Rhymes for the Young Folk

William Allingham's 1886 collection pulses with an irrepressible joy. These aren't your grandmother's stiff Victorian verses. They're living, breathing invocations of childhood's magical kingdom, from dancing fairies to mischievous lepracauns, from robins in winter to bubbles caught in summer light. Each poem crackles with the wild, wondering intelligence of a child looking at the world for the very first time. The language bends and plays, rhymes tumbling over themselves in delightful disorder. Allingham writes like someone who remembers exactly what it felt like to believe in the little people all children carry inside them: the enchanted creatures inhabiting every shadow and moonbeam, the profound importance of birdsong and the turn of seasons. This collection has endured for over a century because it never condescends to its young readers. It honors their interior world, their fears and longings and magnificent irrationality. For anyone who wants to remember what wonder felt like, or to share it with a child, these poems remain as perfectly suited as they were in 1886.