The Children’s Poet

Kevin Coolidge

I lie in bed. The wind howls. I feel the cold, dark breath of it. I cannot sleep. I toss aside my soft, warm blanket, and step on something cold and hard. I swear silently, so I don’t wake my wife. She’s wrestled with sleep and finally lost. I bend to retrieve a small, metal car. I can’t stop the tears. I can’t erase the memories. There will be no sleep for me tonight. Perhaps, not for a very long time…

Depression, anxiety, lack of sleep--losing a child is a horrific experience no parent should have to face. You don’t get over the loss. You may never accept it, but you may find ways to cope with it the best you can.

During one sleepless night when a mourning father needed to finish a poem for a publishing deadline, he drew upon that grief. He then wrote the poignant and moving poem called Little Boy Blue.

The poem told the story of a father longing for his little son who had died. The verses contained remembrances of his lost children, his own lost childhood, his lost parents, and even his own toys from childhood that his absentee-father had sent him for Christmas.

The rusted toy soldier and dusty little toy dog soon became universal symbols for anyone mourning a lost child, and more than any other poem, Little Boy Blue helped establish the father as a respected poet and a significant American writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. That grieving father was Eugene Field.

Few people today know anything about Eugene Field, the poet or the man, or the stories behind his poems. In The Doorstep Orphan: Eugene Field and a Trilogy of His Best Loved Poems, written by Dr. Jean A. Lukesh, we get an examination of Field’s short life, as well as an image of the man, the poet, and the loving father.

He often idealized childhood, as his own was filled with tragedy and insecurity. Field was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850. He was the second of six children, but four of his brothers and sisters died in infancy. In 1856, when he was just six and his brother Roswell was five, their mother and their new baby sister both died. His father was prominent lawyer and never remarried. He loved his sons but could spend very little time with them. He sent them to be with guardians, passed along for someone else to raise, essentially a “doorstep orphan”.

It’s ironic that this “doorstep orphan” became the beloved poet of childhood. His poems were filled with his own memories and feelings, and if you know his poems, you know the man. You may remember pieces of his poems from your own childhood, and even a century later they still sing to the hearts of readers. I too remember. I remember standing on the Green in Wellsboro Pennsylvania, listening to the gurgle of a fountain, and imagining sailing off in a wooden shoe on a wave of dew…

The gingham dog? Or the calico cat? Email me at from_my_shelf@yahoo.com and let me know. Miss a past column? Read them all at http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com Hobo favors the calico cat, because his best friend Gypsy is a real life calico…