Poems of magic and Spells sits on my bookshelf. I have owned this book since I was about eight years old. This is the book that probably set me on the path of reading, writing, and loving poetry. I look back at some of the poems from this book that I have loved and am surprised by some of my choices. Of course, I was a child, and can’t remember what brought me into a certain poem. Give me them. No. is a phrase I still remember rom the Goblin poem. This dialogue in a magical forest resonates as a place where spells can happen, where poetry dances in the shadows. Yeats’ poem, The Stolen Child, was probably one of the first poems I memorized without meaning to, especially the chorus,
Come away o human child
to the water and the wild
with a faery hand in hand
for the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
The meter, rhyme, and chorus were magical to a child who whose parents were soon to be divorced in the days when divorce was rare. I did feel alone as a child and the poems kept me company. I often would make up tunes for the poems. Poems were songs that needed musical voices.
Claudia M. Reder 