VI
ALFRED NOYES [Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used by permission, and are taken from Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes, two volumes, copyright, 1913, by the Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.]
A STUDY OF CHILDHOOD, OF MANHOOD, CHRISTHOOD, AND GODHOOD
If one wants to find the tenderest, most completely sympathetic study of childhood, one that finds echo not only in the heart of the grown-up, but in the heart of children the world over, he must this day go to Alfred Noyes. If you want proof of this, read "The Forest of Wild Thyme" or "The Flower of Old Japan" to your children and watch them sit with open mouths and open hearts to hear these wonder fairy tales. And, further, if you are too grown-up to want to read Noyes for his complete sympathy with childhood, more universal even than our beloved Riley; and you want a poet that challenges you to a more vigorous manhood, a poet who calls man to his highest and deepest virility, read Noyes. Or, if you happen to need a clearer, firmer insight into the man of Galilee and Calvary, read Noyes; and, finally, if you want firmer, more rocklike foundations to plant your faith in God upon, read Noyes, for herein one finds all of these. From childhood to Godhood is, indeed, a wide range for a poet to take, and yet they are akin.
As another poet has said, none less than Edwin Markham, "Know man and you will know the deep of God." And as Noyes himself says in the introduction to "The Forest of Wild Thyme":
"Husband, there was a happy day,
Long ago in love's young May,
When, with a wild-flower in your hand
You echoed that dead poet's cry—
'Little flower, but if I could understand!'
And you saw it had roots in the depth of the sky,
And there in that smallest bud lay furled
The secret and meaning of all the world."
Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
And when we know that the mother was talking about "Little Peterkin," their lost baby, we know that she meant that in a little child there lay furled "The secret and meaning of all the world."
And so, beginning with childhood, through those intermediate steps of manhood and Christhood, with Noyes leading us, as he literally leads the little tots through the mysteries of Old Japan and the Wild Thyme, let us go from tree to tree, and flower to flower, and hope to hope, and pain to pain, up to God, from whence we came. It is a clear sweet pathway that he leads us.