Children’s Classics–Poetry

I love juvenile poetry, so when I saw that June’s Children’s Classics carnival at 5 Minutes for Books was to be all about poetry, I knew just which books I wanted to highlight.

Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young is fun anthology compiled by Jack Prelutsky and illustrated by Marc Brown.  Need I say more?  🙂  Seriously, I figure Prelutsky knows good poetry with kid appeal when he reads it.  This is but a sampling of the many poets whose works appear in this terrific anthology:

• Margaret Hillert
• Dorothy Aldis
• Edward Lear
• Elise Holmelund Minarik
• A.A. Milne
• Jane Yolen
• Aileen Fisher
• Ogden Nash
• Beatrix Potter
• Charlotte Zolotow
• Mary Ann Hoberman
• Joan Walsh Anglund
• Beatrice Schenk de Regniers
• Nikki Giovanni
• Judith Viorst
• Langston Hughes
• Gwendolyn Brooks
• Jack Prelutsky (of course)
• Many, many others

Marc Brown‘s illustrations are lovely and not too Arthur-ish.  Every page is lavishly illustrated, and since most pages contain multiple poems, the illustrations are little cameos for the individual poems.

I believe I first read about this particular anthology in Jim Trelease’s The Read-Aloud Handbook when I first read it many, many years ago (in fact, Jim Trelease wrote the introduction for the anthology), and we added it to our home library before Lulu was really old enough to appreciate it.  In fact, it has been a while since we’ve pulled it off the shelf; I think some poetry reading is in order here in the near future at the House of Hope.

I really can’t say enough good things about this volume.  In my opinion, this is a must-have for any home library intended for children’s use.  I’ll leave it at that and end with a few of my own favorite poems from this collection:

Singing-Time

I wake in the morning early

And always, the very first thing,

I poke out my head and I sit up in bed

And I sing and I sing and I sing.

–Rose Fyleman

A Frog and a Flea

A frog and a flea

And a kangaroo

Once jumped for a prize

In a pot of glue;

The kangaroo stuck

And so did the flea,

And the frog limped home

With a fractured knee.

–Cynthia Mitchell

I also wanted to mention a board book anthology that is more appropriate, but just as lovely, for younger children.  Eloise Wilkin’s Poems to Read to the Very Young features many of the same poets and poems as Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young, with the notable difference that Eloise Wilkin’s Poems to Read to the Very Young contains several poems by Robert Louise Stevenson, Christina G. Rosetti, and William Blake.  Josette Frank compiled this collection, and Eloise Wilkin illustrated it.  If you want a durable volume through which you can introduce very young children to poetry, this would be a great choice.  It even includes this gem of a poem that I can remember my own mother reading to me when I was a child:

Merry Sunshine

“Good morning, Merry Sunshine,

How did you wake so soon,

You’ve scared the little stars away

And shined away the moon.

I saw you go to sleep last night

Before I ceased my playing;

How did you get ‘way over there?

And where have you been staying?

“I never go to sleep, dear child,

I just go round to see

My little children of the East,

Who rise and watch for me.

I waken all the birds and bees

And flowers on my way,

And now come back to see the child

Who stayed out late to play.”

–Anonymous

Be sure to check out 5 Minutes for Books for more poetry posts!