Inscribed to a Dear Child:
In Memory of Golden Summer Hours
And Whispers of a Summer Sea
Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task,
Eager she wields her spade: yet loves as well
Rest on a friendly knee, intent to ask
The tale he loves to tell.
Rude spirits of the seething outer strife,
Unmeet to read her pure and simple spright,
Deem if you list, such hours a waste of life,
Empty of all delight!
Chat on, sweet Maid, and rescue from annoy
Hearts that by wiser talk are unbeguiled.
Ah, happy he who owns that tenderest joy,
The heart-love of a child!
'The heart-love of a child' how simply precious and true. Children love from the heart with nothing else in mind, just pure love.---Beautiful poem---Melvina
Okay, here we go again with the random disregard for authorial intention by the administrators of this site. The poem above is (nearly) the actual dedication written by Lewis Carroll to launch his book, The Hunting of the Snark, into the mind of the reader. Dedications are rarely thought to be independent works of literature within the greater books where they appear. But, okay, Carroll wrote the dedication in verse and the clowns that run this place thought that sufficient reason to collect here on their site. Problem with that is, they left off the concluding stanza of the dedication. so I present here: Away, fond thoughts, and vex my soul no more! Work claims my wakeful nights, my busy days— Albeit bright memories of that sunlit shore Yet haunt my dreaming gaze! All in all a lovely tribute to a youthful muse. But nowhere near as deep and rich as the piece to which it is but an incidental prelude. Hey, Poemhunter.com admins, get your xit together.
A POEM should not be read as a clue to rumors and gossips about its author.
Karoline Leach found in his diaries that even he was involved in relationships with women, he also had child-friends. Karoline suggested that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known as Lewis Carroll, wanted to hide the fact that he was interested only in little girls. She argued that these friendships ended when these girls reached the age of fourteen.
Morton N. Cohen mentioned that Dodgson convinced many of his friends that his attachment to the nude female child form was free of any eroticism, but the same Dodgson wanted to marry the 11-year-old Alice Liddell. Dodgson' illness, migraine aura, affected the way the objects were perceived by his mind. In his book, entitled Alice in Wonderland, Alice suffered sudden size-changes.
A Freudian interpretation of Alice in Wonderland described this book as a descent into the dark world of the subconscious. Lewis Carroll was a writer, a mathematician, an Anglican cleric, a photographer, and an inventor of the nyctograph. In the last stanza, it is explained so well how the wisdom needs a pure feeling to grow up.10.
I love the way he wrote: a lot of fun and a lot of wit...This is obviously an ACROSTIC: GERT/RUDE CHAT AWAY, in four-line stanzas of FOUR...Type-setting appears extremely important for poems.Glad to read it here though.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
He does seem to have an affection for children despite wanting to scare the heebie-jeebies out of them in Alice in Wonderland