Readers of “Poems by a Little Girl” who were surprised at the extraordinarily beautiful poetry such a little girl could produce, will be even more surprised and pleased by the contents of this second volume. Hilda Conkling, with her childhood simplicity of ideas, seems to have discovered unconsciously the most satisfactory content for poems in verse libre. Naïveté is stilted in metrical form, but seems to run truly like “shoes of the wind” along the irregularities of free verse, whereas the vulgar aphorisms of some contemporaries would be more likeable if they were better clothed with the conventionalities of metre and rhyme.
Wordsworth would have loved Hilda Conkling. She would have been ample proof for him that children come, “trailing clouds of glory”. Here is her own expression of it:
I was thinking
The tenderness children need
Is in soft shadow-things;
Is a kind of magic ...
Petals of a dark pansy ...
Cloudy wings....
“Shoes of the Wind” will delight anyone who likes lyrical poetry of the most beautiful sort.
D. C. C.