Look ! The Sun. An Anthology of Poems for Children
edited by Edith Sitwell. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.)
IT may be a truism that there are two kinds of anthology : the anthology of personal taste and that written for a particular purpose or gathered from a chosen field ; nevertheless it is a distinction worth bearing in mind. If it is admitted, then it would seem that Miss Sitwell has added a volume to her personal anthology without sufficient regard for a child's preferences. A child, if one may generalise a little, likes the sad poems, the horrific poems, the animal poems (all these Miss Sitwell includes in some measure), but also the robust and exciting poems. The four-year-old adores " The Ballad of the Revenge " and " Horatius " and " 0 Captain, my Captain, our fearful trip is done . . ." and even such porrage as " The Inchcape Bell." He simply cannot have enough of it. Miss Sitwell gives too many limp little Chinese poems, too much love-poetry, and even older children (not to say adults) will find Mary Coleridge's " Some hang above the tombs " almost completely empty of any content whatever. From practical experiment we found that Elizabethan spelling (for Marlowe and Shakespeare, for example) was simply a nuisance, and though the short extracts will please connoisseurs, a smaller child when confronted with
Pity.
"Who can but pity the founders of the Pyramid?'' waited, and then commented that it was a rather sudden poem. On the other hand, no praise is too high for the editor's choice of ballads and for the fine extract from " A Song to David," while " Tom o' Bedlam's Song " is printed unabridged, thereby gaining an immense dignity and tragedy. There is a charming coloured scrap from Gertrude Stein, some most beautifully chosen devo- tional poetry and about thirty poems by the editor and her brothers.
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