The Cambridge Book
of
Poetry for Children
PART I
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
C. F. CLAY, Manager
London: FETTER LANE, E.C.
Edinburgh: 100 PRINCES STREET
Bombay, Calcutta and Madras: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.
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Copyrighted in the United States of America by
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All rights reserved
The Cambridge Book
of
Poetry for Children
Edited by
KENNETH GRAHAME
Author of The Golden Age, Dream Days, The Windin the Willows, etc.
PART I
Cambridge:
at the University Press
1916
The Editor is indebted to the following authors and publishers forleave to reprint copyright poems: Mr W. Graham Robertson and Mr NormanGale; Messrs Longmans Green & Co. for a poem by Walter Ramal and for apoem from Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verse, Messrs Chatto & Windusfor an extract from Swinburne’s Songs Before Sunrise and for a poemfrom Walter Thornbury’s Ballads and Songs, Messrs G. Routledge & Sonsfor a poem by Joaquin Miller, Mr Elliot Stock for an extract from aplay by H. N. Maugham; and Mr John Lane for the Rands, Eugene Field,and Graham Robertson poems, and for two extracts from John Davidson’sFleet Street Eclogues.
IN compiling a selection of Poetry for Children, a conscientious Editoris bound to find himself confronted with limitations so numerous asto be almost disheartening. For he has to remember that his task is,not to provide simple examples of the whole range of English poetry,but to set up a wicket-gate giving attractive admission to that widedomain, with its woodland glades, its pasture and arable, its walledand scented gardens here and there, and so to its sunlit, and sometimesmisty, mountain-tops—all to be more fully explored later by those whoare tempted on by the first glimpse. And always he must be proclaimingto the small tourists that there is joy, light and fresh air in thatdelectable country.
vBriefly, I think that blank verse generally, and the drama as awhole, may very well be left for readers of a riper age. Indeed, Ibelieve that those who can ignore the plays of Shakespeare and hisfellow-Elizabethans till they are sixteen will be no losers in thelong run. The bulk, too, of seventeenth and eighteenth century poetry,bending under its burden of classical form and crowded classicalallus