Every once in a while a story comes along that is unlike any other. Dancing Birds, the featured story from our September/October 2015 issue, is such a story. What makes it so special? Yes, the characters and setting are exotic. A Welsh girl named Glas lives with her family in a French-speaking village in Quebec. Glas makes mechanical animals in her attic. She misses her father, who is in Denmark, helping his sick brother. She misses her grandmother, who has gone home to Wales. Then her cousin Maskine arrives, sad and silent. But beyond the unusual characters and setting, the story, by 11-year-old Ayla Schultz, is special for the mood it creates. When we finish reading it, our mood has changed too. We feel the sadness, the loneliness, and the final glimmer of happiness. We are in the world of the story. How does Ayla do it? Read the story carefully, and you will see that it is full of descriptions that engage our senses. We see Glas’s dark blue eyes and her grandmother’s red coat. We smell and taste the cinnamon hot chocolate. The bare trees, icy water, and freezing rain tell us how cold it is. But above all, sounds—and especially silence—set the mood of this story. In the first scene, Glas sits silently atop a sand dune, staring at the chilly scene below, thinking about happier times. When cousin Maskine arrives, she doesn’t say a word for weeks. Finally, she speaks a few words to Glas, then grows silent again. Maskine is deeply worried about her family back in Denmark. Sometimes the silence is broken by a doorbell, a knock, or a slammed door. The postman is chatty when he brings a letter. Then all is quiet. In the story’s final scene, Glas has invited Maskine up to her attic workshop. Glas silently hands her the key to a beautiful mechanical bird. From their one conversation, we know that the girls have a bond. They share a love of birds and the way they appear to dance on the sand. Maskine turns the key and the mechanical bird lifts it legs one by one, just like the birds on the beach. For the first time since she arrived, Maskine smiles. No words are spoken, and the story ends with this perfect moment of understanding. The next time you write a story, think about sounds. Which sounds will you include, and which will you leave out? Will your characters reveal themselves through dialogue or through their thoughts? Sometimes a connection can be made between two people from a shared experience, without any words being exchanged. See if you can create a mood that stays with your reader long after the story has ended.
Teaching Children
Free Verse and Kids’ Poetry
Most of the poetry we publish in Stone Soup is free verse. Free verse is the most prose-like form of poetry. It is very popular amongst adult poets and it is also very common in American schools. Free verse may by rhymed or unrhymed. What defines it is that it is unmetered. Walt Whitman was the American poet who popularized the form. Here is an example by Whitman. This poem is called The Noisless Patient Spider. “A noiseless, patient spider, I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated; Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself; Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them. “And you, O my Soul, where you stand, Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them; Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold; Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul. As free verse, Whitman is not constrained by meter or by rhyme. The poem consists of two grammatical sentences, one for each stanza. I’m not going to parse the poem here. If you are interested, look up the poem in Google Books. There are many commentaries. I’ll offer you this commentary on The Noiseless Patient Spider for those of you who want to delve further in the poem. For my purposes here, I will just say that by choosing free verse Whitman is able to focus on other things — to say things he couldn’t say if otherwise constrained by form. The language is poetic — .. “till the ductile anchor hold;/Till the gossamer thread you fling…” This is not prose. The great 20th-century American poet, Robert Frost, rejected this style of poetry for himself. Famously, in an 1935 speech at the Milton Academy he said, “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” We at Stone Soup believe that this is a style that more easily lets children get someplace deep with their poems. If you want to think of it as Robert Frost did — then its a style of poetry that gives the young poet a handicap. It lets young poets focus on content and language but doesn’t impose an overly consisting of structured meter. Anyone with a free verse poem to share by a child is encouraged to do so in the comments.
Poem by a Child, Age 12, Published in 1913 in St. Nicholas Magazine
Poem by a twelve-year-old published in 1913. This poem, A Song Of Home, is a poem written by a child age 12. Originally published in 1913 in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas it is a poem from another time. The poem starts, “Oh, pretty mate of the crimson breast,/Do you remember your little nest….” The poem goes on to speak of the robin living and loving in the cherry tree. I think to better appreciate this poem it is helpful to recall that it was written when writers of natural history routinely wrote about animals, birds, and insects as if they were characters with human attributes. You can open nearly any natural history from the early decades of the 20th century to find engaging stories about the creatures being discussed. It isn’t science writing as we have come to think of it, but it is what makes even encyclopedic works like Dawson’s birds of California (1923) refreshing reading today. The engagement natural history writers had with the creatures they studied as characters in life dramas informs classic works of children’s literature such as Wind in the Willows (1908). I think it is in this literary context that a poem such as A Song of Home should be understood. I realize that the language of this poem with its rhymes and its more ordered rhythm can be distancing. I suggest asking your students or your child to close their eyes when you read to them. Read it a couple times. Let the sound of the language speak for itself. A SONG OF HOME by Evadne Scott (age 12) Oh, pretty mate of the crimson breast, Do you remember your little nest, Far o’er the fields for miles and miles, Where the blue Pigeon River smiles? Soon I know you’ll be on the wing, To the old home, to build and sing; To live and love in the cherry-tree, With tiny birdlings, one, two, three. Carry for me a message dear – A song of home – and sing it near The window where I used to play, When you sing your song at break of day. Take it back to the cherry-tree Take it to your nestlings three; In among the blossoms sing, In among the flowers of spring. Back to my loved ones, dear as ever, Back to the old home by the river; Let me burden your tiny wing With the memories I long to bring.
