Deepa Agarwal - 100 Great Poems for Children

Author, poet and translator, Deepa Agarwal writes for both children and adults and has over fifty published books. A frequent contributor to magazines and journals in India and abroad, she has also edited and compiled several anthologies. She has received, among others, the NCERT National Award for Childrens Literature in 1993 for her picture book Ashoks New Friends, while her historical fiction Caravan to Tibet was on the IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) Honour List 2008. Her work has been translated into several Indian and foreign languages. Her recent titles include Chanakya: The Master of Statecraft (Puffin Books) and The Wish-fulfilling Cow and Other Classic Indian Tales (Scholastic India). Published in Red Turtle by Rupa Publications India Pvt. Published in Red Turtle by Rupa Publications India Pvt.

Ltd 2015 7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj New Delhi 110002 Introduction Copyright Deepa Agarwal 2015 Anthology copyright Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2015 Copyright for the individual pieces vests with the respective authors or their estates. While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission, this has not been possible in all cases; any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions. Pages 195197 are extensions of the copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-81-291-3735-7 First impression 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The moral right of the authors has been asserted. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publishers prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. To all lovers of poetry CONTENTS Rabindranath TagoreGeorge MacDonaldKabirChristina RossettiRuskin BondRobert Louis StevensonKeki DaruwallaWilliam WordsworthMary AustinEmily DickinsonWilliam Brighty RandsToru DuttCharles KingsleyNatasha SharmaSusan CoolidgeWilliam Henry DaviesK. SatchidanandanPercy Bysshe ShelleySatyendranath DuttaRudyard KiplingLouisa May AlcottSubhadra Kumari ChauhanW.F. HolmesWilliam HowittWilliam ShakespeareJoyce KilmerJerry PintoT.S. EliotMatthew ArnoldManoj DasColley CibberElizabeth Barrett BrowningDavid Herbert LawrenceCharles and Mary LambHeinrich HoffmanAlgernon Charles SwinburneGulzarW.B.

YeatsSukumar RayWilliam BlakeShreekumar VarmaWalter de la MareDash BenhurWilliam Ernest HenleyVinda KarandikarJohn DonneH.W. LongfellowThomas HoodAnonymousWalt WhitmanJohn KeatsEdward LearSivakami VelliangiriJohn MiltonLi PoSaroj PadkiAlfred Lord TennysonKatherine MansfieldRobert BurnsRobert BrowningLewis CarrollSarojini NaiduAlexander Sergeyevich PushkinSir Walter ScottAlfred NoyesEunice de SouzaJames Whitcomb RileyAdil JussawalaArthur William Edgar OShaughnessyBarry CornwallAnushka RavishankarOliver Wendell HolmesSampurna ChattarjiWilliam Cullen BryantBeheroze ShroffThomas HardyOliver GoldsmithHarindranath ChattopadhyayaLord ByronTemsula AoLascelles AbercrombieAnju MakhijaAlexander PopeMallika GopalAlfred Edward HousmanRalph Waldo EmersonK. Ayyappa PanikerAbbie Farwell BrownAmbrose BierceSamuel Taylor ColeridgeShanta AcharyaGerard Manley HopkinsRobert BridgesAnupa LalElla Wheeler WilcoxNirendranath ChakrabartyPaul Laurence DunbarJohn ClareViky AryaDeepa Agarwal INTRODUCTION What is it about poetry that a verse you read in your childhood stays with you for the rest of your life? Is it the rhythm that seems to match the pulse of your heartbeat? Or the music of the words that resonates in your head for days on end? Maybe its a sentiment that connects with some deeply felt emotion within you. It could even be some meaning that you cannot put into words but sense intuitively in a poem. We first discover poetry as babies, in the lullabies our mothers and fathers sing to us, or the nonsense rhymes that grandparents, uncles and aunts repeat when they play with us. Later, we learn nursery rhymes and chant verses such as Hara Samundar, Gopi Chander or Oranges and Lemons while playing.

And as we grow older we are introduced to a wider variety of poemsfunny and serious, thoughtful and inspirational. We have to memorize them in class too, which is so much easier, I always felt, than learning history dates or your thirteen times multiplication table. When I was asked to put this collection together, I was delighted to get an opportunity to share some of the poems I had loved as a child (and still do) with readers who might not have discovered them so far. But of course, I gave serious thought to what you, the child of today, might like to read. So what did I assemble? Poems are written on so many different themes and convey such a variety of moods. Some delight us with their unusual use of language, others with the heart-warming sentiments they express.

Some are about the familiar things in our lives, like relationships dear to us and our ordinary, everyday experiences. Others open our eyes to ideas, situations and events far removed from us. Talking about relationships, innumerable poems have been composed on mothers. I have selected four here. The Scientist, the very first poem, is by Rabindranath Tagore. Beautifully translated from the Bengali original by Arunava Sinha, it is about a child sharing the sense of wonder and curiosity he experiences when face to face with natural phenomena and his own explanations for these to his mother: Do you know for whom They are trying to bloom Do you think that they dont have Mothers just like mine? Then we have another famous classicSubhadra Kumari Chauhans much-loved Hindi poem This Kadamb Tree, lively with mischief and warm with love.

Further on, in Viky Aryas charming Mas Houseagain a translation from Hindiwe have an evocative word picture of a nurturing mother. Anupa Lals Views and Woes of a Teenager is in a different veina humorous take on a teenagers exasperation with his mother. Typically it ends: Shes not so bad After all, she is my mother! Talking about fathers, Alfred Noyess Daddy Fell into the Pond is a comic piece that would make anyone smile. I deliberately chose this one rather than his more popular The Highwayman, even though that is an old favourite. There are poems about grandparents toothoughtful ones such as Mallika Gopals Glimpse of my Great-Grandmother and enthusiastically affectionate ones like Grannys Come to Our House by James Whitcomb Riley. The delight a baby brings to one and all is expressed in poems like Where did You Come from, Baby Dear? by George Macdonald, who wrote so many wonderful books for children.