Poems By A Little Girl
 Hilda Conkling
Poems By a Little Girl
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 have
been injured.

Then again, blessed though many of the nurses
of childhood undoubtedly are (and we all remember
them), they have no means of answering the
thousand and one questions of an eager, opening
mind. To be an adequate companion to childhood,
one must know so many things. Hilda is
fortunate in her mother, for if these poems reveal
one thing more than another it is that Mrs.
Conkling is dowered with an admirable tact. In
the dedication poem to her mother, the little girl
says:

"If I sing, you listen;
If I think, you know."

No finer tribute could be offered by one person to
another than the contented certainty of understanding
in those two lines.

Hilda tells her poems, and the method of it is
this: They come out in the course of conversation,
and Mrs. Conkling is so often engaged in
writing that there is nothing to be remarked if she
scribbles absently while talking to the little girls.
But this scribbling is really a complete draught of
the poem. Occasionally Mrs. Conkling writes
down the poem later from memory and reads it
afterwards to the child, who always remembers
if it is not exactly in its original form. No line,
no cadence, is altered from Hilda's version; the
titles have been added for convenience, but they
are merely obvious handles derived from the
text.

Naturally it is only a small proportion of
Hilda's life which is given to poetry. Much is
devoted to running about, a part to study, etc. It
is, however, significant that Hilda is not very keen
about games with other children. Not that she
is by any means either shy or solitary, but they do
not greatly interest her. Doubtless childhood
pays its debt of possession more steadily than we
know.

Now to turn to the book itself; at the very start,
here is an amazing thing. This slim volume contains
one hundred and seven separate poems, and
that is counting as one all the very short pieces
written between the ages of five and six. Certainly
that is a remarkable output for a little girl,
and the only possible explanation is that the poems
are perfectly instinctive. There is no working
over as with an adult poet. Hilda is subconscious,
not self-conscious. Her mother says that she
rarely hesitates for a word. When the feeling is
strong, it speaks for itself. Read the dedication
poem, "For You, Mother." It is full of feeling,
and of that simple, dignified, adequate diction
which is the speech of feeling:

"I have found a way of thinking
To make you happy."

That is beautiful, and, once read, inevitable;
but it waited for a child to say. Poem after poem
is charged with this feeling, this expression of
great love:

"I will sing you a song,
Sweets-of-my-heart,
With love in it,
(How I love you!)"

"Will you love me to-morrow after next
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