Rainbow gold; poems old and new selected for boys and girls

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO
POEMS OLD AND NEW SELECTED FOR BOYS AND GIRLS By SARA TEASDALE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS By DUGALD WALKER
NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1922 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Copyright, 1922, By THE MACMILLAN CO. Set up and published September, 1922 CONDÉ NAST PRESS GREENWICH, CONN. TO THE BEAUTIFUL MEMORY OF MY FATHER JOHN WARREN TEASDALE

Every anthologist must adopt some plan for making selections. Mine has been very simple. I have made a small collection of poems that would have pleased the child I used to be and the boy who was my playmate. Above all things I have striven to keep the book small, for the big books of poetry on our shelves were always left to themselves. It was the little books that became our intimate companions.
To make a selection for boys and girls from the countless riches of lyric poetry in our language, and to reduce that selection to the contents of so small a book as this one, is a grave task. It involves the exclusion on the grounds of mere lack of space, of so much that one loves. I should have liked to make a book of this size containing only Elizabethan songs and early English ballads, another entirely devoted to Georgian and Victorian poets, a third to living writers, and a fourth to child-rhymes, parodies, nonsense verses and the like. If the grown-up reader regrets omissions, I beg him to be sympathetic toward the compiler, who has been a prey to those same regrets constantly during the year in which she has been at work on the book. Alas that a volume cannot have the advantages of being both a big book and a little one at the same time!
In selecting the poems for the girl and boy who used to be, I have tried always to read with their eyes. I have been guided from first to last by their enjoyment or their boredom. The poems that they loved best had highly accented rhythms, and took them into “a land of clear colors and stories.” They enjoyed certain sad poems as much as merry ones, but meditative, moralistic and gloomy poems were never read but once, if they were read at all. And I am glad to say that poems full of sentimentality fared no better. I have brought together much that has been written since they were children, and boys and girls of to-day will find among these poems many of the most enjoyable things in the book. To mention only one recent poet that they would have loved, Walter de la Mare, is to realize how much a child has missed who does not possess his inimitable “Peacock Pie.”