The Language of Poetry is a Child’s First Language
The language of poetry is a child’s first language. Poetry is a child’s natal language. It is the voice with which a child is born. Her engagement in the poetic elements of language begins in utero with the rhythm of the first heartbeat, an intimacy of percussion between mother and child. The infant’s poetic voice evolves into a delight of manipulating sounds and by ten months they are engaging in multisyllabic utterances categorized as reduplicated babbles. They basically engage in rhythmic repetition of sounds of consonant-vowel syllables with adult-timing. There are no identifiable referents, just an apparent delicious participation with sounds of proto – words. This is precursor to children’s delight in the rhythms and intonations that a child finds in nursery rhymes and other simple children’s rhyming.
Imagination is also a gift at birth and nourished in a child’s writing of poetry. They easily become responsible parents of their dolls, super heroes when they don a cape or as fast as a jaguar when they are running. And therefore, sneakers can easily become alive for my fourth grade poet who in his poem had them “reclining” in the closet after a long run, “tired with their tongues hanging out” and their “shoe laces drooping” just before the “eyelets fluttered” to sleep.
Poetic imagination assists the young child in bridging her familiar concrete world with the strange abstract world of the adult. A child’s physical world is experienced with sensual scrutiny and she can see, hear, taste and touch what has become banal and insignificant to an adult. Particularly sensitive to the attributes of her environment, she can use the imaginative poetic tool of comparison to communicate and understand intangible concepts of life. One young poet in an effort to share her idea of poetry compared it to all the five senses. Poetry felt like a “corduroy jacket; sounded like a “whispering moon;” looked like “her chubby orange crayon, dull at the tip;” tasted like “summer honey” and smelled like “ a lavender wand.” She has travelled to a place prose could not have carried her. Another young poet gave meaning to the concept of an apology by comparing it to a bar of soap because it “cleaned the injury of an argument,” “healed the hurt of hate” and “disinfected the wound of verbal war.”
Without the poetry in a child’s instruction, there seems a missed opportunity for exploring words to the depth of their imaginative and pleasurable potential. The more practiced a child is in this natural acquisition of poetic language, the more competent she feels in communicating her imagined world with depth and pleasing prosody.
