A Trio of Poetry Books for Children

Nancy Willard's A Visit to William Blake's Inn, inspired by Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, is handsomely illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen and opens with a curiously misleading introductory anecdote, about how Willard first heard Blake's "Tyger, Tyger" when she was seven years old and received shortly afterward a mysteriously autographed volume of Blake's Songs. One might assume from this that Willard will offer, because of her own childhood fascination with Blake, an edition of Blake's Songs for children. This is not the case. Instead, she has written seventeen poems for children, many in the familiar cadences of Blake's best-known lyrics, about an imaginary inn staffed by dragons, angels, and a rabbit and owned by (to judge by the poems) a prosperous, cleanshaven William Blake, who (to judge by the poems) is a sort of spiritual guide to children and animals.

Despite Blake's presence as personage and cadence, one has the uneasy feeling, reading these poems, that their author has somehow lost sight of William Blake in the grand plan of her book. The second poem, for example, introduces "Blake's Celestial Limousine," in which the speaker (a small boy in the illustrations) travels to Blake's Inn. The limousine, we find out in the last lines, is "a wish that only flew / when I climbed in and found it true." We reach these lines, however, after hearing from the driver, apparently an angel clad in a mackintosh and boots, that "all luggage must be carried flat / and worn discreetly on your hat / or served with mustard on a bun." The absurdity here is more Edward Lear than William Blake, and this jarring juxtaposition is characteristic of several poems in the collection. Blake's tiger, of course, makes several appearances, but so do the king of cats, a wise cow, a bear, a rabbit, and an assortment of small animals. The tiger, whose energy, strength, and cruelty led Blake to wonder about its Creator, has here been domesticated, contritely confessing to Blake that it has eaten "half the roast and all the bread" and "the three / lumps of sugar by your tea" and sweetly asking Blake for a bedtime story which will cure its stomach-ache, in a poem which ends:

Now I lay me down to sleepwith bear and rabbit, bird and sheep.If I should dream before I wake,may I dream of William Blake.

As these two poems indicate, Willard is reaching for larger meaning than one is accustomed to in poems for children: her poetry is about the power of the imagination, about the power of poetry to heal. Yet too often the poems try to achieve meaning by echoing or mentioning Blake. "Two Sunflowers Move into the Yellow Room" does both, to a much diminished end:

"Ah, William, we're weary of weather,"said the sunflowers, shining with dew."Our traveling habits have tired us.Can you give us a room with a view?"

They arranged themselves at the windowand counted the steps of the sun,and they both took root in the carpetwhere the topaz tortoises run.

Unfortunately, the echo wil be lost on the child unfamiliar with Blake, and the child will wonder: How do sunflowers travel? How will they cease to travel in the inn, since they are at the window?

A longer poem, "The Wise Cow Makes WAY, ROOM, and BELIEVE," comes closer to offering real meaning. Here the Wise Cow, when told to "make" the abstractions named in the title, interprets the request literally, making WAY a nest of grass and hay, ROOM a loom on which weather can be weaved, and BELIEVE a boat rather similar to the...