For National Poetry Month I’ve set out on a feature where I’m examining the poems in a pair of poetry anthologies directed at children which were published roughly a century ago: The Girls Book of Verse and The Boys Book of Verse. Each collected around a hundred poems in a variety of styles, sub-categorized in broad subject areas the anthologists thought reflected childhood moods and interests.
That child audience became our ancestors. The early readers of the first edition would have been the oft-praised Greatest Generation which grew up in the Great Depression and served in the titanic national struggles of WWII and the Cold War. It’s likely that childhood has changed since then, but did these books in any way equip the young minds for the panorama of their future?
One of the pair of anthologies used this well-known poem by Emily Dickinson as a lead-off poem placed even before the table of contents. How many libraries had, maybe still have, this poem on the wall of their children’s section? I can’t say, but I recall seeing it in more than one in my post-WWII childhood.
Some of the words, if laid plain on the page, might risk being obscure to a 1920 or 2020’s child. Dickinson and the anthologists seemingly had little fear of that. A frigate is a class of fast war ship. Do children still have youthful romance with sea-ships? Born in a landlocked Midwestern state, I did — reading of and knowing all the classifications of ships, famous naval battles, famous captains, that sort of thing. Modern youthful D&D fantasists of the earth-like realms seem kind of land-bound to me, perhaps because Tolkien seems to have left his sea-faring tales to the long unpublished Silmarillion. Current SciFi readers might still have all the trappings of sea-battles recast in airless space, but that is less the exact particulars of historic ships.
Bookplate, warship. Did you know the warship was largely saved from rot and disposal by a poem?
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Coursers too is not a word in most modern children’s vocabularies, and I have my doubts for a 1920s child. It’s a term for a fast-pursuing horse, and by extension those that ride them. With frigates just preceding it, I always heard and misremembered the word here as corsairs, a term for pirates or privateers, and it’s possible Dickinson thought she was punning there.
Dickinson’s second stanza makes reference to funds, and by extension class, in its metaphor. Rather than the appeal to straightaway imagination in the more remembered first stanza, here she makes the case that it doesn’t take much money to read. Dickinson’s family seems to have been roughly middle class, despite some challenges in her family’s finances during her childhood. Extensive world travel might have been outside their means or attitudes, but books wouldn’t have been. Oddly though, she says the “poorest” can have this book-led adventure. Does she simply not know of that level of poverty, or is this just “poetic license?”
I’m grateful to my parents and librarians for extending limited means to afford books as a child. My mother, an avid reader, knew how to use library extension services to order nearly any book, and I can still recall my joy when she’d open a substantial cardboard box from a letter-placed order which would include several books picked by some far-off librarian to be about sailing and historic sea battles for me to read. My father would let me ride in the empty well of his bread truck to be let off at the county seat which had a beautiful and bountiful library for me to wander in.
Here’s a standing question for this month’s pieces from the two gendered anthologies: do you think it was the for boys or for girls book that lead off with this Dickinson poem? Answer below.
A note about how today’s musical setting of Dickinson’s poem came about. At around 10 PM, which ought to be bed-thinking time, I was still thinking about more recording opportunity to bank musical pieces for this Project. Like last-time’s Blake piper, today’s poem’s book-with-far-flung-words seems to invoke not only poetry, but this Project itself — so I thought I should do this one sooner rather than later. My wife, who’s sometimes bothered trying to sleep if I strum an unplugged electric guitar in the next room was out house-sitting for a friend. I need a tune! I grabbed an old plastic acoustic guitar with a large crack in its top that I bought in a second-hand shop decades ago and now keep out in the dry, wood-cracking-weather of my home office. The chord progression I settled on was simple. My melody, like many of mine, is doomed to be served by my voice, and so is utilitarian. After finding that music in the nighttime, I decided to record a short demo then and there. It was after midnight. I rigged up some way to record the cracked plastic guitar — a brittle and unappealing pickup as there’s no room for a mic on its body like I would use in my studio space — and set one down.
Simple guitar chord sheet in case you’d like to sing this song yourself.
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The next morning I listened to the demo and thought it aspired to be presentable. To disguise the crinkly sound of the guitar I did my best to sweeten it with EQ and reverb — but more elaborately, I composed one of my simple string trio parts to further cover the guitar sound up. You can hear that night sound Tolless-Traverse with the audio player below. No player? This highlighted link is a backup way, as it opens a new tab with its own audio player. Was our poem, written by a woman hunting on fast, pursuing ships in her imagination, in the girls or the boys verse anthology? It was the boy’s book.
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Frank Hudson 