Education: Children’s Laureate

Wynken, Blynken and Nod one night Sailed off in a wooden shoe —

Sailed on a river of crystal light, Into a sea of dew. —

“Where are you going and what do you wish?” The old moon asked the three. —’

“We have come to fish for the her ring fish”

That live in this beautiful sea; Nets of silver and gold have we!”

Said Wynken, BlynkenAnd Nod.

Such was the music once to be heard in a certain house on a certain street in Chicago. The man that made it, a gaunt fellow with a nervous manner, very fond of practical jokes, used to sit up in bed late at night and early in the morning, writing, reciting and writing more. Of an afternoon he would go down to a newspaper office (The Record) where he was employed and have the poems put into type.

He took extraordinary delight in the amount of poetry he could prepare for a single morning’s edition of the newspaper, and often he published doggerel that was very far from being musical, or was ludicrous alliterative nonsense like this:

A flimflam flopped from a fillimaloo, Where, the pollywog pinkled so pale,

And the pipkin piped a petulant “pooh” To the garrulous gawp of the gale.

“Oh, woe to the swap of the sweeping swipe

That booms on the hobbling bay!” Snickered the snark to the snoozing snipe

That lurked where the lamprey lay.

The gluglug glinked in the glimmering gloam.

Where the buzbuz bumbled his bee. . . .

None the less, Wynken, Blynken and Nod and another lullaby, Little Boy Blue, were poetic masterpieces. And Eugene Field, the gaunt man who wrote them, put such a lyric fluency into whatever he wrote that he became known as “the children’s laureate.” He is best remembered as that today. No grown-up wishing to be popular with children allows himself to forget the words to:

Tiddde-de-dumpty, tiddle-de-dee— The spider courted the frisky flea; Tiddle-de-dumpty, tiddle-de-doo— The flea ran off with the bugaboo! . . .

The house in Chicago was what reminded people of Eugene Field, who has been dead 30 years. Last week news got out that the house had been sold and that trip-hammers would rat-a-tat-tat on a new eight-story apartment house after the old walls had been torn down. They were damaged by fire last spring and Poet Field’s widow has been living in Wisconsin.

The poet himself has been lying since 1895 amid unpretentious surroundings in a Chicago cemetery, but within the fortnight it was announced that the Episcopal church of Kenilworth, 111. (village on Lake Michigan, 16 mi. north of Chicago, where lived William C. Englard Jr., a grandson of Eugene Field), is to have a memorial window and a “poet’s corner”; that the poet’s body will be moved there, together with personal mementos saved by his widow in the hope that their home would be preserved as a memorial.

Field’s own room will be reproduced by the Chicago Historical Society, a room whose shelves and chimney corner were cluttered with toys, dolls, and historic trophies such as the axe with which Gladstone, statesman of Britain, took his exercise; the bond that was given for the release of Jefferson Davis, president of the Southern Confederacy; letters of Charles Lamb; and manuscripts in Field’s own hand, including, perhaps, Seein’ Things at Night, or

Rumpty-tumpty, pimplety-pan— The flubdub courted a catamaran But timplety-topplety, timpity-tare— The flubdub wedded the big blue bear!