"John-flowers,
Mary-flowers,
Polly-flowers
Cauli-flowers."
That is the conscious Hilda, the gay little girl, but it shows a quick ear nevertheless. We can almost hear the giggle with which that "Cauliflowers" came out. Usually rhyme does not appear to be a matter of moment to her. Some poets think in rhyme, some do not; Hilda evidently belongs to the second category. "Treasure," and "The Apple-Jelly-Fish-Tree," and "Short Story" are the only poems in the book which seem to follow a clearly rhymed pattern. If any misguided schoolmistress had ever suggested that a poem should have rhyme and metre, this book would never have been "told." In "Moon Doves," however, there is a distinctly metrical effect without rhyme. But the great majority of the poems are built upon cadence, and the subtlety of this little girl's cadences are a delight to those who can hear them. Doubtless her musical inheritance has all to do with this, for in poem after poem the instinct for rhythm is unerring. So constantly is this the case, that it is scarcely necessary to point out particular examples. I may, however, name, as two of her best for other qualities as well, "Gift," and "Poems." The latter contains two of her quick strokes of observation and comparison: the morning "like the inside of a snow-apple," and she herself curled "cushion-shaped" in the window-seat.
Dear me! How simple these poems seem when you read them done. But try to write something new about a dandelion. Try it; and then read the poem of that name here. It is charming; how did she think of it? How indeed!
Delightful conceits she has—another is "Sun Flowers"—but how comes a child of eight to prick and point with the rapier of irony? For it is nothing less than irony in "The Tower and the Falcon." Did she quite grasp its meaning herself? We may doubt it. In this poem, the subconscious is very much on the job.
To my thinking, the most successful poems in the book—and now I mean successful from a grown-up standpoint—are "For You, Mother," "Red Rooster," "Gift," "Poems," "Dandelion," "Butterfly," "Weather," "Hills," and "Geography." And it will be noticed that these are precisely the poems which must have sprung from actual experience. They are not the book poems, not even the fairy poems, they are the records of reactions from actual happenings. I have not a doubt that Hilda prefers her fairy-stories. They are the conscious play of her imagination, it must be "fun" to make them. Ah, but it is the unconscious with which we are most concerned, those very poems which are probably to her the least interesting are the ones which most certainly reveal the fulness of poetry from which she draws. She probably hardly thought at all, so natural was it, to say that three pinks "smell like more of them in a blue vase," but the expression fills the air with so strong a scent that no superlative could increase it.
"Gift" is a lovely poem, it has feeling, expression, originality, cadence. If a child can write such a poem at eight years old, what does it mean? That depends, I think, on how long the instructors of youth can be persuaded to keep "hands off." A period of imitation is, I fear, inevitable, but if consciousness is not induced by direct criticism, if instruction in the art of writing is abjured, the imitative period will probably be got through without undue loss. I think there is too much native sense of beauty and proportion here to be entirely killed even by the drying and freezing process which goes by the name of education.
What this book chiefly shows is high promise; but it also has its pages of real achievement, and that of so high an order it may well set us pondering. AMY LOWELL.