As I have been studying for our exam, I have created a study sheet for all of the poems we discussed in class. I have decided to post them as one of my blog entries for the week. This includes all poetry for the class except Robert Louis Stevenson and Christina Rosetti.

Nonsense and humorous verses
“Although it is difficult to distinguish between humor and nonsense, one might say that in humor the real is absurd, whereas in nonsense the absurd is real.”

Jabberwocky – Lewis Carroll
· From Through the Looking Glass
· A mock heroic tale of a possible prince who must defeat a jabberwocky
· This poem is recognized as the greatest nonsense poem in English
· Opening and closing paragraphs are the same – peaceful and pastoral – while the middle is all about fighting
· Sentence structure is correct for English
· Standard poetic forms are observed (quatrain, ABAB rhyme form, iambic meter)

Experiment Degustatory – Ogden Nash
· “it tastes like chicken”
· Personal narrative
· Degustatory is a mixture of disgusting and gustatory (taste)

Adventures of Isabel – Ogden Nash
· Reminds of Little Red Riding Hood (the Thurber and Dahl version)
· Zwieback crackers show she is a child (those are crackers given to children as they learn to eat whole food)
· 1st four lines describe villain
· Next two lines – villain tells Isabel what they are going to do
· Next two lines is the same in all stanzas
· Last two lines – Isabel does to the villain what they wanted to do to her.

The Spaghetti Nut – Jack Prelutsky
· Plays with words and sounds
· Gustatory images
· Slip stick or visual humor
· Nettie Cutt vs. Nettie cut (name versus action)
Sick – Shel Silverstein
· 1st person narrator
· He misuses words like children would do
· Things that aren’t problems are presented (like having blue eyes)
· Hyperbole – blows something out of proportion to lunacy (the list is huge)
· Last four lines is the turn in the poem (it’s actually Saturday)

Boa Constrictor – Shel Silverstein
· Took something supposed to be scary and made it funny
· Starts out like a nursery rhyme and then moves into rhymed couplets
· Poem told in first person narrative – which makes the last funny line possible

The Witch of Willowby Wood – Rowena Bennett
· The witch is much like that out of Hansel and Gretel
· Free verse without rhyme scheme which makes it feel more like prose or conversation

Macavity: The Mystery Cat – T.S. Eliot
· Again, a narrative
· He is a con man hero

Mother’s Nerves – X.J. Kennedy
· A punch line poem

Narrative Poetry

The Highwayman – Alfred Noyes
· Listened to the song from you tube
· A ballad tradition, even though it isn’t in the usual ballad form
· The rhythm of the poem causes one to speed up when getting ot the action parts (the language makes you speed up).

Cremation of Sam McGee – Robert Service
· Not originally written for children, but they picked it up very quickly
· The poem is very dark and ends up being almost lighthearted and slightly funny
· The opening stanza is repeated at the end and gives the feel of a ghost story
· First person narrative
· The language is very commonplace (i.e. “he’d sooner live in hell”)
· The last two stanzas take us from a near ghost story to a turn where it ends humorously.

A visit from St. Nicholas – Clement Clarke Moore
· Clement Moore wrote this poem for his family and read it for the first time on Christmas Eve.
· The Santa that we now envision came straight from this poem
· In the first few lines, the language is full of nouns and adjectives and the words are longer
· Then, the language is more focused on verbs and the reader speeds up.

Casey at the Bat – Ernest Lawrence Thayer
· Written in 1888
· Made famous by DeWolf Hopper (recited over 10000 times)
· A mock heroic poem
· Tragic comedy
· Ballad (4 line stanzas, etc.)
· In medias res: it starts in the middle of the story
· Casey is the hero going into battle

Pied Piper of Hamelin – Robert Browning
· Poem written especially for a little boy
· “Modern rendition” of a traditional tale (the story is a well known story throughout Europe).
· He is dealing with a pretty sad concept, but he made it fairly humorous (injected little bits of humor)
· Rhythm of the words is important
o Lots of action verbs (short and to the point), thus moving the speaking quickly (stanza II)
o The words are used to portray a building of the intensity when the rats are pouring out of the houses (stanza VII)
o Same kind of effect with the children, but you get a different feel because it is children rather than rats (stanza XII)
· In stanza XV he gives a moral (he was a good Englishman, and thus, had to give a moral)

Lyric Poetry

The Creation – Cecil Alexander
· A Christian didactic poem
· Alexander was a 19th century author from the British Isles

William Blake
· Similar to Cecil Alexander (written at the same time and also British).
· Illuminated works – etched illustrations into copper
· Set the exemplar as to what children’s literature should be (i.e. beautiful and thought invoking).
· Wrote poems on Innocence and Experience
· All poems in Sword except Tyger are from the innocent side
· He pairs the innocence poems with troubling issues (i.e. child labor laws)
· Because the illustrations are inherent to the story, they are the front runners to picture books
· Many of the poems do have religious contexts
· Most have simple vocab and easy syntax
· Use familiar imagery
· Use repetition and refrain
· His poems also deal with social issues of the day
· He draws upon the oral tradition and also pulls in parts that are not necessarily appropriate for children’s literature (verbal ambiguity, covert satire, and sexual imagery).


Incident – Countee Cullen
· Expression of the African American experiences of the US
· From the point of view of an eight year old child
· Cullen felt that he should write on more universal topics than Hughes
· Cullen was a huge figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Mother to Son – Langston Hughes
· Expression of the African American experiences of the US
· The point of view of the mother talking to the son
· The metaphor of the stair is carried through the poem. It is an amazing metaphor juxtaposing a poor black woman and a rich white woman
· Hughes felt he should write to the black experience.
· Hughes was a huge figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Life Doesn’t Frighten Me – Maya Angelou
· A much more universal poem and doesn’t have to be the black experience strictly (although the child is most probably urban)

Hunchback girl: She Thinks of Heaven – Gwendolyn Brooks
· Again, a more universal poem. She could be in Heaven where everything is straight and she can live like a proper princess.
· The poem is a prayer
Emily Dickinson
· Tended to have four major themes in her poetry
o Nature
§ Scenes (look at nature and describe)
§ Meaning (look at something in nature and use a creature to explore other life meanings)
o Poetry, Art, Imagination
§ Looked at a book and the beauty of it
o Friendship, love, society
§ Relational issues of life
o Death, Immortality, Religion
· Her poems used compression (a type of writing with brevity)
o Short stanzas (many were quatrains)
o Short lines
o Usually, 2nd and 4th lines rhymed
· Will see a lot of nature images, domestic activities, industry, warfare, the law and economy
· The speaker is a “supposed person,” and not Emily Dickinson herself

I Met A King This Afternoon – Emily Dickinson
· She enjoys the play-acting of the children
· She seems to say that these children at play are at least as important as actual royalty

There is No Frigate like a Book – Emily Dickinson
· The power of a book can allow even the poor to travel
I am Nobody! Who are You? – Emily Dickinson
· Most famous of Emily’s poems
· Appears in many children’s collections
· She was a recluse, and all her poems were published posthumously, so she really was a nobody
· She rejoiced in being a nobody and not having to show herself to everyone (not a negative thing)


Hope is the Thing with Feathers – Emily Dickinson
· The bird is always there (even during the storm) just as hope is always there
· Hope doesn’t take anything from us

E.E. Cummings
· He played with typography and did not use capital letters and doesn’t use punctuation very much.
· Plays with white space to give a special image on the page
· Deals with nature, love, the relationship between the individual and the masses, and satire

In Just-Spring – E.E. Cummings
· Plays with the way kids run kids’ names together
· Images of spring (balloonman, puddles, etc)
· Looks strange on the page

Maggie and Millie and Molly and May – E.E. Cummings
· No punctuation
· Looks more normal on the page
· A bit of truth found in the poem (i.e. the little girls can find themselves at the beach no matter what they’ve lost)
· An alliteration

William Carlos Williams
· A doctor
· Imagism – uses short poems, ordinary language, and free verse to create sharp, exact, and concentrated pictures. All about what an image can say

This is Just to Say – William Williams
· The image is terrific
· The plum is a deep purple and it is cold

The Red Wheel Barrow – William Williams
· You can picture it perfectly
· He wrote this poem after having been to help a very sick little girl

Spring and All – William Williams
· He is at the beginning of spring where the first little buds are beginning to pop through the ground
· Very different images than those of E.E. Cummings