Joseph T. Thomas Jr.

Abstract: This essay argues that Robert Graves’s The Penny Fiddle (1960) is a significant contribution to mid-twentieth-century children’s poetry. Reading The Penny Fiddle alongside several poems included within The Poems of Robert Graves: Chosen by Himself (1958) demonstrates that Graves did not simply write for children but reimagined the child reader as central to the poetic project. The essay examines how The Penny Fiddle constructs the child both as a recurring figure within the poems and as an implied, discerning reader. Framing the collection as a poetic primer that invites young readers into poetry’s pleasures and responsibilities, it contends that Graves presents childhood as a space of moral complexity and imaginative potential.

Keywords: children’s poetry, poetic knowledge, poetics

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During the first half of the twentieth century, prominent poets – including T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, and Gertrude Stein – turned their hand to writing children’s poetry. This development received a shot of adrenaline after World War II, as the postwar baby booms in the United States and United Kingdom[1] spurred the emergence of Anglo-American ‘youth culture’.[2] Robert Graves’s The Penny Fiddle (1960) exemplifies this trend, part of a broader movement in which acclaimed poets began publishing books for young readers. A widely respected poet in both the UK and the US, Graves played a key role in reimagining children not only as readers of poetry but also as poetic subjects and, implicitly, as poets themselves.

In many respects, Graves’s work anticipated the broader interest in childhood that would emerge in 1960s poetry, conjuring a child figure that had until then remained largely unseen. Michael Joseph has compellingly argued that Graves’s interest in children and childhood was not a late-career novelty but a long-standing preoccupation: ‘Although Graves wrote poems he hoped to publish for children as early as 1916, […] it was not until’ the early 1960s ‘that he gathered them into two slim volumes, The Penny Fiddle: Poems for Children (1960) and Ann at Highwood Hall (1964)’.[3] This longstanding fascination also extended to forms typically associated with childhood – nonsense verse, folk tales, and fairy tales – all of which figure centrally in The Penny Fiddle[4] and were well-represented in The Poems of Robert Graves: Chosen by Himself (1958), published just two years earlier.

This essay examines the dual construction of the child in The Penny Fiddle, both as a presence within the poems and as an implied reader outside them. I argue that Graves conceived the collection as a poetic primer – an exploration of the poetic imagination, of reading and meaning-making strategies available to astute readers regardless of their age. Further, I situate this reading within Graves’s broader commitment to childhood, contending that The Penny Fiddle summons a complex and morally ambiguous child figure – one that has too often remained invisible to adult eyes. Like The Poems (1958), The Penny Fiddle is an anthology, some of its poems dating back as far as 1916, some from the 20s, and still others contemporaneous with the collection. As Graves writes in Poetic Unreason, ‘a well-chosen [poetry] anthology should be [like] a medicine chest’ (with the caveat that ‘no medicine and no poetry can ever be effective without the consent and co-operation of the patient’).[5] With The Penny Fiddle Graves has built and stocked a medicine chest accompanied by a canny set of pharmacist-prepared patient notes, a combination that avoids didacticism while advising young readers on the promise and perils of poetry and the poetic enterprise.

We’ll begin, briefly, with Randall Jarrell, who, like Graves, was a poet well acquainted with children and writing for and about them. In ‘Graves and The White Goddess’ (collected in Jarrell’s Third Book of Criticism), Jarrell famously notes that

Graves has never forgotten the child’s incommensurable joys; nor has he forgotten the child’s and the man’s incommensurable, irreducible agonies. He writes naturally and well – cannot keep himself from writing – about bad, and worse, and worst, the last extremities of existence.[6]

Jarrell then quotes the entirety of ‘The Castle’, a poem first published in Poems 1929 and later collected in The Poems of Robert Graves: Chosen by Himself. Now, few would think ‘The Castle’ a children’s poem, but it evokes the darker side of childhood that drew the attention of many other poets of the 50s and 60s.[7] The Poems of Robert Graves contains all ten of the poems Jarrell lists after quoting ‘The Castle’ (including ‘The Haunted House’, ‘Mermaid, Dragon, and Fiend’, ‘The Suicide in the Copse’, ‘The Devil at Berry Pomeroy’, and ‘The Death Room’), all poems, Jarrell reflects, ‘enough to make any reader decide that Graves is a man to whom terrible things have happened’.[8] So, let’s take a look at ‘The Castle’, beginning with the fractured eighth line of the poem (an odd line of eleven-syllable blank verse, broken in two, the first half reading, ‘Machines easy to improvise’). The second half of the broken line ends with the beginning of a new sentence and a new verse paragraph.

No escape,

No such thing; to dream of new dimensions,

Cheating checkmate by painting the king’s robe

So that he slides like a queen;[9]

Such a rich, beautifully torqued quatrain, its lines’ twisty sinews stressed with ambiguities and contradictions that resist conventional meaning making. While the lines tell us that there’s no such thing as escape, checkmate can evidently be cheated with subterfuge or misdirection, illusions created, crucially, with paint – with art, with poetry – the paint (not unlike the painted strings of The Penny Fiddle’s title poem) transmuting the king into a queen via a ‘dream of new dimensions’.

Here we find our first example of Graves’s tendency to summon binary oppositions only to collapse them, fold them into one another, a tendency crucial to poetic knowledge, what Graves calls poetic truth, a truth Joseph characterizes as ‘supra-rational’.[10] This variety of poetic truth is a major aspect of The Penny Fiddle.

‘The Castle’ ends with a pair of alternatives to the ‘dream of new dimensions’ with its painted king sliding like a queen. Graves writes:

Or to cry, ‘Nightmare, nightmare!’

Like a corpse in the cholera-pit

Under a load of corpses.

Or to run the head against these blind walls,

Enter the dungeon, torment the eyes

With apparitions chained two and two,

And go frantic with fear –

To die and wake up sweating by moonlight

In the same courtyard, sleepless as before.

The poem ends, then, with an evocation of death: but it is not necessarily (or only) a literal death, it is a death from which one ‘wake[s] up’, ‘sweating by moonlight’, ‘sleepless’. There’s something of the White Goddess here, a summoning of the muse. However, such summoning is not easy, as poets, unlike the Goddess, are mortal: we wake up in her ‘moonlight’ with images from a ‘dungeon’, ‘apparitions’ that ‘torment the eyes’. Poetry can be, at its best, revelatory, but what it reveals can be hard to take. (Still, even the hardest poetic truths can sustain us, even when, or especially when, they concern the deaths of our friends and the portent of our own.)

Many of the poems Jarrell found so beguiling in The Poems of Robert Graves – even while assuring us (as Jarrell puts it) ‘that Graves is a man to whom terrible things have happened’[11] – nonetheless partake in the rhetoric of childhood, feature the images of nursery rhyme and fairy tale, childhood games and perspectives, while also turning darkly to meditations on death and impermanence. These poems, especially the ones listed by Jarrell in ‘Graves and The White Goddess’, could have appeared in Penny Fiddle, which contains more than few poems about death and ghostly apparitions that ‘torment the eyes’.[12] ‘The Cool Web’, for instance, would be another ideal choice, resonant with ‘The Castle’ in its modulations between dream and nightmare, its meditations on poetry, childhood, and the dangerous power thrumming within both. Graves was in his 30s when he composed ‘The Cool Web’, first published in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1927, yet it anticipates the dark, fairy-tale atmosphere prevalent in his 1958 collection. Commentators have tended to skip over what this poem has to say about childhood, reading it as merely a time of intense feeling absent the ability of verbal expression.

‘The Cool Web’ begins by seemingly dividing the adult world (and adult perceptions – or interpretations – of that world) from the child’s, locating that divide in the ability to speak poetry. He writes,

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,

How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,

How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.[13]

This divide, of course, depends on our interpretation of the next line:

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,

And speech to dull the rose’s cruel scent,

We spell away the overhanging night,

We spell away the soldiers and the fright. (ibid)

Spell – to work magic, to make words, to tell a story (from the Anglo-Saxon word for narration) – is important here: we ‘spell’ away the fright, the black wastes of evening sky, even the dreadful tall soldiers: but also important is the humbler we, a pronoun with ambiguous antecedents.

Before unpacking that ambiguous we, let me turn to another poem, ‘At Best, Poets’. Published in Graves’s 1964 collection, Man Does, Woman Is, ‘At Best, Poets’ also hinges on a provocative we without a clear antecedent. The we in question begins the final couplet. The poem reads,

Woman with her forests, moons, flowers, waters,

And watchful fingers:

We claim no magic comparable to hers –

At best, poets; at worst, sorcerers.[14]

In her unpublished oral presentation, Adriana Marinelli observes that the poem’s title ‘evokes a powerful duality,’ one that reveals itself as a sharp opposition.[15] This opposition, I would add, echoes the tensions found in ‘The Cool Web’. In the final line of the poem, the poet is portrayed as a truly magical being – inseparable from magic itself – while the sorcerer appears merely as someone who uses magic, with the power remaining external to them. To borrow an analogy from ‘The Penny Fiddle’: the poet is like the fiddle, the source of music, whereas the sorcerer is the player, dependent on the instrument to produce sound. The ambiguity lies in exactly who (or what) these final words describe, an ambiguity summoned by the we. This we likely refers to an absent ‘men’ – a trace summoned by the poem’s implicit opposition of men and women. However, the woman of line 1 is singular. The we of line 3, plural. Yet the woman is associated with pluralities: forests, flowers, waters, fingers – even moons (an evocative detail, as the Earth’s moon is a solitary satellite. If we read the plural moons as referencing the phases of the moon – the new, the crescent, the gibbous, and the full – then Graves has nested the plural within the singular). One is then tempted to read the implied ‘men’ as yet another plural category existing ‘with’ woman: Woman with her forests, moons, flowers, waters, watchful fingers, and men. The binary deconstructed. This troubles the final line. The most conventional reading is simply that men, with ‘no magic comparable to hers,’ are at best, poets; at worst, sorcerers. But, the nesting of men within woman (the plural within the singular) offers the possibility that it is the magical woman who might be poet at best, sorcerer at worst.

Marinelli writes,

In Gravesian terms, woman is the subject of his (love) poetry, and more importantly, the vital embodiment of the White Goddess. As the ultimate muse and source of poetic inspiration, she herself embodies a complex unity of opposing forces.[16]

Graves’s tendency to unify oppositions is key here: the poem’s opposition of men and woman, muddied by the possibility of reading either as ‘at best, poets; at worst, sorcerers,’ is deconstructed by the poem, even if unintentionally so, the poem figuring them less as opposites than as an occasion to reconcile two seemingly exclusive categories often opposed but nevertheless dependent. After all, neither gender nor sexuality is binary, and neither woman nor man monolithic. Therein lies the magic of poetry, a magic more powerful than that wielded by sorcerers. In ‘The Cool Web’, the opposition is between child and Adult: ‘Children are dumb to say how hot the day is’ whereas ‘we have speech, to chill the angry day’. The opposition seems clear. But the we may not necessarily refer to adults (although this is the conventional or more probable reading). Of course, the we could refer to ‘poets’ (implying, of course, adult poets). Yet it could also refer to ‘children’ – the antecedent actually in the text of the poem. (Again, in ‘At Best, Poets,’ the we likely refers to ‘men’ who do not appear in the poem; they are only implied; likewise, in ‘The Cool Web’, the antecedent ‘adults’ does not appear in the poem.) However, even if the we does refer to children, are they literal children or metaphoric children, poets, perhaps, that seem children when compared to the Goddess, the immortal hand or eye who facilitates the poet’s ability to see these dreadful images anew, and, in seeing, craft them into poetry, spelling the angry heat of the hot day chill?

The poem functions most complexly when the we in ‘we spell away the soldiers’ is read ambiguously, referring to both adults and children. Graves freights the poem with ambiguity so that it can bear both possibilities. As in ‘At Best, Poets,’ the poem reconciles its oppositions while maintaining their poetic reactivity. The child is the parent to the adult; the line between adult and child blurrier than we’d like to believe: every adult, after all, was a child (and even if every child does not become an adult, many do). To emphasize the interpenetration of these opposites, the poem ends with ‘the wide glare of the children’s day,’ within which even adult poets live:

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,

Throwing off language and its watery clasp

Before our death, instead of when death comes,

Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,

Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,

We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

This ending, then, is a kind of a racemic mixture of opposites: beginnings and endings, childhood and old age, the magical poet and quotidian literalist. The poem ends, much like ‘The Castle,’ with an evocation of death, our mortality, and with an exhortation to (and illustration of) the power of poetry, an exhortation not unlike the one found in ‘Warning to Children,’ the final poem in The Penny Fiddle (and one that appears alongside ‘The Cool Web’ in part II of the 1958 collection, the section containing the poems Jarrell mentions in ‘Graves and The White Goddess,’ poems particularly resonant with childhood and fairy tale).

Compare the concluding lines of ‘The Cool Web’ with ‘Warning to Children,’ which like ‘The Castle’ and ‘The Cool Web’ cautions readers, particularly children, about the nature of imagination and the physical world while also exalting poetry, the imagination’s instrument. The poem explores the tension between fantasy and (for lack of a better phrase) the real world, warning that while imagination enchants and allures, it can also lead one into confusion or even danger if not balanced with a sense of reality (one needs both chemistry and alchemy):

Children, if you dare to think

Of the greatness, rareness, muchness,

Fewness of this precious only

Endless world in which you say

You live, you think of things like this.[17]

The children here are not dumb; they are able to ‘say’ as well as ‘dare to think’ of the superlative world constituted by – or at least infused with – poetic knowledge. The list of ‘things’ our young poets ‘think’ suggests nested, recursive images, a procession of Russian dolls wending endlessly along a Möbius strip. They ‘think of things like this’:

Blocks of slate enclosing dappled

Red and green, enclosing tawny

Yellow nets, enclosing white

And black acres of dominoes,

Where a neat brown paper parcel

Tempts you to untie the string.

And inside that parcel? An island. And on the island? A large tree. And growing from the tree? A husky fruit. And inside that fruit? More:

Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled

Red and green, enclosed by tawny

Yellow nets, enclosed by white

And black acres of dominoes.

And there? Yet another ‘brown paper parcel,’ yet this time the children are warned:

Who dares undo the parcel

Finds himself at once inside it,

On the island, in the fruit,

Blocks of slate about his head.

And yet, the poem ends as it begins, with the conditional ‘if’ of

If he then should dare to think

Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,

Greatness of this endless only

Precious world in which he says

He lives – he then unties the string.

Note the reversal of the list of superlatives. The poem begins:

Of the greatness, rareness, muchness,

Fewness of this precious only

Endless world.

This tercet, a perfect reversal of the closing list, a mise en abyme of signifiers of poetic image and metaphor, endlessly nested signifiers within endless, nested signifiers, all the way down. That is, while Graves insists that the poetic imagination can transport us to new, enchanting places, free us from the traps of the quotidian, he admits also that the poetic imagination can craft illusions that might trap or mislead us (my readings of ‘The Cool Web’ and ‘At Best, Poets’ arguably exemplifying these dangers). Graves describes how children might be drawn into fantastical worlds, but warns that those who enter may never find their way back, like the damned hero of many fairy tales who, once tasting fairy bread, can never return to the mortal world, may never know which world is real, which is Fäerie. Overall, ‘Warning to Children’ reflects a blend of fascination and caution regarding the power of imagination, encouraging both a love for creativity and an awareness of its potential pitfalls. It speaks to the dual nature of fantasy: both beautiful and perilous – indeed, beautiful because it’s perilous.

This ambiguity informs much of The Penny Fiddle, a collection modelling the poetic imagination, a preoccupation also found within The Poems (1958). In ‘“The Penny Fiddle” and Poetic Truth’, Joseph explicates the ‘arguments for poetic truth’ found in Graves’ The Penny Fiddle, arguments, he maintains, that are articulated in poems ‘light-hearted [and] accessible in terms of topic, imagery, metre and diction’ while remaining ‘deeply aesthetically self-conscious,’ a poetry perfectly tuned to ‘young readers sensitive to poetry at the level of intuition and play’.[18] Joseph’s argument is complex, on the one hand arguing that Graves’ work ‘offers proofs that poetry is not contingent, but transcends all barriers of gender, social class, and of course age,’ while, on the other, maintaining that Graves ‘proffers no universal claims. His truth is not ontologically autonomous but reified in the experience of poets and dependent on the receptivity of poets’. By ‘poet’ Joseph does not mean ‘authors skilled in verse craft, but individuals born with a particular cast of mind – those able to grasp and abide by poetic truth’. He concludes with the assertion that The Penny Fiddle, and its title poem in particular,

legitimat[es] the circumstances of childhood, by demonstrating that although suffering may appear purposeless and incomprehensible, it grounds the poetic process, the process of making meaning. It instructs readers to disregard nothing – not their own clumsiness and frustration, not even an apparently trite, didactic, cast-off children’s rhyme – because anything may be transvalued by poetic truth, regardless of gender, race or age. Poetic truth alone determines what has meaning and worth. (ibid)

The children of ‘The Cool Web’ recall ‘Allie’, which features a first-person child speaker who exemplifies the poet’s ability to determine what has meaning and worth. Joseph has given us an entire essay on the four-stanza, thirty-six-line, ‘Allie,’ the second poem in The Penny Fiddle: ‘“Allie” and the Lost War’. ‘At first glance,’ Joseph proposes, ‘Allie’ is a children’s poem; it ‘seems unambiguously an ode to lost childhood, and a variation on the ancient theme Northrop Frye calls the “Framework of all literature”’: ‘how man once lived in a Golden Age, ... how that world was lost . . . and how someday we may be able to get it back again’.[19] However, take a closer, second look, Joseph recommends, and the poem, first published only two years after the close of World War I, transforms into a war poem, or more precisely, he contends, it becomes ‘a poem that is and is not a war poem, and is and is not a children’s poem’ (p. 264). I advise a third look – not at the close of WWI but at the close of this essay; read here, alongside The Poems (1958); read here, not in Country Sentiment but set in the pages of The Penny Fiddle (subtitled: Poems for Children) where it immediately follows the ars poetica that is its title poem; read here, Allie’s call becomes another spell, this one inside a children’s poem.

Allie, call the birds in,

The birds from the sky.

Allie calls, Allie sings

[…]

Allie calls, Allie sings.[20]

Again we have a poem about poetry; Allie does not make music with a penny fiddle but draws it from within herself. Allie calls. Allie sings. A young Orpheus, Allie makes poetry, and that poetry makes the world. And that poetry impossibly unites the two conflicting readings of war (death) and childhood (life).

‘Allie’ is (initially) much lighter, admittedly, than some of the earlier poems we’ve discussed. The speaker (which we later discover to be a child: this one not ‘dumb to say how hot the day is, | How hot the scent is of the summer rose’) calls upon inspiration – calls, if you will, on the White Goddess – to organize the world; perhaps to sing it into being, remaking the world by turning it into poetry, into song. Yes, it is Allie who calls, who sings, but only after the exhortation of the poem’s speaker. Strangely, however, the poem ends with the child speaker being summoned along with the other animals. For the child, the poet, is bound up in the material world and its forests, moons, flowers, waters – never apart from it, even if inspiration may be.

The poetic enterprise, of course, is often conceived as a bid for immortality; you’ll recall Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55. Although the rhyme may outlast gilded the monuments of princes, and, arguably, the rhyme’s subject,[21] such immortality is a fantasy, and a doomed one at that:

Allie, call the children,

Children from the green.
Allie calls, Allie sings,

Soon they run in.
First there came
Tom and Madge,

Kate and I who’ll not forget
How we played by the water’s edge

Till the April sun set.

Like Tom and Madge and Kate, the speaker here may believe that he’ll ‘not forget | How we played by water’s edge,’ but that metaphorically ladened April sun will eventually set, and, grammatically, this final tercet stresses that fact – life’s end embedded in springtime’s beginning – for if the speaker will not forget their poetic play ‘Till the April sun set,’ forget he shall, as shall we all. The Penny Fiddle reminds us – and its child readers – of this fact, reminds us all of the troubled power that comes with poetic play and the poetic truths it can reveal.

Joseph T. Thomas Jr. is a poet and scholar. He is a Full Professor at San Diego State University, where he teaches children’s literature and American poetry in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature. He is the author of two books: Poetry’s Playground (Wayne State UP, 2007) and Strong Measures (Make Now, 2007), as well as numerous essays and poems. He can be found on Bluesky @josephsdsu.bsky.social.