin”; Dickens’ A Christmas Carol; and perhaps Thomas Mallory’s Le Mortes d’ Arthur and Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, I sometimes find what I am only somewhat able to produce myself.
As an adult I still occasionally look at two poems from The Tall Book of Make-Believe, and I guess I will quote them here. They are “Moon Song” and “Wynken’, Blinken’ and Nod”:
Moon Song
Zoon, zoon, cuddle and croon–
Over the crinkling sea,
The moon man flings him a silvered net
Fashioned of moonbeams three.
And some folk say when the net lies long
And the midnight hour is ripe;
The moon man fishes for some old song
That fell from a sailor’s pipe.
And some folk say that he fishes the bars
Down where the dead ships lie,
Looking for lost little baby stars
That slid from the slippery sky.
And the waves roll out and the waves roll in
And the nodding night wind blows,
But why the moon man fishes the sea
Only the moon man knows.
Zoon, zoon, net of the moon
Rides on the wrinkling sea;
Bright is the fret and shining wet,
Fashioned of moonbeams three.
And some folk say when the great net gleams
And the waves are dusky blue,
The moon man fishes for two little dreams
He lost when the world was new.
And some folk say in the late night hours,
While the long fin-shadows slide,
The moon man fishes for cold sea flowers
Under the tumbling tide.
And the waves roll out and the waves roll in
And the gray gulls dip and doze,
But why the moon man fishes the sea
Only the moon man knows.
Zoon, zoon, cuddle and croon–
Over the crinkling sea,
The moon man flings him a silvered net
Fashioned of moonbeams three.
And some folk say that he follows the flecks
Down where the last light flows,
Fishing for two round gold-rimmed “specs”
That blew from his button-like nose.
And some folk say while the salt sea foams
And the silver net lines snare,
The moon man fishes for carven combs
That float from the mermaids’ hair.
And the waves roll out and the waves roll in
And the nodding night wind blows,
But why the moon man fishes the sea
Only the moon man knows.
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,—
Sailed on a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
The old moon asked the three.
“We have come to fish for the herring-fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we,”
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
The old moon laughed and sang a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe;
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew;
The little stars were the herring-fish
That lived in the beautiful sea.
“Now cast your nets wherever you wish,—
Never afraid are we!”
So cried the stars to the fishermen three,
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam,—
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home:
‘Twas all so pretty a sail, it seemed
As if it could not be;
And some folk thought ’twas a dream they’d dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea;
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is a wee one’s trundle-bed;
So shut your eyes while Mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:—
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
*****
I know this is an awful lot of quoting from a childhood friend–The Tall Book of Make-Believe. I checked on Amazon, and somebody is trying to sell their copy for a great deal. Yet I could never sell mine. No, even if it was as precious as the Mona Lisa to collectors I would never sell that friend of my childhood years, The Tall Book of Make-Believe.