A Flight of Dragons: Mythological Poems

When I give talks in schools about Gods and Monsters: Mythological Poems, we always finish with the World Cup of Mythological Monsters. Imagine the sun beating down on the Colisseum’s earthen floor as our challengers emerge from their corners, to gasps from the crowd. How will the Minotaur fare away from his home turf of dark Labrinth? Is the retiring Yeti temperamentally suited to fierce combat? How effective is the Gorgon’s petrifying stare at a distance? It’s great fun and every time it goes a little differently. At one school, Team Grendel is especially vocal. At a library event, the Amarock, a terrifying Wolf from Inuit mythology, proves a fan favourite. But I think I’m going to have to mix it up because… the dragon always wins.

They’re often big, you see. Sometimes huge. (Not always, if you’ve met How To Train Your Dragon’s Nano Dragons, but often.) They have tough leathery scales, and fearsome teeth and claws, although sometimes their eyesight is poor after all that crouching on treasure in the darkness. They have wings, and they can breathe fire. As range weapons go, it’s hard to argue with. (Just ask the charred remains of that Sphinx it dispatched without breaking a sweat in Round Three.)

As a child, I was enchanted and pleasantly terrified by Roger Lancelyn Green’s Puffin Book of Dragons. From Sigurd and Lancelot to Beowulf, I quested with the dragon slayers, while always retaining a little sympathy for their majestic adversaries. What a joy it has been to ride out again in search of dragon poems for my most recent anthologies.

Within the pages of Gods and Monsters, I watched Pie Corbett’s Dragon Whistler, beautifully drawn by the amazing Chris Riddell, summon her scaly legions by night.

I walked deep into The Forest with A F Harrold, and when we brushed the sleeping dragon’s hide with our outstretched hands, we were marked forever. (Sometimes, we notice others with the same secret in their fingertips, and we

‘Say nothing, but nod,

say nothing, but smile,

say nothing, but know

you’re not alone

knowing

what you know.’)

I stood on the wind-whipped cliff to watch Laura Varnam’s Dead Dragon, Deep Dragon plunge like a comet into the ocean. I listened, yawning, to Andrew Lang recalling the lullaby of Orpheus, soothing the ‘King of Gods and men’ to sleep. I longed, like Marianne Moore, to be a dragon myself, ‘of silkworm size or immense’.

Some figures that appeared in Gods and Monsters, a collection of mythological poems, could not perform an encore in Heroes and Villains: Legendary Poems. A legend is a story that has – or was thought to have – a grain of truth at its heart. People from many different cultures all over the world have sincerely believed in dragons, the stories perhaps inspired when fossils were discovered in the earth. Brian Moses wonders whether The Dragons Are Hiding:

‘Yet recently there were rumours again:

The whisper of wing-beats in darkness,

distant thunder from mountains,

a tumult beneath a waterfall, where roaring

could easily be disguised.’

Well, good, I say, and so say all the children who cheer the dragon to victory in the World Cup of Mythological Monsters. They are the most fearsome and the finest of the beasts in which we never quite stop half-believing.

Gods and Monsters: Mythological Poems and Heroes and Villains: Legendary Poems gather classic and contemporary poems for an audience of 8+. Both are illustrated by Chris Riddell.

More information on school events with me here.

This article originally appeared on the Children’s Poetry Summit blog.

Introducing Primary School children to Poetry

Here’s the headline: you don’t have to. They’re already steeped in the stuff!

I’m writing some school events based around Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book at the moment. It’s so exciting choosing poems to share with children about the solar system, whales and dinosaurs. Questions to be debated include: what planets might taste of, how it might feel to meet a Kronosaurus while swimming and whether or not we’d like to be a whale. Children, you see, aren’t scared of poetry.

If you buy Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book from an independent bookshop during November 2021, email me the receipt and your address and I’ll send you a Natural History Museum postcard with personalised message and a signed bookplate.

By the time we leave school, some of us have been rather put off poetry. Actually – confession time, now – I was. Picking it apart and poring over the meanings and structure throughout my education had sucked some of the simple joy out of poetry. I became paralysed by the thought that I must understand every element, rather than just enjoying it. I had to learn to love poetry again.

Primary school children, however, don’t have any of those associations. The earliest things we hear and learn are usually songs and nursery rhymes: from the sun putting his hat on to the little piggies of our toes. We often read rhyming books with our children: my five year old is word perfect on everything from There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly to Room on the Broom, and woe betide me if I try to skip a verse to get to bedtime quicker! Children are at home in rhyme and verse before they learn to talk, so they don’t have any of the associations some adults have of poetry being fancy, or intimidating, or difficult.

So, my advice on sharing poetry with young children is just to get started! I love Lewis Carroll’s inventive and whimsical poems and I’ve read both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, illustrated beautifully by Chris Riddell, to my five and eight year olds this year. Even though today’s children won’t be familiar with the Victorian rhymes many of them parody (though they might enjoy Mary Howitt’s ‘The Spider and the Fly’, which is one of them) the nonsense and fun of ‘The Lobster Quadrille’ or ‘You Are Old, Father William’ will tickle them. Who can walk anywhere with dawdling children without invoking the lines:

“Will you walk a little faster”, said a whiting to a snail?

There’s a porpoise close behind me and he’s treading on my tail…

Edward Lear’s poems are wonderful too. Ask them to draw the Jumblies in their sea-faring sieve or the Pobble who has no toes, and watch their imaginations soar. For a modern dose of balderdash, Michael Rosen’s Book of Nonsense is great fun.

Poems can help little people tackle big feelings, too. ‘Grandma and the Sea’ in Kate Wakeling’s excellent new collection Cloud Soup will help children to process grief and loss. (It moved me to tears too, so I guess not just children!) Encouraging children to write themselves is a fantastic way to help them express themselves and examine their own emotions. They might be inspired by reading the work of other children, like Take Off Your Brave, a lovely collection of impressive and expressive poems by 4 year old Nadim.

Reading poems aloud, in as dramatic and over the top a way as possible, is a brilliant way to bring them to life to children. My daughter loves A A Milne’s ‘Disobedience’ with its rapid, building rhythm and repetition of ‘James James Morrison Morrison William George Dupree’. If you feel they’ll respond well to a touch of goriness, Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children will appeal – try Jim, who was eaten by a lion. Poet Matt Goodfellow – a former Primary School teacher himself – has a wonderful collection of poems to read aloud called Caterpillar Cake (yum!). If you’re not confident about your own performances, you can find poets reading their own work out loud online to bring it to life for children. I love Laura Mucha’s readings from Dear Ugly Sisters here.

Researching She Is Fierce I came across some wonderful, lesser known poems by women that even young children will – I hope – enjoy as much as I did. Liz Lochhead’s ‘A Glasgow Nonsense Rhyme for Molly’, and Katherine Mansfield’s playful ‘When I Was A Bird’ are bound to delight younger readers. For slightly older children, the chatty, encouraging tone of ‘God Says Yes to Me’ by Kaylin Haught will appeal. Jan Dean’s ‘Three Good Things’ could inspire a discussion about the three best things to choose from their day. Jean Little’s ‘Today’ – like the poems in Allan Ahlberg’s much-loved Please Mrs Butler – speaks directly to the experience of school-children, and they will be delighted to find themselves reflected there – and with the poem’s rebelliousness.

And Wonder has opened the door to a world of nature poems on every subject from volcanoes to otters, dinosaurs to dodos, meteorites to trees. I’m very excited to introduce this book to children and am planning to schedule both live and online events throughout 2022. If you know a Primary School who would welcome one, do email me.