POEMS Chosen by Boys and Girls - Book I
Arranged by Fowler Wright
and Crompton Rhodes
Basil Blackwell
Broad Street, Oxford
MDCCCCXXV
BOOK I
... Again, the dream is true:
Again, to each, the well-worn path is new.
PREFACE
The poems in these little books of verse have been chosen, not by a man or a woman, but by ten thousand boys and girls. This needs some explanation. They are the result of an appeal in Poetry for the assistance of those teachers who love poetry, and who have conveyed their love of poetry to their boys and girls. The appeal at once received the cordial sympathy and support of the entire educational press, and the response was a large number of essays containing lists of poems which were received from teachers in every type of school, public and private, urban and rural, primary and secondary. The poems in each list were those which had appealed most to scholars, which had given them the deepest joy, the highest delight. With singular generosity these lovers of poetry placed at the disposal of the editors the wisdom and experience of years, often with hundreds of children, in many schools. Ten thousand is, indeed, too low a figure to cover the number of collaborators, and to those teachers who contributed these most valuable essays the warm thanks of the publishers and the editors are tendered.
Apart from the arranging of the poems into books and negotiating copyrights, the editors' work has been, and been only, the ensuring that the poems chosen are those which, under the guidance of lovers of poetry, have carried their beauty into the hearts of the boys and girls - the real collaborators of these books.
S. F.W. & R. C. R.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THE Editors wish to thank Miss G. Blades, B.A., assistant editor of Poetry, for her assistance in transcription and collation, and in the work of analysis entailed by the essays.
Acknowledgements for permission to reprint are due to Mrs. Allingham (for William Allingham), to Mrs. Katharine Tynan Hinkson, Harold Monro, Eric Pinker and Son (for Walter de la Mare), John Murray (for Robert Bridges), Chatto and Windus (for Robert Louis Stevenson), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Hilton Young, Wilfred Meynell (for the late Alice Meynell), and to A P. Watt and Son (for William Butler Yeats).
CONTENTS
The Fairies | William Allingham | |
Piping down the Valleys | William Blake | |
Fairyland | Ethel Gate | |
You Spotted Snakes | William Shakespeare | |
Sheep and Lambs | Katharine Tynan | |
The Lamb | William Blake | |
The Tiger | William Blake | |
Milk for the Cat | Harold Monro | |
Gay Robin | Robert Bridges | |
Martha | Walter de la Mare | |
Sister, Awake (English Madrigal) | Anonymous | |
The Song of the Bow | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | |
Christmas | Hilton Young | |
Sweet and Low | Lord Tennyson | |
The Shepherdess | Alice Meynell | |
Home from the Daisied Meadows | R. L. Stevenson | |
The Fiddler of Dooney | William Butler Yeats | |
Lucy Gray | William Wordsworth | |
The Windmill | Robert Bridges | |
The Windmill | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | |
Abou Ben Adhem | Leigh Hunt | |
Meg Merrilies | John Keats | |
The Lost Doll | Charles Kingsley | |
The Pobble who has no Toes | Edward Lear | |
A Boy's Song | James Hogg | |
Song of the Shirt | Thomas Hood | |
The Inchcape Rock | Robert Southey | |
The Sands of Dee | Charles Kingsley | |
Lady Clare | Lord Tennyson | |
Barbara Freitchie | John Greenleaf Whittier | |
The Three Fishers | Charles Kingsley | |
The River | Charles Kingsley | |
The Brook | Lord Tennyson | |
The Pied Piper of Hamelin | Robert Browning |
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