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Poems By a Little Girl By: Hilda Conkling (1910-1986) |
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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... Continue reading book >>
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Fiction |
Literature |
Poetry |
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