J. C. Smith
Published: 2018-03-06
Total Pages: 72
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Excerpt from A Book of Verse for Boys and Girls, Vol. 1 With children who have learned to read the pleasure of poetry is not all sensuous: the emotions, too, begin to be stirred. Now we cannot make children feel poetry unless we feel it ourselves and show that we do so by our manner of reading or repeating it. Some explanation will be needed here and there to make the ideas clear enough to be felt: more than this runs the risk of explaining the charm away. If a poem is to delight the mind as well as the ear, it should first be read or said as a whole; for it is only the whole that properly has meaning. Most short poems that are worth knowing are worth knowing by heart. But if these poems be studied and enjoyed as I have said, it matters little how many verses are deliberately learned by heart. Verses that are used to train the voice should no doubt be learned as a set task. But beyond this there is little need to mak a task of an exercise whose true end is to lay up permanent possibilities of delight. That end will be best attained if, after the poems have been studied and enjoyed, the children are left to choose for themselves what pieces they will learn by heart. If the book is in their hands for a year or two, those who have a gift for verse will be found to have learned most of it; the others might try at least to learn one poem from each section. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
