POEMS Chosen by Boys and Girls - Book IV

Arranged by Fowler Wright
and Crompton Rhodes

Basil Blackwell
Broad Street, Oxford
MDCCCCXXIV

BOOK IV

... Again, the dream is true:

Again, to each, the well-worn path is new.

PREFACE

        The poems in these little books of verse have been chosen, not by a man or a woman, but by ten thousand boys and girls. This needs some explanation. They are the result of an appeal in Poetry for the assistance of those teachers who love poetry, and who have conveyed their love of poetry to their boys and girls. The appeal at once received the cordial sympathy and support of the entire educational press, and the response was a large number of essays containing lists of poems which were received from teachers in every type of school, public and private, urban and rural, primary and secondary. The poems in each list were those which had appealed most to scholars, which had given them the deepest joy, the highest delight. With singular generosity these lovers of poetry placed at the disposal of the editors the wisdom and experience of years, often with hundreds of children, in many schools. Ten thousand is, indeed, too low a figure to cover the number of collaborators, and to those teachers who contributed these most valuable essays the warm thanks of the publishers and the editors are tendered.

        Apart from the arranging of the poems into books and negotiating copyrights, the editors' work has been, and been only, the ensuring that the poems chosen are those which, under the guidance of lovers of poetry, have carried their beauty into the hearts of the boys and girls - the real collaborators of these books.

S. F.W. & R. C. R.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

        ACKNOWLEDGMENTS for permission to reprint are due to John Murray (for Robert Bridges), A. P. Watt and Son (for William Butler Yeats), Hilaire Belloc, John Drinkwater, the Merton Press, Ltd. (for Constance A.Renshaw and Anita Moor), John Masefield, Sidgwick and Jackson (for Rupert Brooke), and Macmillan, Ltd. (for Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Edward Brown).

CONTENTS

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