Early Stories as Poetry

For the past several years I have been investigating the stories that children tell spontaneously, analyzing them with various structural and symbolic techniques.¹ From the time that children are around the age of five years, their stories become comprehensible in terms of linear sequences—beginnings, middles, and endings. Before that age, however, the stories are something of a mystery. They are simply not fictional narratives in the accepted definition of the term.² So how should they be analyzed?

Following are some examples of the kinds of stories told by two-year-olds. The first were collected in a private nursery school in New York City by Dan Mahony, mostly while he was lying on the floor. He was well known to the children and had regularly played with them for many months before he began collecting stories.

(boy)    The monkeysThey went up skyThey fall downChoo choo train in the skyThe train fell down in the skyI fell down in the sky in the waterI got on my boat and my legs hurtDaddy fall down in the sky.

(girl)    The cat went on the cakiesThe cat went on the carThe cookie was in my nose The cookie went on the fireman's hatThe fireman's hat went on the bucketThe cookie went on the carouselThe cookie went on the puzzleThe cookie went on the doggie.

The next group of stories was collected from a rural black community in the Piedmont Carolinas. The collector was Shirley Heath, who spent seven years studying this community; these stories were collected in the homes of the two-year-olds who told them.³

(story 1)    WayFarNowIt a church bellRingingDey singingYou hear itI hear it

(story 2)    UpWay up dereAll time upEarniePete got it [potato chips]All up dere.

(story 3)    Tessie Mae comeCome round hereCome dumDa-dum, Da-dumD ad um.

(story 4)    TrackCan't go to the trackDat TrackTo dat train trackBig train on the trackPetey down by de TrackMom git imTrackTrain trackHe come back.

These two groups of children are ethnically distinct, and the ways that they learn narrative are quite different. The two-year-olds in the first group are often read to. The two-year-olds in the second group are seldom read to, although they do hear fanciful accounts of real events. Nevertheless, the stories seem to have these common characteristics:

1. 1. When set down in this way, to show the natural pauses between statements, they have a line-by-line character. They are told as lines, not as sentences.

2. 2. Insofar as a beat is detectable, it is generally a strong beat in the manner of most nursery rhymes. For instance, "Old King Cole was a merry old soul" has a strong trochaic beat, and the four stresses make it trochaic tetrameter. Although the children's stories contain more metrical variety, they too rely on a strong metrical beat.

3. 3. In addition to these metrical and rhythmic elements, however, there are also repeated sounds, including rhymes, alliteration, and consonance. For example, throughout the verses listed above, there is much repetition of similar sounds: articles (the): pronouns (they, I); agents (cat, cookie); active verbs (fall down, come, hear, went on); and locatives (down, up, on, dere, sky track). There are alliterations (choo-choo, cat-cakes, car-car, cookie-carousel, da-dum, traintrack), consonance (carousel-puzzle, hat-bucket), and rhymes (ringing-singing, come-dum, track-back).

We have no further information on the Carolina collection. In the New York collection, however, as the children get older, they generally drop out these verselike elements and tell more prosaic stories. But even when older children are in the habit of telling coherent narratives, they sometimes regress to these earlier forms. Thus, at four years of age, after telling us fairly logical stories for a year, Cathy regressed to the following, in a manner reminiscent of Ruth Weir's classic recording...