This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
The other day I asked an adult if she knew Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. "I used to," she said. I didn't want to hear that. There's already too much "used to" in the world. I used to fly a kite, I used to pick bloodroots each spring. We all used to read Eugene Field—over and over.
Field was a contemporary of Mark Twain. He was born in St. Louis in 1850 and studied at Knox College at Galesburg. In 1873 he took a job as reporter and then city editor for the St. Louis Evening Journal. A series of editorial positions took him eventually to the Chicago Daily News.
It was his poems for children published in these newspaper columns that made him famous as "the Children's Laureate." Poems such as "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat" and "Little Boy Blue" were used in schoolrooms across the country. Story hour was special when we got to hear again how the gingham dog and the calico cat got into a fight and ate each other up, leaving not a trace. Remember how worried the Old Dutch Clock and the Chinese Plate were? Many of us knew "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" by heart from mothers reading it to us as we fell asleep. And pleasant dreams we had, sailing off in that wooden shoe, sailing "on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew"
But alas, children will grow up, as I suppose they should, into a world where the things children used to do don't belong, and Eugene Field has been all but forgotten. "Field's poems for adults are not significant or probing," as a modern critic puts it.
Who reads "Little Boy Blue" these days? That story about a boy whose death has not kept his toys from remaining true: the little toy dog all covered with rust, but "sturdy and staunch he stands" and the "little toy soldier is red with rust, and his musket molds in his hands."
They remain where he left them: "faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand, each in the same old place, awaiting the touch of a little hand, the smile of a little face."
Eugene Field himself died in 1895. The readers he left behind have not been nearly so faithful as the dog and the little toy soldier.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by the Scott County Regional Authority, with additional funding from the Illinois Arts Council and Augustana College, Rock Island.
