Everyone grumbled. The sky was grey.
We had nothing to do and nothing to say.
It was nearing the end of a dismal day,
And there seemed to be nothing beyond.
THEN
Daddy fell into the pond!

Quick, who wrote that poem?

I discovered this poem as a young child, in one of the first books I remember owning, Piping Down the Valleys Wild, a collection of poetry for children.

It was probably a gift from Mimi, my maternal grandmother, who loved reading and gifted me a number of my favorite books as a child. In a home with three young children, the dustjacket quickly disintegrated, and I remember the rough texture of the hardcover under my fingertips, the rich colors that formed a picture: the lower half a dark forest green, the upper half a deep aquatic indigo, with a perfectly round maroon circle about the size of a silver dollar in the upper right corner of the front cover, and the title picked out in silver script along the spine. A spine that was quickly cracked so I could hold it flat and read the longer lines that wrapped into the margin. The pages were smooth, a light latte colored, and the verses in a beautiful italic font.

That copy disappeared long ago but I found a copy at Barnes & Noble, a Dell Yearling edition with a cover that captures none of the beauty and mystery of my childhood copy. But the poems are the same.

Every child should have a book of poetry in their collection. And I gave copies of this one to the children in my life, when they were younger, along with collections of Shel Silverstein, who only appears – if you can believe it – once in this collection. Well, it was published in 1968…

[Sidenote: just for fun, read Silverstein’s Wikipedia page – man, this guy did everything!]

These are traditional authors – Emily Dickinson, Edna St Vincent Millay, Robert Lewis Stephenson – collected by a teacher and expert in children’s literature, who clearly wanted children to enjoy poetry as much as she did. Her introduction talks about how the children she spoke to defined poetry: the youngest insisted “it had to rhyme”, older children learned to appreciate the “music” and “new word pictures” – and avoided poems that seemed “too sweet.” Many of the poems included were written for adults but appeal also to kids. And the introduction includes direction for adults on how to learn to read poetry to children.

So have you figured out who wrote that silly poem about daddy falling into the pond – a poem I quote when we’re sitting around the living room on a cloudy day, unable to pull ourselves together enough to actually go do something, anything – ?

Perhaps it will help if I quote something else written by the same author, something that many of us had to read in school. Once you hear them next to each other, you can’t unhear the similarities, and it becomes too obvious who the author is. Ready?

And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,   
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,   
A highwayman comes riding—
         Riding—riding—
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.

Was there a book of poetry that you loved as a child? Do poems from your childhood stick in your mind, coming back to you unbidden, sometimes at inopportune times like the middle of staff meetings? Share in the comments.