THE BLUE POETRY BOOK
EDITED BY
ANDREW LANG
WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS BY H. J. FORD AND LANCELOT SPEED
SEVENTH IMPRESSION
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
FOURTH AVENUE & 30th STREET, NEW YORK
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1918
All rights reserved
Made in Great Britain
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this Collection is to put before children, and young people, poems which are good in themselves, and especially fitted to live, as Theocritus says, ‘on the lips of the young.’ The Editor has been guided to a great extent, in making his choice, by recollections of what particularly pleased himself in youth. As a rule, the beginner in poetry likes what is called ‘objective’ art—verse with a story in it, the more vigorous the story the better. The old ballads satisfy this taste, and the Editor would gladly have added more of them, but for two reasons. First, there are parents who would see harm, where children see none, in ‘Tamlane’ and ‘Clerk Saunders.’ Next, there was reason to dread that the volume might become entirely too Scottish. It is certainly a curious thing that, in Mr. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, where some seventy poets are represented, scarcely more than a tenth of the number were born north of Tweed. In this book, however, intended for lads and lassies, the poems by Campbell, by Sir Walter Scott, by Burns, by the Scottish song-writers, and the Scottish minstrels of the ballad, are in an unexpectedly large proportion to the poems by English authors. The Editor believes that this predominance of Northern verse is not due to any exorbitant local patriotism of his own. The singers of the North, for some reason or other, do excel in poems of action and of adventure, or to him they seem to excel. He is acquainted with no modern ballad by a Southern Englishman, setting aside ‘Christabel’ and the ‘Ancient Mariner—’ poems hardly to be called ballads—which equals ‘The Eve of St. John.’ For spirit-stirring martial strains few Englishmen since Drayton have been rivals of Campbell, of Scott, of Burns, of Hogg with his song of ‘Donald McDonald.’ Two names, indeed, might be mentioned here: the names of the late Sir Francis Doyle and of Lord Tennyson. But the scheme of this book excludes a choice from contemporary poets. It is not necessary to dwell on the reasons for this decision. But the Editor believes that some anthologist of the future will find in the poetry of living English authors, or of English authors recently dead, a very considerable garden of that kind of verse which is good both for young and old. To think for a moment of this abundance is to conceive more highly of Victorian poetry. There must still, after all, be youth and mettle in the nation which could produce ‘The Ballad of the Revenge,’ ‘Lucknow,’ ‘The Red Thread of Honour,’ ‘The Loss of the Birkenhead,’ ‘The Forsaken Merman,’ ‘How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,’ ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin,’ and many a song of Charles Kingley’s, not to mention here the work of still later authors. But we only glean the fields of men long dead.
For this reason, then—namely, because certain admirable contemporary poems, like ‘Lucknow’ and ‘The Red Thread of Honour,’ are unavoidably excluded—the poems of action, of war, of adventure, chance to be mainly from Scottish hands. Thus Campbell and Scott may seem to hold a pre-eminence which would not have been so marked had the works of living poets, or of poets recently dead, been available. Yet in any circumstances these authors must have occupied a great deal of the field: Campbell for the vigour which the unfriendly Leyden had to recognise; Scott for that Homeric quality which, since Homer, no man has displayed in the same degree. Extracts from his long poems do not come within the scope of this selection. But, estimated even by his lyrics, Scott seems, to the Editor, to justify his right, now occasionally disdained, to rank among the great poets of his country. He has music, speed, and gaiety, as in ‘The Hunting Song’ or in ‘Nora’s Vow:’
Lines like these sing themselves naturally in a child’s memory, while there is a woodland freshness and a daring note in
‘Young Lochinvar’ goes ‘as dauntingly as wantonly’ to his bridal, as the heir of Macpherson’s Rant to his death, in a wonderful swing and gallop of verse; while still, out of dim years of childhood far away, one hears how all the bells are ringing in Dunfermline town for the wedding of Alice Brand. From childhood, too, one remembers the quietism of Lucy Ashton’s song, and the monotone of the measure—
The wisdom of it is as perceptible to a child as that other lesson of Scott’s, which rings like a clarion:
Then there are his martial pieces, as the ‘Gathering Song of Donald Dhu’ and ‘The Cavalier,’ and there is the inimitable simplicity and sadness of ‘
These are but a few examples of Scott’s variety, his spontaneity, his hardly conscious mastery of his art. Like Phemius of Ithaca, he might say ‘none has taught me but myself, and the God has put into my heart all manner of lays’—all but the conscious and elaborate ‘manner of lays,’ which has now such power over some young critics that they talk of Scott’s redeeming his bad verse by his good novels. The taste of childhood and of maturity is simpler and more pure.
In the development of a love of poetry it is probable that simple, natural, and adventurous poetry like Scott’s comes first, and that it is followed later—followed but not superseded—by admiration of such reflective poetry as is plain and even obvious, like that of Longfellow, from whom a number of examples are given. But, to the Editor at least, it seems that a child who cares for poetry is hardly ever too young to delight in mere beauty of words, in the music of metre and rhyme, even when the meaning is perhaps still obscure and little considered. A child, one is convinced, would take great pleasure in Mr. Swinburne’s choruses in ‘Atalanta,’ such as
and in Shelley’s ‘Cloud’ and his ‘Arethusa.’ For this reason a number of pieces of Edgar Poe’s are given, and we have not shrunk even from including the faulty ‘Ulalume,’ because of the mere sound of it, apart from the sense. The three most famous poems of Coleridge may be above a child’s full comprehension, but they lead him into a world not realised, ‘an unsubstantial fairy place,’ bright in a morning mist, like our memories of childhood.
It is probably later, in most lives, that the mind wakens to delight in the less obvious magic of style, and the less ringing, the more intimate melody of poets like Keats and Lord Tennyson. The songs of Shakespeare, of course, are for all ages, and the needs of youth comparatively mature are met in Dryden’s ‘Ode on Alexander’s Feast,’ and in ‘Lycidas’ and the ‘Hymn for the Nativity.’
It does not appear to the Editor that poems about children, or especially intended for children, are those which a child likes best. A child’s imaginative life is much spent in the unknown future, and in the romantic past. He is the contemporary of Leonidas, of Agincourt, of Bannockburn, of the ‘45; he is living in an heroic age of his own, in a Phæacia where the Gods walk visibly. The poems written for and about children, like Blake’s and some of Wordsworth’s, rather appeal to the old, whose own childhood is now to them a distant fairy world, as the man’s life is to the child. The Editor can remember having been more mystified and puzzled by ‘Lucy Gray’ than by the ‘Eve of St. John,’ at a very early age. He is convinced that Blake’s ‘Nurse’s Song,’ for example, which brings back to him the long, the endless evenings of the Northern summer, when one had to go to bed while the hills beyond Ettrick were still clear in the silver light, speaks more intimately to the grown man than to the little boy or girl. Hood’s ‘I remember, I remember,’ in the same way, brings in the burden of reflection on that which the child cannot possibly reflect upon—namely, a childhood which is past. There is the same tone in Mr. Stevenson’s ‘Child’s Garden of Verse,’ which can hardly be read without tears—tears that do not come and should not come to the eyes of childhood. For, beyond the child and his actual experience of the world as the ballads and poems of battle are, he can forecast the years, and anticipate the passions. What he cannot anticipate is his own age, himself, his pleasures and griefs, as the grown man sees them in memory, and with a sympathy for the thing that he has been, and can never be again. It is his excursions into the untravelled world which the child enjoys, and this is what makes Shakespeare so dear to him—Shakespeare who has written so little on childhood. In The Midsummer Night’s Dream the child can lose himself in a world familiar to him, in the fairy age, and can derive such pleasure from Puck, or from Ariel, as his later taste can scarce recover in the same measure. Falstaff is his playfellow, ‘a child’s Falstaff, an innocent creature,’ as Dickens says of Tom Jones in David Copperfield.
A boy prefers the wild Prince and Poins to Barbara Lewthwaite, the little girl who moralised to the lamb. We make a mistake when we ‘write down’ to children; still more do we err when we tell a child not to read this or that because he cannot understand it. He understands far more than we give him credit for, but nothing that can harm him. The half-understanding of it, too, the sense of a margin beyond, as in a wood full of unknown glades, and birds, and flowers unfamiliar, is great part of a child’s pleasure in reading. For this reason many poems are included here in which the Editor does not suppose that the readers will be able to pass an examination. For another reason a few pieces of no great excellence as poetry are included. Though they may appear full of obviousness to us, there is an age of dawning reflection to which they are not obvious. Longfellow, especially, seems to the Editor to be a kind of teacher to bring readers to the more reflective poetry of Wordsworth, while he has a sort of simple charm in which there is a foretaste of the charm of Tennyson and Keats. But everyone who attempts to make such a collection must inevitably be guided by his own recollections of childhood, of his childish likings, and the development of the love of poetry in himself. We have really no other criterion, for children are such kind and good-natured critics that they will take pleasure in whatever is given or read to them, and it is hard for us to discern where the pleasure is keenest and most natural.
The Editor trusts that this
Almost the happiest of such moments were those lulled by the sleepy music of ‘The Castle of Indolence,’ a poem now perhaps seldom read, at least by the young. Yet they may do worse than visit the drowsy castle of him who wrote
Childhood is the age when a love of poetry may be born and strengthened—a taste which grows rarer and more rare in our age, when examinations spring up and choke the good seed. By way of lending no aid to what is called Education, very few notes have been added. The child does not want everything to be explained; in the unexplained is great pleasure. Nothing, perhaps, crushes the love of poetry more surely and swiftly than the use of poems as school-books. They are at once associated in the mind with lessons, with long, with endless hours in school, with puzzling questions and the agony of an imperfect memory, with grammar and etymology, and everything that is the enemy of joy. We may cause children to hate Shakespeare or Spenser as Byron hated Horace, by inflicting poets on them, not for their poetry, but for the valuable information in the notes. This danger, at least, it is not difficult to avoid in the Blue Poetry Book. [Pg xiv] [Pg xv]
CONTENTS
Page ANONYMOUS: A Red, Red Rose 66 Annan Water 178 Cherry Ripe 176 Helen of Kirkconnel 115 Lawlands of Holland 106 Lyke-Wake Dirge 330 Sir Hugh; or, the Jew’s Daughter 326 Sir Patrick Spens 259 The Twa Corbies 78 The Wife of Usher’s Well 124 Willie Drowned in Yarrow 163BARNEFIELD, RICHARD, 1574-1627:
The Nightingale 206
BLAKE, WILLIAM, 1757-1828:
Night 5 Nurse’s Song 1 The Chimney-sweeper 16 The Lamb 4
BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1809-1861:
To Flush, my Dog 51
BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN, 1794-1878:
To a Waterfowl 179
BUNYAN, JOHN, 1628-1688:
The Pilgrim
BURN, MINSTREL:
Leader Haughs 284
BURNS, ROBERT, 1759-1796:
Bannockburn 67 I Love my Jean 62 O, wert Thou in the Cauld Blast 61 The Banks o’ Doon 64 The Farewell 68 There’ll never be Peace till Jamie comes Hame 63
BYRON, LORD, 1788-1824:
Could Love for Ever, Run like a River 71 So, we’ll go no more a Roving 181 Stanzas written on the Road between Florence and Pisa 111 The Destruction of Sennacherib 82
CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1777-1844:
Hohenlinden 36 Lord Ullin’s Daughter 13 The Battle of the Baltic 43 The Last Man 255 The Soldier’s Dream 27 Ye Mariners of England 22
COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1772-1834:
Christabel 312 Kubla Khan 142 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 215
COLLINS, WILLIAM, 1721-1756:
Ode written in mdccxlvi 88 To Evening 121
COWPER, WILLIAM, 1731-1800:
Boadicea 341 Epitaph on a Hare 285 John Gilpin 28 On a Spaniel called ‘Beau’ Killing a Young Bird 6 The Dog and the Water-lily 50 The
DIBDIN, CHARLES, 1745-1814:
Tom Bowling 270
DRAYTON, MICHAEL, 1563-1631:
Ballad of Agincourt 18
DRYDEN, JOHN, 1631-1701:
Alexander’s Feast; or, the Power of Music 129
ELLIOTT, JANE, 1727-1805:
The Flowers o’ the Forest 137
GOLDSMITH, OLIVER, 1728-1774:
Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog 38
GRAY, THOMAS, 1716-1771:
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard 298 The Bard 243
HERRICK, ROBERT, 1591-1674:
To Blossoms 92 To Daffodils 89
HEYWOOD, THOMAS—d. circa 1640:
Morning 176
HOGG, JAMES, 1772-1835:
A Boy’s Song 2 The Skylark 198
HOOD, THOMAS, 1798-1845:
A Lake and a Fairy Boat 87 I Remember, I Remember 3
JONSON, BEN, 1574-1637:
Hymn to Diana 80
KEATS, JOHN, 1796-1821:
La Belle Dame Sans Mercy 265 On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer 86 Winter 311
LAMB, CHARLES, 1775-1834:
Hester 120
LAMB, MARY, 1765-1847:
The Child and the Snake 268
LANDOR, WALTER SAVAGE, 1775-1864:
Rose Aylmer 72
LINDSAY, LADY A., 1750-1825:
Auld Robin Gray 161
LONGFELLOW, HENRY WADSWORTH, 1807-1882:
The Beleagured City
LOVELACE, RICHARD, 1618-1658:
To Althea from Prison 117 To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars 102
MACAULAY, LORD, 1800-1859:
Ivry 257 The Armada 167 The Battle of Naseby 211
MARLOWE, CHRISTOPHER, 1564-1593:
The Passionate Shepherd to his Love 135
MARVELL, ANDREW, 1620-1678:
Song of the Emigrants in Bermuda 183 The Girl Describes her Fawn 25
MICKLE, WILLIAM JULIUS, 1734-1788: Cumnor Hall 200
MILTON, JOHN, 1608-1674:
L’Allegro 144 Il Penseroso 150 Lycidas 291 On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity 303
MINSTREL BURN:
Leader Haughs 284
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border:
Battle of Otterbourne 286 Kinmont Willie 248 The Demon Lover 102
MOORE, THOMAS, 1779-1852:
As Slow our Ship 65 The Light of Other Days 184 The Harp that once through Tara’s Halls 70 The Minstrel-Boy 68
NAIRNE, LADY, 1766-1845:
The Land o’ the Leal 182
NASHE, THOMAS, 1567-1600:
Spring
PEACOCK, THOMAS LOVE, 1785-1866:
War-song of Dinas Vawr 187
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry:
Mary Ambree 171
POE, EDGAR ALLAN, 1809-1849:
Annabel Lee 96 The Haunted Palace 240 The Sleeper 207 The Valley of Unrest 107 To Helen 198 To One in Paradise 79 Ulalume 138
PRAED, WINTHROP MACKWORTH, 1802-1839:
The Red Fisherman; or, the Devil’s Decoy 331
SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1771-1832:
A Weary Lot is Thine, Fair Maid 194 Alice Brand 55 Allen-a-Dale 126 County Guy 81 Evening 74 Gathering Song of Donald Dhu 82 Hunting Song 12 Hymn for the Dead 94 Jock of Hazeldean 156 Lucy Ashton’s Song 73 Nora’s Vow 17 Proud Maisie 92 Rosabelle 213 St. Swithin’s Chair 109 The Cavalier 85 The Eve of St. John 278 The Outlaw 40 The Sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill 123 Twist ye, Twine ye
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM, 1564-1616:
A Sea Dirge 71 Fidele 199 Orpheus with his Lute 77 Where the Bee Sucks, there Suck I 181 Who is Silvia? What is she 73 Winter 95
SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE, 1792-1822:
Arethusa 191 To a Skylark 203 The Recollection 159
SHIRLEY, JAMES, 1594-1666:
Death the Leveller 177
SIDNEY, SIR PHILIP, 1554-1586:
Sleep 94
SURTEES, ROBERT, 1779-1834:
Barthram’s Dirge 111
WOLFE, CHARLES, 1791-1823:
The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna 108 To Mary 100
WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM, 1770-1850:
I Wandered Lonely 119 Lucy Gray; or, Solitude 8 On the Departure of Sir Walter Scott from Abbotsford for Naples, 1831 343 The Kitten and Falling Leaves 271 The Reverie of Poor Susan 164 The Solitary Reaper 90 To the Cuckoo 113 Two April Mornings 195 Yarrow Unvisited, 1803 322 Yarrow Visited, September 1814 324
WOTTON, SIR HENRY, 1568-1639:
Elizabeth of Bohemia 175
LIST OF PLATES
PAGE To behold the wandering Moon Riding near her highest noon Frontispiece And the Star of Peace return 23 ‘And if there’s blood upon his hand, ’Tis but the blood of deer’ 59 Orpheus with his Lute 76 And the Idols are broke in the Temple of Baal 84 To shut her up in a sepulchre, In this kingdom by the sea 97 ‘Why weep ye by the tide, Ladie?’ 157 Syne, in the cleaving of a craig 165 The beard and the hair Of the River-god were Seen through the torrent’s sweep 190 The death-fires danced at night 220 And nothing else saw all day long 266 So half-way from the bed she rose, And on her elbow did recline To look at the Lady Geraldine 321the
Blue Poetry Book