Tyger VS Tigger

So as I have admitted in my previous post I was not very much of a reader growing up, and I have to say nursery rhymes always weirded me out. The fact that the adult I was having a perfectly coherent conversation with had just sat down was now rhyming to me about some generally pointless and not engaging event like a girl getting scared by a spider, or mouse running up and down a clock honestly made the whole reading thing to me just seem to make people a little bit…. well…. Strange.

Worse than that were the rhymes I found the rhymes disturbing like Three Blind Mice. Whatever did that awful woman want with their tails anyhow?  The rhyme that sticks with me as really having bothered me was Who Killed Cock Robin after reading that one I thought that maybe these rhymes had scary underlying meaning like making murder and violence an acceptable part of society. Which actually made the innocent ones bother me more because I was trying to figure out what kind of morbidity they were promoting and when I couldn’t figure it out I wondered what other people were taking away from them.

I liked reading nursery rhymes because they were short so if I was supposed to be reading I could spend all my time on one or two of them and feel like I had actually accomplished finishing something, being that I was a painfully slow reader. I don’t recall disliking nursery rhymes but to say I liked them was a bit of a stretch too. Rather the concept of trying to figure out why anyone would write about such silly events and why some of them seemed to be so good and others  there seemed to be something not quite morally right about kept me reading them. I also imagine looking back on it that I assumed at a young age all nursery rhymes were written by the same author because of the writing style.

I had enough books read too me that I was aware certain stories that were made by the same person sounded a certain way, because nursery rhymes were usually stuffed in one big book I just assumed one person wrote them, because I really couldn’t imagine more than one person being so very strange. I have since discovered that the world is a very strange place.

Having had such mixed feelings about rhymes as a child I wonder how it is they determine what reading levels and age groups nursery rhymes are for?  At my age now I hate censorship and can’t imagine locking something into an age group but as a kid I thought some of the rhymes I heard were just palin wrong and should not be read in front of children.

 I have also been looking for a rhyme book for my reading for ages 0-5 and for the same book I have found it listed as ages: 1 and up, 5 – 9 and 9 – 12? Apparently the internet may always have an answer but many times it seems unable to settle on just one. The worst part is that I found all these listed at relatively sound informative site that I normally pull book information off of like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  What exactly is poetry for children?

For me I can honestly say the first “rhyme” that stuck in my head at a young age was “The Tyger” by William Blake, because it was part of a Batman cartoon episode. Bruce Wayne only read the first few lines of it in the cartoon episode, but I remember the words painting such a vivid picture in my mind, I actually did ask for it by author in the book store ended up reading the rest of the Poem … what is more I remember distinctly liking it. This likely stemmed only from my love of big cats at the time, and it having being on a batman episode where someone became part cat I assumed it was about some one transforming into a tiger. I read the Lamb as well but couldn’t relate so some of the other works in the collection the book store owner gave me. I do remember thinking the William Blake poems were more meaningful than nursery rhymes, and they gave me more of a sense of normalcy because when I puzzled through one or two of them they sounded like something an adult would say. Therefore if I read (or more likely had read to me) poetry that was dealing it things like good and evil, and death and murder, it didn’t bother me because it sounded like it was coming from an adult, who I felt should know about these sort of things and talk and explain about them to other adults. I wasn’t  as discouraged if I didn’t grasp the meaning of things because I figured I wasn’t meant to at my age and I just enjoyed the powerful visual properties of the words used in short bits of writing that I could actually read in a short period of time.  The Tyger will always stick with me because it painted a fierce and beautiful image of a large flaming cat with wings, a giant kitty that was all claws and fire. I don’t think I understood it any more than that but I liked it and I remember it almost to the word to this day and I am sure if you had asked me to recite it to you in grade two, I likely did know it word for word. I still enjoy short poerty and the strong visual disctiptions it holds.