Poems By a Little Girl | Page 5

kings,
and princesses, and
golden wings, and there are reminiscences of

story-books, and hints of pictures that have pleased
her. After all, that
is the way we all make our
poems, but the grown-up poet tries to get
away
from his author, he tries to see more than the
painter has seen.
The little girl is quite
untroubled by any questions of technique. She


takes what to her is the obvious always, and in
these copied pieces

it is, naturally, less her own
peculiar obvious than in the nature
poems.
Hilda Conkling is evidently possessed of a rare
and accurate power of
observation. And when
we add this to her gift of imagination, we see

that it is the perfectly natural play of these two
faculties which
makes what to her is an obvious
expression. She does not search for it,
it is her
natural mode of thought. But, luckily for her,
she has been
guided by a wisdom which has not
attempted to show her a better
way. Her observation
has been carefully, but unobtrusively,
cultivated;
her imagination has been stimulated by the
reading of
excellent books; but both these lines
of instruction have been kept
apparently apart
from her own work. She has been let alone there;

she has been taught by an analogy which she has
never suspected. By
this means, her poetical gift
has functioned happily, without ever for
a moment
experiencing the tension of doubt.
A few passages will serve to show how well
Hilda knows how to use
her eyes:
"The water came in with a wavy look
Like a spider's web."
A bluebird has a back "like a feathered sky."
Apostrophizing a
snow-capped mountain she
writes:
"You shine like a lily
But with a different whiteness."
She asks a humming-bird:
"Why do you stand on the air
And no sun shining?"
She hears a chickadee:
"Far off I hear him talking
The way smooth bright pebbles
Drop
into water."

Now let us follow her a step farther, to where
the imagination takes a
firmer hold:
"The world turns softly
Not to spill its lakes and rivers.
The water is
held in its arms
And the sky is held in the water."
School lessons, and a reflection in a pond--
that is the stuff of which
all poetry is made. It
is the fusion which shows the quality of the poet.

Turn to the text and read "Geography." Really,
this is an
extraordinary child!
It is pleasant to watch her with the artist's
eagerness intrigued by the
sounds of words, for
instance:
"--silvery lonesome lapping of the long wave."
Again, enchanted by a little bell of rhyme, we have
this amusing
catalogue:
"John-flowers,
Mary-flowers,
Polly-flowers
Cauli-flowers."
That is the conscious Hilda, the gay little girl,
but it shows a quick ear
nevertheless. We can
almost hear the giggle with which that
"Cauliflowers"
came out. Usually rhyme does not
appear to be a
matter of moment to her. Some
poets think in rhyme, some do not;
Hilda
evidently belongs to the second category.
"Treasure," and
"The Apple-Jelly-Fish-Tree," and
"Short Story" are the only poems in
the book
which seem to follow a clearly rhymed pattern.
If any
misguided schoolmistress had ever
suggested that a poem should
have rhyme and
metre, this book would never have been "told."
In
"Moon Doves," however, there is a distinctly
metrical effect without
rhyme. But the great
majority of the poems are built upon cadence,

and the subtlety of this little girl's cadences
are a delight to those who
can hear them.
Doubtless her musical inheritance has all to do
with
this, for in poem after poem the instinct for
rhythm is unerring. So

constantly is this the case,
that it is scarcely necessary to point out
particular
examples. I may, however, name, as two of her
best for
other qualities as well, "Gift," and
"Poems." The latter contains two
of her quick
strokes of observation and comparison: the morning

"like the inside of a snow-apple," and she herself
curled
"cushion-shaped" in the window-seat.
Dear me! How simple these poems seem when
you read them done.
But try to write something
new about a dandelion. Try it; and then
read
the poem of that name here. It is charming;
how did she think
of it? How indeed!
Delightful conceits she has--another is "Sun
Flowers"--but how
comes a child of eight to
prick and point with the rapier of irony? For
it
is nothing less than irony in "The Tower and the
Falcon." Did she
quite grasp its meaning
herself? We may doubt it. In this poem, the

subconscious is very much on the job.
To my thinking, the most successful poems in
the book--and now I
mean successful from a
grown-up standpoint--are "For You, Mother,"

"Red Rooster," "Gift," "Poems," "Dandelion,"
"Butterfly,"
"Weather," "Hills," and
"Geography." And it will be noticed that
these
are precisely the poems which must have sprung
from actual
experience. They are not the book
poems, not even the fairy poems,
they are the
records of reactions from actual happenings. I
have not
a doubt that Hilda prefers her fairystories.
They are the conscious
play of her
imagination, it must be "fun" to make them.
Ah, but it is
the unconscious with which we are
most concerned, those very
poems which are probably
to her the least interesting are the ones
which
most certainly reveal the fulness of poetry from
which she
draws.