The Book of a Thousand Poems
a classic anthology for children
first collected by J. Murray Macbain · 1942
What this is, exactly. This is not that book. The 1942 anthology
is still in copyright and only lends; its contents and its arrangement
are somebody's work and are not reproduced here.
What is here was assembled to stand in its place: 982 poems taken from
sixteen out-of-copyright volumes on Project Gutenberg — the Mother Goose
books, A Child's Garden of Verses, Rossetti's Sing-Song,
Blake's Songs, Lear's Nonsense, The Golden Treasury
and the rest — and sorted into eighteen subjects, in the spirit of the
book it is named after. The choosing and the sorting are ours. Every
poem in it belongs to everyone.
Poets still in copyright were left out on purpose, and they are the ones
a child's anthology would miss most: Walter de la Mare, Rose Fyleman,
Eleanor Farjeon, A. A. Milne. The fairy section is thin for exactly that
reason.
The reading layers. The Chinese under a line is a crib and not a
translation: flat, literal, and meant to be read across from the English
line above it. It is written by hand, poem by poem, and most poems do
not have one yet — the cover says how many do.
Every word can be tapped. Those glosses come from ECDICT, an offline
dictionary, with some two hundred and fifty written out by hand: the old
grammatical furniture of English verse, the Scots of Burns and the
ballads, and the words where the dictionary answers with a modern sense
the poem does not mean. A word the dictionary can only guess at is left
saying nothing, or told that it is a name — a wrong gloss is worse than
none, because there is no way to tell from the outside.
The ▶ beside a line is the phone speaking, not a person. It is there so
a line can be heard, and it will read anything; it is not a recording
and it is not a performance. Recordings, where a poem ever has one, are
public-domain readings, and where one follows the lines a machine is
asked only where in the sound each line falls — nothing is transcribed
and nothing is translated by one.
Made for one reader. Not to be passed on or linked to.