Christopher told me that, until he was eight or nine, he ‘quite liked being famous’. He corresponded with his fans, made public appearances, even made a record. ‘It was exciting and made me feel grand and important.’ He felt differently when he went away to boarding school where he was teased and bullied. He learnt to box to defend himself. He came to despise the boy in the books called ‘Christopher Robin’. He had a particular loathing of the child depicted in ‘Vespers’, the poem that begins:
Little Boy kneels at the foot of the bed,
Droops on the little hands little gold head.
‘I vividly recall how intensely painful it was to sit in my study at Stowe while my neighbours played the famous – now cursed – gramophone record remorselessly over and over again. Eventually I took the record and broke it into a hundred fragments and scattered them over a distant field.’
That’s why I’m not suggesting you learn ‘Vespers’. I am hoping you might learn these two instead. The rhythm and the rhymes make them easy to learn and perfect to perform to little ones, however small.
Sneezles
by A. A. Milne
(1882–1956)
Christopher Robin
Had wheezles
And sneezles,
They bundled him
Into
His bed.
They gave him what goes
With a cold in the nose,
And some more for a cold
In the head.
They wondered
If wheezles
Could turn
Into measles,
If sneezles
Would turn
Into mumps;
They examined his chest
For a rash,
And the rest
Of his body for swellings and lumps.
They sent for some doctors
In sneezles
And wheezles
To tell them what ought
To be done.
All sorts and conditions
Of famous physicians
Came hurrying round
At a run.
They all made a note
Of the state of his throat,
They asked if he suffered from thirst;
They asked if the sneezles
Came after the wheezles,
Or if the first sneezle
Came first.
They said, ‘If you teazle
A sneezle
Or wheezle,
A measle
May easily grow.
But humour or pleazle
The wheezle
Or sneezle,
The measle
Will certainly go.’
They expounded the reazles
For sneezles
And wheezles,
The manner of measles
When new.
They said ‘If he freezles
In draughts and in breezles,
Then PHTHEEZLES
May even ensue.’
Christopher Robin
Got up in the morning,
The sneezles had vanished away.
And the look in his eye
Seemed to say to the sky,
‘Now, how to amuse them to-day?’
The King’s Breakfast
by A. A. Milne
The King asked
The Queen, and
The Queen asked
The Dairymaid:
‘Could we have some butter for
The Royal slice of bread?’
The Queen asked the Dairymaid,
The Dairymaid
Said, ‘Certainly,
I’ll go and tell
The cow
Now
Before she goes to bed.’
The Dairymaid
She curtsied,
And went and told
The Alderney:
‘Don’t forget the butter for
The Royal slice of bread.’
The Alderney
Said sleepily:
‘You’d better tell
His Majesty
That many people nowadays
Like marmalade
Instead.’
The Dairymaid
Said, ‘Fancy!’
And went to
Her Majesty.
She curtsied to the Queen, and
She turned a little red:
Your Majesty,
For taking of
The liberty,
But marmalade is tasty, if
It’s very
Thickly
Spread.’
The Queen said
‘Oh!’
And went to
His Majesty:
‘Talking of the butter for
The Royal slice of bread,
Many people
Think that
Marmalade
Is nicer.
Would you like to try a little
Marmalade
Instead?’
The King said,
‘Bother!’
And then he said,
‘Oh, deary me!’
The King sobbed, ‘Oh, deary me!’
And went back to bed.
‘Nobody,’
He whimpered,
‘Could call me
A fussy man;
I only want
A little bit
Of butter for
My bread!’
The Queen said,
‘There, there!’
And went to
The Dairymaid.
The Dairymaid
Said, ‘There, there!’
And went to the shed.
The cow said,
‘There, there!
I didn’t really
Mean it;
Here’s milk for his porringer,
And butter for his bread.’
The Queen took
The butter
And brought it to
His Majesty;
The King said,
‘Butter, eh?’
And bounced out of bed.
‘Nobody,’ he said,
As he kissed her
Tenderly,
‘Nobody,’ he said,
As he slid down the banisters,
‘Nobody,
My darling,
Could call me
A fussy man –
BUT
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!’
2. ‘Then the whining schoolboy’
Here are two of my children’s favourites by two of America’s most popular children’s poets:
Please Mrs Butler
by Allan Ahlberg
(born 1938)
Please Mrs Butler
This boy Derek Drew
Keeps copying my work, Miss.
What shall I do?
Go and sit in the hall, dear.
Go and sit in the sink.
Take your books on the roof, my lamb.
Do whatever you think.
Please Mrs Butler
This boy Derek Drew
Keeps taking my rubber, Miss.
What shall I do?
Keep it in your hand, dear.
Hide it up your vest.
Swallow it if you like, love.
Do what you think best.
Please Mrs Butler
This boy Derek Drew
Keeps calling me rude names, Miss.
What shall I do?
Lock yourself in the cupboard, dear.
Run away to sea.
Do whatever you can, my flower.
But don’t ask me!
Today Is Very Boring
by Jack Prelutsky
(born 1940)
Today is very boring,
it’s a very boring day,
there is nothing much to look at,
there is nothing much to say,
there’s a peacock on my sneakers,
there’s a p
enguin on my head,
there’s a dormouse on my doorstep,
I am going back to bed.
Today is very boring,
it is boring through and through,
there is absolutely nothing
that I think I want to do,
I see giants riding rhinos,
and an ogre with a sword,
there’s a dragon blowing smoke rings,
I am positively bored.
Today is very boring,
I can hardly help but yawn,
there’s a flying saucer landing
in the middle of my lawn,
a volcano just erupted
less than half a mile away,
and I think I felt an earthquake,
it’s a very boring day.
Next up are two very different poems reflecting different aspects of childhood.
The first is by Eleanor Farjeon, an English girl from a literary family who was educated at home and was so painfully shy that she spent much of her childhood hidden up in the attic, reading and (from the age of five) writing. She had three brothers.
I quarreled with my brother
by Eleanor Farjeon
(1881–1965)
I quarreled with my brother,
I don’t know what about,
One thing led to another
And somehow we fell out.
The start of it was slight,
The end of it was strong,
He said he was right,
I knew he was wrong!
We hated one another.
The afternoon turned black.
Then suddenly my brother
Thumped me on the back,
And said, ‘Oh, come on!
We can’t go on all night –
I was in the wrong.’
So he was in the right.
James Mercer Langston Hughes was a twentieth-century American poet, playwright, novelist and activist, who moved to New York City from Joplin, Missouri, when he was young. He was a pioneer of what came to be known as ‘jazz poetry’ and was part of the Harlem Renaissance when, as he put it, ‘the negro was in vogue’.
Merry-Go-Round
Colored child
at carnival
by Langston Hughes
(1901–67)
Where is the Jim Crow section
On this merry-go-round,
Mister, cause I want to ride?
Down South where I come from
White and colored
Can’t sit side by side.
Down South on the train
There’s a Jim Crow car.
On the bus we’re put in the back –
But there ain’t no back
To a merry-go-round!
Where’s the horse
For a kid that’s black?
And here are two poems about sons and their fathers. The first is by Theodore Roethke, a twentieth-century American poet (and revered teacher of poetry) from Michigan, whose father was a German immigrant.
My Papa’s Waltz
by Theodore Roethke
(1908–63)
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
There is a touching passage in A. A. Milne’s autobiography (entitled, tellingly, It’s Too Late Now) where Milne reflects on his own relationship with his father and anatomizes the ‘life-long process of saying goodbye’. He pictures himself as a schoolboy approaching his teens, bidding his father farewell: ‘From now on we shall begin to grow out of each other. I shall be impatient, but you will be patient with me; unloving, but you will not cease to love me. “Well,” you will tell yourself, “it lasted until he was twelve; they grow up and resent our care for them, they form their own ideas, and think ours old-fashioned. It is natural.”’
Cecil Day-Lewis is best known for being Britain’s Poet Laureate (from 1968 to 1972, between John Masefield and John Betjeman), for writing detective stories under the name Nicholas Blake, and for being the father of Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis. This poem is about Sean, Day-Lewis’s son from his first marriage. Sean was born in 1931 and the poem was written in 1956.
Walking Away
by Cecil Day-Lewis
(1904–72)
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
3. ‘Then the lover’
These aren’t poems to learn and perform to your beloved: you will find those in Chapter Twelve on page 242. These are nine poems, presented in chronological order, that explore the bitter-sweet nature of love and the not-always-easy reality of the lover’s lot.
The Sun Rising
by John Donne
(1572–1631)
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.
She’s all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic; all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.
When We Two Parted
by George Gordon, Lord Byron
(1788–1824)
When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.
The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow –
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.
They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me –
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well: –
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.
In secret we met –
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee! –
With silence and tears.
Unfortunate Coincidence
by Dorothy Parker
(1893–1967)
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying –
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
Social Note
by Dorothy Parker
Lady, lady, should you meet
One whose ways are all discreet,
One who murmurs that his wife
Is the lodestar of his life,
One who keeps assuring you
That he never was untrue,
Never loved another one …
Lady, lady, better run!
A Subaltern’s Love-song
by John Betjeman
(1906–84)
Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,
Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament – you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won,