Joyce Kilmer

Chapter 102: FOR A CHILD

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About This Book

A biographical memoir accompanies a wide selection of poems, essays, and letters that together trace the author’s life, friendships, and artistic growth. The poems alternate between nature and devotional themes, domestic observations, and wartime and memorial pieces composed both abroad and at home. Essays and correspondence reveal literary preferences, personal affections, and religious sensibilities, while photographs and facsimiles supplement the personal record. The collection balances lyrical short poems with occasional longer pieces and critical or biographical sketches, offering a compact portrait of a poet engaged with faith, ordinary life, and the moral and emotional stakes of his historical moment.

FOR A CHILD

His mind has neither need nor power to know

The foolish things that men call right and wrong.

For him the streams of pleasant love-wind flow,

For him the mystic, sleep-compelling song.

Through love he rules his love-made universe,

And sees with eyes by ignorance made keen

The fauns and elves whom older eyes disperse,

Great Pan and all the fairies with their queen.

King gods, I pray, bestow on him this dole,

Not wisdom, wealth, nor mighty deeds to do,

But let him keep his happy pagan soul,

The poet-vision, simple, free and true,

To hunt the rainbow-gold and phantom lights,

And meet with dryads on the wooded heights.