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Silver Pennies: A Collection of Modern Poems for Boys and Girls
Book by Blanche Jennings Thompson
138 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1996
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May 25, 2025
Note, May 25, 2025: I just did an edit here to correct a misspelled word that I caught.
In my review of the poetry anthology English Poems From Chaucer To Kipling, which I read in my junior high school days (but on my own, not as a school assignment), I made the statement that it “was the first real book of serious poetry I read.“ However, that statement wasn't true; when I wrote it, I was absent-mindedly forgetting this collection, a precursor exposure to poetry that I read when I was much younger, and which also helped a lot to shape my poetic tastes. How it slipped my mind, I don't know; because while 1959 is a fair guess as to the official “read date,” I read in this book multiple times in my younger reading years (1958-60), and it was something of a staple favorite.
Blanche Jennings Thompson was a high school English teacher, who was seriously interested in introducing kids to poetry, and assembled this book to that end. She brought together 83 poems by 55 American and British poets, some very well known and some more obscure, who wrote during the late 19th or early 20th centuries. (Vachel Lindsay is the most represented author, with five selections, but several others have two or three.) It's organized into two parts, the 50 poems in Part 1 being primarily for children of age 10 and younger, and the remaining 33 for older kids even up into junior high school; but as she notes, some poems in Part 1 can be enjoyed even by two-year-olds, and many (I would say, almost all!) selections in the book can be appreciated by adults. Each poem is prefaced by a short (2-3 sentences) italicized introductory thought, conversational in tone, which presumes that the readers are children but doesn't talk down to them.
The poems themselves are short (Alfred Noyes' “A Song of Sherwood” is the longest at about five pages, but these are fairly small pages), most being a page or less, often with one or two stanzas. For the most part, they rhyme; a few are free verse, but all have a recognizable poetic quality. (One selection, “The Army of the Sidhe” by Lady Gregory, is actually prose, “but if you read it aloud you will find that the words have a lovely sound.”) Not all of the included poets wrote entirely or even mainly for children, so the roster lists some big names in the English-language poetry of that era (the Goodreads description names a few of these, and more could be added), and not all of the selections were originally written with child readers in mind. Some are humorous, but none are nonsensical (unless you call the imagery in poems like Lindsay's “The Moon's the North Wind's Cooky” nonsense; but I view these more as an invitation to think of conventional reality in imaginative ways, which children can be more prone to do than adults –but adults are blessed if they retain the capability!). But the great majority are serious, and often have deeper meanings than show on the surface. A few, like John Masefield's “Cargoes” have big words like “quinquireme,” that modern educators would assume that children can't possibly understand (and would convince them of that by example); Thompson just casually defines the word in her italicized comment, and lets her young readers enrich their vocabulary.
Obviously, I borrowed a copy of the book (by interlibrary loan) to refresh my memories from some 60 years ago; but I was struck by how many poems have remained in my recollection for all this time. Some of my favorites as a kid, besides the ones mentioned above, were “The Good Joan” by the little-known Lizette Woodworth Reese, which envisions the spirit of Joan of Arc riding forth to encourage the French soldiers and populace during the Great War; Christopher Morley's “Animal Crackers,” (probably because I liked animal crackers myself at that age –still do! :-) ), even though I could tell that the social conditions it was describing, in a middle-class British household with servants, in which parents and children ate their meals separately, were drastically different from my own; and “The Elf and the Dormouse” by Oliver Herford, which humorously explains the invention of the umbrella. (Those who don't believe in elves might be skeptical. :-) ) Among the outstanding poems here are Emily Dickinson's “I Never Saw a Moor;” Robert Frost's “The Pasture;” and “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae. Carl Sandburg is represented by “Fog,” and Amy Lowell by “Fringed Gentians.” We generally associate Hamlin Garland with prose fiction; but “Do You Fear the Wind?”demonstrates that he could write meaningful poetry as well.
It's also worth mentioning that a number of the poems here evoke associations with the magical, the supernatural or fantastic, or the world of folklore, all of these presented in a way that's inviting (or sometimes numinous) rather than scary. We encounter a griffin and a dryad; the Wee Folk in one form or another are frequent subjects, and poems like Yeat's “The Song of Wandering Aengus” conjure a supernatural, non-rational influence that we can't really put a name to. (Walter de la Mare's “Tartary,” another childhood favorite of mine, isn't exactly in the same category, but does celebrate the beautifully exotic.) All of this imagery functions as a metaphor for the imaginative and emotional side of reality and the human psyche, to which poetry of course particularly speaks. (This is reflected in the book's title, and the cover image in which a child reaches up for silver pennies spilling down from the moon; “You must have a silver penny/To get into Fairyland” serves Thompson as the epigraph to her Preface --though I've been unable to track the original source of these lines-- and she develops the metaphor of poems each being a silver penny. “It is my hope, then,” she writes, “that... no child will be kept out of the fairyland of modern poetry for the lack of a silver penny.”) As an eight or six-year-old child, of course, I didn't understand all of that in those terms. But I could recognize and like that running theme. I grew up to be a fan of fantasy and supernatural fiction. It's quite possible that this collection helped to unlock that particular side of my tastes.
Apparently figuring (and probably rightly) that most kids don't bother to read prefaces, and envisioning classroom use of the book, Thompson addressed her short (about four pages) Preface to her fellow schoolteachers. Some of this is concerned with pedagogical technique, and she was ahead of her time there, in a good way. (Her emphasis was on creating an appreciation of and feeling for poetry, stressing the value of “simple, sincere, and unaffected” out-loud reading without “elocution,” and of discussion that's centered on the features of the poem as a child experiences them, not on grown-up analysis; she also de-emphasized the then-regnant technique of memorization, and especially forced rote memorization.) No information is given about the included authors (except that Hilda Conkling was six years old when she wrote “Fairies” --no mean achievement for an adult, let alone a kid that age!) and the poems are not dated; but there is a index of authors, and of first lines. There are also many black-and-white illustrations by Winifred Bromhall, and these genuinely enhance the text.
This would still, even nearly a century after it was compiled, be a good collection for introducing young readers, or even adults unfamiliar with the form, to poetry, IMO. But it's also just a good, solid collection for readers who already love poetry!
In my review of the poetry anthology English Poems From Chaucer To Kipling, which I read in my junior high school days (but on my own, not as a school assignment), I made the statement that it “was the first real book of serious poetry I read.“ However, that statement wasn't true; when I wrote it, I was absent-mindedly forgetting this collection, a precursor exposure to poetry that I read when I was much younger, and which also helped a lot to shape my poetic tastes. How it slipped my mind, I don't know; because while 1959 is a fair guess as to the official “read date,” I read in this book multiple times in my younger reading years (1958-60), and it was something of a staple favorite.
Blanche Jennings Thompson was a high school English teacher, who was seriously interested in introducing kids to poetry, and assembled this book to that end. She brought together 83 poems by 55 American and British poets, some very well known and some more obscure, who wrote during the late 19th or early 20th centuries. (Vachel Lindsay is the most represented author, with five selections, but several others have two or three.) It's organized into two parts, the 50 poems in Part 1 being primarily for children of age 10 and younger, and the remaining 33 for older kids even up into junior high school; but as she notes, some poems in Part 1 can be enjoyed even by two-year-olds, and many (I would say, almost all!) selections in the book can be appreciated by adults. Each poem is prefaced by a short (2-3 sentences) italicized introductory thought, conversational in tone, which presumes that the readers are children but doesn't talk down to them.
The poems themselves are short (Alfred Noyes' “A Song of Sherwood” is the longest at about five pages, but these are fairly small pages), most being a page or less, often with one or two stanzas. For the most part, they rhyme; a few are free verse, but all have a recognizable poetic quality. (One selection, “The Army of the Sidhe” by Lady Gregory, is actually prose, “but if you read it aloud you will find that the words have a lovely sound.”) Not all of the included poets wrote entirely or even mainly for children, so the roster lists some big names in the English-language poetry of that era (the Goodreads description names a few of these, and more could be added), and not all of the selections were originally written with child readers in mind. Some are humorous, but none are nonsensical (unless you call the imagery in poems like Lindsay's “The Moon's the North Wind's Cooky” nonsense; but I view these more as an invitation to think of conventional reality in imaginative ways, which children can be more prone to do than adults –but adults are blessed if they retain the capability!). But the great majority are serious, and often have deeper meanings than show on the surface. A few, like John Masefield's “Cargoes” have big words like “quinquireme,” that modern educators would assume that children can't possibly understand (and would convince them of that by example); Thompson just casually defines the word in her italicized comment, and lets her young readers enrich their vocabulary.
Obviously, I borrowed a copy of the book (by interlibrary loan) to refresh my memories from some 60 years ago; but I was struck by how many poems have remained in my recollection for all this time. Some of my favorites as a kid, besides the ones mentioned above, were “The Good Joan” by the little-known Lizette Woodworth Reese, which envisions the spirit of Joan of Arc riding forth to encourage the French soldiers and populace during the Great War; Christopher Morley's “Animal Crackers,” (probably because I liked animal crackers myself at that age –still do! :-) ), even though I could tell that the social conditions it was describing, in a middle-class British household with servants, in which parents and children ate their meals separately, were drastically different from my own; and “The Elf and the Dormouse” by Oliver Herford, which humorously explains the invention of the umbrella. (Those who don't believe in elves might be skeptical. :-) ) Among the outstanding poems here are Emily Dickinson's “I Never Saw a Moor;” Robert Frost's “The Pasture;” and “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae. Carl Sandburg is represented by “Fog,” and Amy Lowell by “Fringed Gentians.” We generally associate Hamlin Garland with prose fiction; but “Do You Fear the Wind?”demonstrates that he could write meaningful poetry as well.
It's also worth mentioning that a number of the poems here evoke associations with the magical, the supernatural or fantastic, or the world of folklore, all of these presented in a way that's inviting (or sometimes numinous) rather than scary. We encounter a griffin and a dryad; the Wee Folk in one form or another are frequent subjects, and poems like Yeat's “The Song of Wandering Aengus” conjure a supernatural, non-rational influence that we can't really put a name to. (Walter de la Mare's “Tartary,” another childhood favorite of mine, isn't exactly in the same category, but does celebrate the beautifully exotic.) All of this imagery functions as a metaphor for the imaginative and emotional side of reality and the human psyche, to which poetry of course particularly speaks. (This is reflected in the book's title, and the cover image in which a child reaches up for silver pennies spilling down from the moon; “You must have a silver penny/To get into Fairyland” serves Thompson as the epigraph to her Preface --though I've been unable to track the original source of these lines-- and she develops the metaphor of poems each being a silver penny. “It is my hope, then,” she writes, “that... no child will be kept out of the fairyland of modern poetry for the lack of a silver penny.”) As an eight or six-year-old child, of course, I didn't understand all of that in those terms. But I could recognize and like that running theme. I grew up to be a fan of fantasy and supernatural fiction. It's quite possible that this collection helped to unlock that particular side of my tastes.
Apparently figuring (and probably rightly) that most kids don't bother to read prefaces, and envisioning classroom use of the book, Thompson addressed her short (about four pages) Preface to her fellow schoolteachers. Some of this is concerned with pedagogical technique, and she was ahead of her time there, in a good way. (Her emphasis was on creating an appreciation of and feeling for poetry, stressing the value of “simple, sincere, and unaffected” out-loud reading without “elocution,” and of discussion that's centered on the features of the poem as a child experiences them, not on grown-up analysis; she also de-emphasized the then-regnant technique of memorization, and especially forced rote memorization.) No information is given about the included authors (except that Hilda Conkling was six years old when she wrote “Fairies” --no mean achievement for an adult, let alone a kid that age!) and the poems are not dated; but there is a index of authors, and of first lines. There are also many black-and-white illustrations by Winifred Bromhall, and these genuinely enhance the text.
This would still, even nearly a century after it was compiled, be a good collection for introducing young readers, or even adults unfamiliar with the form, to poetry, IMO. But it's also just a good, solid collection for readers who already love poetry!
March 5, 2010
Even though I now know most of the poems by heart, I have read and re-read this little book since my third grade teacher gave it to me more than 50 years ago.
August 30, 2021
This delightful collection of "modern" poems was first published in 1925. The poems are whimsical and short, perfect for introducing poetry to children.
It was wonderful to re-visit Silver Pennies after almost 20 years and to recall old favorites such as Vachel Lindsay's "The Moon's the North Wind's Cookie" and Christopher Morley's "Animal Crackers." The fanciful illustrations by Winifred Bromhall add an additional layer of pleasure to the book.
It was wonderful to re-visit Silver Pennies after almost 20 years and to recall old favorites such as Vachel Lindsay's "The Moon's the North Wind's Cookie" and Christopher Morley's "Animal Crackers." The fanciful illustrations by Winifred Bromhall add an additional layer of pleasure to the book.
July 20, 2008
A gem of a book for anyone who loves fairies, goblins, or whimsy of any kind. Currently out of print, it is well worth seeking out a used copy. You won't find a better way to introduce poetry to children than this!
January 6, 2010
Delightful, whimsical, sensitive, perfumed with pixie dust. Worth owning
June 3, 2025
The first volume of a book that my mother held as her closest. So important in her life that I had to read it. I wish she were still here to talk about it.
January 25, 2021
This is a really charming 1920s collection of poetry that the editor thought children would like, with old-fashioned teacherly introductions to each poem. The focus on 'modern' poetry means there's some Yeats and Teasdale, some Millay and Dickinson, as well as a number of poets I've never heard of but who I'll be searching out. Most of the poems have a fantastical feel to them -- lots of fairies and goblins, lots of imagining talking animals and flowers, but to my surprise they were rarely twee -- some were dated, some just did not interest me very much, but many were both lovely and evoked the numinous hidden in everyday life. I read a few each night before bed over some months & it was the perfect pacing; I hope I can find her other collections.
September 5, 2009
My sister won this book at our school book fair in elementary school for a story she had written. During the summer while swimming in the Chesapeake Bay my aunt had a crab on the end of her foot hanging on to her tennis shoes. The librarian, Mrs. Francis covered a penny with aluminum foil and gave it to her along with the book. The book became a favorite poetry book for the family. Later, when I was teaching third grade I purchased a used copy to use in my classroom.
March 29, 2012
I remember seeing this book on my mother's book shelf, thinking it was so beautiful on the outside. When I was finally was old enough to read it I found it was just as beautiful on the inside. So my love of old beautifully crafted books began. I still love this book and it's still on my mother's bookshelf. One of those books that has impacted me.
June 13, 2024
Sweet collection of poems, with brief introductory comments. Read aloud, very slowly, to my children during occasional afternoon tea time.
August 12, 2012
This book is very special to me, as my mother and I read it to each other when I was a boy. The following is a favorite of mine...
Overheard on a Salmarsh
Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?
Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?
Give them me.
No.
Give them me. Give them me.
No.
Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.
Goblin, why do you love them so?
They are better than stars or water,
Better than voices of winds that sing,
Better than any man's fair daughter,
Your green glass beads on a silver ring.
Hush, I stole them out of the moon.
Give me your beads, I want them.
No.
I will howl in the deep lagoon
For your green glass beads, I love them so.
Give them me. Give them.
No.
-- Harold Monro
Overheard on a Salmarsh
Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?
Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?
Give them me.
No.
Give them me. Give them me.
No.
Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.
Goblin, why do you love them so?
They are better than stars or water,
Better than voices of winds that sing,
Better than any man's fair daughter,
Your green glass beads on a silver ring.
Hush, I stole them out of the moon.
Give me your beads, I want them.
No.
I will howl in the deep lagoon
For your green glass beads, I love them so.
Give them me. Give them.
No.
-- Harold Monro
May 26, 2007
"You must have a silver penny / To get into Fairyland." This book will take you there. An anthology of children's poetry, this book was originally published in 1925, and then reissued in 1956 in the original format. My father probably read it when he was a child and then read it to me. Alas, you cannot have it read to you by him. Even so, Moon Folly, Vinegar Man and Overheard on a Saltmarsh are fraught with just the right amount of light and dark to captivate.
February 21, 2014
I've cherished this exact edition of Silver Pennies, along with More Silver Pennie and All the Silver Pennies (all out of print now) since my mother read these poems to my brother and sister and me, over and over, for years. We can all still recite many of them from memory. It's a wonderful selection that I read many times to my children. I recently splurged on an old copy for a baby gift. Beautiful book, beautiful peoms.
January 6, 2014
I've loved this book since I can remember. My 77-year-old mother's uncle gifted it to her when she was a child, and she read it to me often over the years. I just love the illustrations and the poems are wonderful for children and adults. I would recommend this book to any one interested in charming, classic children's poems.
September 20, 2021
This is a wonderful collection of poetry directed toward children, but able to keep an adult's attention. These selections were collected back around 1925, and they all still hold up today. There are many notable poets mixed in. They spark the imagination and provide a fantastic journey into the beautiful things in life. Highly recommended for anyone!
June 13, 2018
Lovely collection, child-sized and chockful of beautiful multilayered pieces. W.B. Yeats, John Masefield, Vachel Lindsay, Harold Munro, McCrae. Sad, wry, mysterious. This book figures in one of my earliest literacy memories and I am so happy to see it still in print.
November 19, 2007
This book used to be my grandmothers book. I read it often and like it a lot. It's a cute little poetry book of faeries that can wisk you away in your imagination and see things from a whole other view.
March 12, 2013
I grew up on this poetry collection, and recently got a copy for my kids, as well! A great poetry collection for lovers of fairy tales, and a great companion for anyone who loves George MacDonald's short stories, too!
June 6, 2023
Beautiful book of poetry! The illustrations are wonderful. It's a higher lexile level book but would be great as a read aloud. A few of the poems have a Christian message. Most of them are about the beauty of nature. There are lots of fairies, elves and even a griffin mentioned in the poems.
January 25, 2008
My grandmother gave me an old battered copy of this book when I was very little. The book is also very little.
July 26, 2013
This is one of my favorite antique books. It was given to my grandfather when he was young. With it is an actual silver penny minted in the 1940s.
February 5, 2021
I don't usually read poetry but I really enjoyed this book!!
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews