Poems By a Little Girl | Page 3

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ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
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POEMS
BY A LITTLE GIRL
BY
HILDA CONKLING
WITH A PREFACE BY
AMY LOWELL
FOR YOU, MOTHER
I have a dream for you, Mother,
Like a soft thick fringe to hide your
eyes.
I have a surprise for you, Mother,
Shaped like a strange
butterfly.
I have found a way of thinking
To make you happy;
I
have made a song and a poem
All twisted into one.
If I sing, you
listen;
If I think, you know.
I have a secret from everybody in the
world full of people
But I cannot always remember how it goes;
It
is a song
For you, Mother,
With a curl of cloud and a feather of
blue
And a mist
Blowing along the sky.
If I sing it some day,
under my voice,
Will it make you happy?
Thanks are due to the editors of Poetry:
A Magazine of Verse, The
Delineator,
Good Housekeeping, The Lyric, St.
Nicholas, and
Contemporary Verse for
their courteous permission to reprint
many
of the following poems.
PREFACE
A book which needs to be written is one dealing
with the childhood

of authors. It would be
not only interesting, but instructive; not
merely
profitable in a general way, but practical in a
particular. We
might hope, in reading it, to gain
some sort of knowledge as to what
environments
and conditions are most conducive to the growth
of
the creative faculty. We might even learn how
not to strangle this rare
faculty in its early years.
At this moment I am faced with a difficult task,
for here is an author
and her childhood in a most
unusual position; these two
conditions--that of
being an author, and that of being a child--appear

simultaneously, instead of in the due order to
which we are
accustomed. For I wish at the outset
to state, and emphatically, that it
is poetry, the
stuff and essence of poetry, which this book
contains.
I know of no other instance in which such
really beautiful poetry has
been written by a child;
but, confronted with so unwonted a state of
things,
two questions obtrude themselves: how far has
the condition
of childhood been impaired by, not
only the possession, but the
expression, of the gift
of writing; how far has the condition of
authorship
(at least in its more mature state still to
come) been
hampered by this early leap into the
light?
The first question concerns the little girl and
can best be answered by
herself some twenty
years hence; the second concerns the world, and

again the answer must wait. We can, however,
do something--we
can see what she is and what
she has done. And if the one is
interesting to the
psychologist, the other is no less important to the

poet.
Hilda Conkling is the younger daughter of Mrs.
Grace Hazard
Conkling, Assistant Professor of
English at Smith College,
Northampton,
Massachusetts. At the time of writing, Hilda has just

passed her ninth birthday. Her sister, Elsa, is
two years her senior.
The children and their
mother live all the year round in Northampton,


and glimpses of the woods and hills surrounding
the little town

crop up again and again in these
poems. This is Emily Dickinson's
country, and
there is a reminiscent sameness in the fauna and
flora
of her poems in these.
The two little girls go to a school a few blocks
from where they live.
In the afternoons, they
take long walks with their mother, or play in
the
garden while she writes. On rainy days, there
are books and Mrs.
Conkling's piano, which is not
just a piano, for Mrs. Conkling is a
musician, and
we may imagine that the children hear a special

music as they certainly read a special literature.
By "special" I do not
mean a prescribed course
(for dietitians of the mind are quite as apt to
be
faddists as dietitians of the stomach), but just
that sort of reading
which a person who passionately
loves books would most want to
introduce
her children to. And here I think we have the
answer to
the why of Hilda. She and her sister
have been their mother's close
companions ever
since they were born. They have never known
that
somewhat equivocal relationship--a child
with its nurse. They have
never been for hours
at a time in contact with an elementary
intelligence.
If Hilda had shown these poems to even
the most
sympathetic nurse, what would have been
the result? In the first place,
they would, in all
probability, have been lost, since Hilda does not

write her poems, but tells them; in the second, they
would have been
either extravagantly praised or
laughingly commented upon. In either
case, the
fine flower of creation would most certainly