Tonight Ethan regaled me with some Yeats and some Whitman, and I responded with Christina Rossetti and Lewis Carroll. Ethan found this poem by Rossetti particularly compelling. He asked me what it meant so I gave him a simple explanation. Offended, he asked, “Why would she want a dead guy?”
Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimful of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago!
I just like the line: “Speak low, lean low,/ As long ago”. It speaks to my dramatic teen goth side.
Further squicked out by my explanation why Rossetti would pine for the dead guy, Ethan changed the subject, asking me what my favorite poem was or if I ever wrote poetry. “I have lots of favorite poems, none of which are in this book,” I told him. “And Mommy used to like writing poetry. In high school. Poorly.”
Ethan then requested a recitiation of Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” which was not as popular as Rossetti’s ode to dead dude.
Now I’m on a poetry hunt for things approriate for advanced second-graders. I’m thinking John Donne. Maybe The Wasteland.
I assume The Wasteland was a joke, but Eliot did publish a book of poems more or less for children, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. If I’ve ever read any of it, I’ve forgotten, so I can’t say if any of the cats pine away for lost loved ones.
One of the benefits of having is 6 year old is that I have to worry less about the appropriateness of the poetry and more about an engaging rhythm.
I found the text of Old Possum’e et al here.
And when I was Ethan’s age, I loved Yeats’ “Isle of Innisfree” (the first adult poem I understood) and of course, of course, Blake’s Tiger, which I loved for the rhythm when my Mama read it aloud.
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?