Nature

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Upton, Bertha. The Vege-Men’s Revenge. Illustrated by Florence Upton. Longmans, Green & Co., 1897.

Nature, defined as our collective ecosphere, plays an important role in poetry for children. Though it was used for centuries to represent aspects of human nature that either need to be brought under control or carefully nurtured, by the time most of the poetry in the Prelutsky Collection was written, nature was more often associated with innocence, freedom, and possibility. There are many reasons children want to be outdoors, and it is no great secret that the greatest of these is the chance to be away from grownups. The entire universe may be under a leafy bush or over the crest of a hill. Nature poems affirm the spirit and courage of children left to stumble upon mysteries and overcome perils on their own terms.

Early writers of poetry for youth, as mentioned, often turned to the natural world for familiar, relatable images and metaphors that helped make a point about morality or religion. The Flower-Vase, or Pretty Poems for Good Little Children (1860) is a miniature or toy book (so called for its size) that includes a poem encouraging children to be like industrious insects and spend their time wisely: “My youth is but a summer’s day, / then like the bee, and ant, I’ll lay / A store of learning by.” Nineteenth-century poetry, in particular, taught young boys and girls that God was in heaven but also in “all creatures great and small.” To encounter nature was to encounter the divine. At the same time, nature poetry was never limited to the didactic purposes of adults. Its words and rhythms, like the cool grass beneath our feet or the birds chirping in the trees, can be enjoyed in their own right, apart from any higher meaning.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, nonsense poetry mated with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and gave birth to a new breed of storytelling that delighted readers young and old. Probably the most well-known example, Edward Lear’s Nonsense Botany and Nonsense Alphabets (1888), can be interpreted as a caricature not only of the Victorian fascination with science, but also of the many new theories that were being proposed at that time—some sensible, some not. Was the Fizzigiggious Fish, “who always walked about upon Stilts, / because he had no Legs” really any crazier than the conclusions that highly respected scientists were drawing about topics like race and genetics?

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Gordon, Elizabeth. Wild Flower Children: The Little Playmate of the Fairies. Illustrated by Janet Laura Scott. P. F. Volland Company, 1918.

Other nature-themed works challenge humans to see things from a non-human perspective. In The Vege-Men’s Revenge (1897), for example, a young girl named Poppy is kidnapped by Herr Carrot and Don Tomato and taken to Vege-men’s Land. The vegetables, she learns, are unhappy about being diced, mashed, and fried at the hands of humans. Poppy is placed underground, where she grows, is harvested, undergoes kitchen prep, and is finally served as the main course at a banquet. It turns out to be just a dream, but for Poppy, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the experience sticks.

Stories with imaginary creatures had their critics. The Spoofah and the Antidote (1898) by Leila Trapmann is an illustrated poem about two friends who set out, like adventurous Victorian naturalists, to prove the existence of the Barking Serpent. One of them, the Spoofah, is part man, part elephant, part bicycle. The other, the Antidote, has the ears and legs of a deer or gazelle and wears roller skates. Their quest is unsuccessful, and by the story’s end, they are no longer friends. The book was briefly reviewed in the British literary magazine Black & White in its December 1898 supplement as “nonsense run mad... The creatures conceived and presented here are not funny; they are merely hideous, and will, we should say, terrify more children than they will amuse.”

A few critics aside, nearly everyone agreed with Aesop that animals (and occasionally plants), whether real or not, were good literary companions and teachers, especially as science education increased in classroom curriculum. The lessons didn’t have to be complicated. Just being aware that the other inhabitants of Earth, our island home, are worthy of care and consideration is a great place to start. Whether or not nature poetry teaches serious science, it could be argued that encouraging young people to see species other than their own as friends, relatives, and playmates is an important step towards deeper knowledge that may come later in life. Elizabeth Gordon’s Wild Flower Children (1918) gets at this idea. Taking the form of a field guide, plants’ common and scientific names are accompanied by whimsical poems and illustrations: “Bellwort / [Uvularia Perfoliata] / If through the woods you’ll walk in May / You’ll see the Bellwort children play / At hide and seek, in yellow coats / With their wee cousins, sweet Wild Oats.” Another message these books convey is that at some level, all life is connected. As Robert Wallace in Behind the Garden Wall (1913) put it: “Just watch the busy garden life / Behind the old gray wall, / And, if there’s hoping in your eyes, / the veil will from them fall.”

William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence” (1803) begins with these lines: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.” Jack Prelutsky expressed a similar sentiment of awe and familiarity in “The Ways of Living Things” (1983). “There is wonder past all wonder / in the ways of living things, / in a worm’s intrepid wiggling, / in the song a blackbird sings.” While Blake was writing for adults and Prelutsky for young people, both express a sense of enchantment with the natural world that has been embraced over the ages, by all ages.