Hilda Conkling
Reading edition
Hilda Conkling, most gifted of recent infant prodigies, was born at Catskill-on-Hudson, New York, October 8, 1910. The daughter of Grace Hazard Conkling (see page 207), she came to Northampton, Massachusetts, with her mother when she was three years old and has lived there since, a normal out-of-doors little girl.
Hilda began to write poems—or rather, to talk them—at the age of four. Since that time, she has created one hundred and fifty little verses, many of them astonishing in exactness of phrase and beauty of vision. Hilda “tells” her poem and her mother copies it down, arranges the line-divisions and reads it to the child for correction. Conceding a possible half-conscious shaping by Mrs. Conkling, the quality which shines behind all of Hilda’s little facets of loveliness is a straightforward ingenuousness, a childlike but sweeping fantasy.
Poems by a Little Girl (1920), published when Hilda was a little more than nine years old, is a detailed proof of this 395delightful quality. Every poem bears its own stamp of unaffected originality; “Water,” “Hay-Cock,” and a dozen others are startling in their precision and a power of painting the familiar in unsuspected colors. This child not only sees, feels and hears with the concentration of a child-artist, she communicates the results of her perceptions with the sensitivity of a master-craftsman. She hears a chickadee talking
The way smooth bright pebbles
Drop into water.
Everything is extraordinarily vivid and fanciful to her keen senses. The rooster’s comb is “gay as a parade;” he has “pearl trinkets on his feet” and
The short feathers smooth along his back
Are the dark color of wet rocks,
Or the rippled green of ships
When I look at their sides through water.
She observes:
The water came in with a wavy look
Like a spider’s web.
It is too early for judgments—even for a prophecy. It is impossible to guess how much Hilda’s vision will be distorted by knowledge and the traditions that will accompany her growth. One can only hold one’s breath and hope for the preservation of so remarkable a talent.
WATER
The world turns softly
Not to spill its lakes and rivers.
The water is held in its arms
And the sky is held in the water.
What is water,
That pours silver,
And can hold the sky?
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HAY-COCK
This is another kind of sweetness
Shaped like a bee-hive:
This is the hive the bees have left,
It is from this clover-heap
They took away the honey
For the other hive!
THE OLD BRIDGE
The old bridge has a wrinkled face.
He bends his back
For us to go over.
He moans and weeps
But we do not hear.
Sorrow stands in his face
For the heavy weight and worry
Of people passing.
The trees drop their leaves into the water;
The sky nods to him.
The leaves float down like small ships
On the blue surface
Which is the sky.
He is not always sad:
He smiles to see the ships go down
And the little children
Playing on the river banks.
397
I KEEP WONDERING
I saw a mountain,
And he was like Wotan looking at himself in the water.
I saw a cockatoo,
And he was like sunset clouds.
Even leaves and little stones
Are different to my eyes sometimes.
I keep wondering through and through my heart
Where all the beautiful things in the world
Come from.
And while I wonder
They go on being beautiful.
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