PORTRAIT OF A BOY
After the whipping, he crawled into bed;
Accepting the harsh fact with no great weeping.
How funny uncle’s hat had looked striped red!
He chuckled silently. The moon came, sweeping
A black frayed rag of tattered cloud before
In scorning; very pure and pale she seemed,
Flooding his bed with radiance. On the floor
Fat motes danced. He sobbed; closed his eyes and dreamed.
Warm sand flowed round him. Blurts of crimson light
Splashed the white grains like blood. Past the cave’s mouth
Shone with a large fierce splendor, wildly bright,
The crooked constellations of the South;
Here the Cross swung; and there, affronting Mars,
The Centaur stormed aside a froth of stars.
Within, great casks like wattled aldermen
Sighed of enormous feasts, and cloth of gold
Glowed on the walls like hot desire. Again,
Beside webbed purples from some galleon’s hold,
A black chest bore the skull and bones in white
Above a scrawled “Gunpowder!” By the flames,
Decked out in crimson, gemmed with syenite,
Hailing their fellows by outrageous names
The pirates sat and diced. Their eyes were moons.
“Doubloons!” they said. “The words crashed gold.
Doubloons!”
Hilda Conkling
Hilda Conkling, most gifted of recent infant prodigies, was born at Catskill-on-Hudson, New York, October 8, 1910. The daughter of Grace Hazard Conkling (see page [207]), she came to Northampton, Massachusetts, with her mother when she was three years old and has lived there since, a normal out-of-doors little girl.
Hilda began to write poems—or rather, to talk them—at the age of four. Since that time, she has created one hundred and fifty little verses, many of them astonishing in exactness of phrase and beauty of vision. Hilda “tells” her poem and her mother copies it down, arranges the line-divisions and reads it to the child for correction. Conceding a possible half-conscious shaping by Mrs. Conkling, the quality which shines behind all of Hilda’s little facets of loveliness is a straightforward ingenuousness, a childlike but sweeping fantasy.
Poems by a Little Girl (1920), published when Hilda was a little more than nine years old, is a detailed proof of this delightful quality. Every poem bears its own stamp of unaffected originality; “Water,” “Hay-Cock,” and a dozen others are startling in their precision and a power of painting the familiar in unsuspected colors. This child not only sees, feels and hears with the concentration of a child-artist, she communicates the results of her perceptions with the sensitivity of a master-craftsman. She hears a chickadee talking
The way smooth bright pebbles
Drop into water.
Everything is extraordinarily vivid and fanciful to her keen senses. The rooster’s comb is “gay as a parade;” he has “pearl trinkets on his feet” and
The short feathers smooth along his back
Are the dark color of wet rocks,
Or the rippled green of ships
When I look at their sides through water.
She observes:
The water came in with a wavy look
Like a spider’s web.
It is too early for judgments—even for a prophecy. It is impossible to guess how much Hilda’s vision will be distorted by knowledge and the traditions that will accompany her growth. One can only hold one’s breath and hope for the preservation of so remarkable a talent.