1Laura E. Richards’s In My Nursery: A Book of Verse (1890) is a volume for children containing many poems that engage the common and related phenomena of sleeping, insomnia, and dreaming. They do so in the occasionally overlapping contexts of the book’s “several worlds”: “the world of mother and child,” “the world of nature,” and “the world of pure fancy where the mother is absent” (Alexander 235). Of the collection’s nearly one hundred and fifty poems, about ten percent depict one or more of these three psychosomatic experiences, doing so in an unusually interrelated way. Specifically, the phenomena reveal inextricable interconnections among the “worlds” categorized above, highlighting the importance of good sleep hygiene as integral to the regulation of children’s temporality. The poems introduce the young, through playfully encouraging language and illustrations, to how proper sleep brings children’s habits into better alignment with their human caretakers and elements within nature itself. Dreams and sleep allow concerns to appear throughout the book about managing the transition of day into night and vice versa, with marshaled cooperation among fauna and flora largely and pleasantly aiding in creating norms around conventional expectations and their benefits.
2This article places these poems in the larger framework of a subgenre of texts dating back to antiquity, that of oneirocritical literature, a category of literary production that has as its very subject sleep and dreaming. Such a context makes the innovative qualities of In My Nursery even more appreciable. After offering a brief history and definition of the subgenre in the first section of this article, I consider Richards’s lullabies as a case study in its emphasis on generating healthful “ontological connections among all three” of what Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. has described as Aristotelian groupings of plant, animal, and human life (4). Shorter discussions of her variations on other types of oneirocritical lyric poetry follow, all of which together argue for Richards’s rightful inclusion as a significant contributor to the literary knowledge that this “wild work,” to quote Milton’s Adam, creates.
3Sleep and dreams have appeared in literature since Gilgamesh, the Bible, and the Homeric epics, and although the themes they tend to be associated with do not always “fall squarely into one category alone” (Brook xi; Miller 11–12), they have often involved certain features that are genre-specific. Episodic moments of sleep in narrative poetry, for instance, often depict the following, in isolation or in combination: immediate, temporary loss of agency (indicative of moral failures such as one of the seven deadly sins, that of sloth); enchantment, an erotic encounter, or an otherwise momentarily enjoyable interlude; restoration of bodily and /or mental abilities; and a general state of vulnerability to outside forces ranging from dangerous to affirmational of an ambitious, widely urgent goal (Sullivan 19). Common to but not required of such representations is the explicit role of nighttime darkness, which facilitates diverse activities including enemy attacks in hostile environments (as in The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost), gods’ visitations and prophecies (The Iliad), and transitions to other practices or modes such as allegorical dream-quests (Chaucer’s Romance of the Rose). Finally, in dramatic texts, such as Shakespearean tragedies, sleeping characters’ evocations of powerlessness as well as dreams can presage death (when those who sleep are not mistaken for dead, as in Romeo and Juliet). In comedies, such tensions or challenges are resolved in favor of outcomes like marriage or reaffirmed social ties (Lewin 111; Garber 70, 86). Later, romantic poets found themselves as fascinated by these elements of sleep and dreams as their Freudian descendants would be (Ford 4–6).
4Lyric poetry has also featured sleeping and dreaming since ancient times; dating back to the premodern period, poems in this genre complexly and frequently represent threats to ordinary bodily and mental existence, centering not on an individual’s existential survival as in epic poetry but instead mostly on romantic love (Calame 36–37). The aubade, or dawn song, is one such poem, in which the beloved and lover-speaker part after a night together, usually with regret over the end of a blissful but furtive visit, marking a necessary daytime separation, and celebrating the relationship itself. Whether appearing within sequences or as stand-alone original texts or translations, sonnets by poets from Dante until the present day often contain an opposing perspective on the topic of insomnia, much less nostalgic: The lover-speaker registers a current and agonizing condition of worry or wakefulness after a fantasized union with the beloved. Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Lady Mary Wroth, and John Milton (through more recent poets like Louise Bogan, James Merrill, and Seamus Heaney), whose sonnets, and songs within sequences, imagine this scenario as dreams or as waking visions willfully constructed, more generally thus highlight sleep and dreams as mechanisms for imagining the beloved’s appearance as a form of attempted mutual recognition, expressing a wish for relational normalcy (Weidhorn 92–93). In the case of this second major type of oneirocritical poem, however, the moments are fictive, and readers assume they have not taken place; the aubade’s premise is that they have.
5For both groups of poems, however, sleeping and dreaming introduce a similar and wide range of opposing emotions: trouble and solace, danger and pleasure, fragility and strength. The separations they assert between waking life’s irreparable loneliness and nighttime plenitude frustrate speakers suddenly finding themselves trapped in this newfound dilemma and craving a permanent reality that replaces the former with the latter. If John Frow calls the first-person address in lyric “a figuring forth rather than a direct expression of the self” (193), even as the “I” exacerbates its own bodily and mental isolation, it generates selves that are distinctively capable of positing kinds of human engagement that are no less vivid than they are presently out of reach. The poems aim to resolve conflict between conditions that are as mental as they are bodily. In other words, they stage searches for reconciliation and integration after dramatized absence.
6Laura Richards’s In My Nursery joins these literary representations of sleep and dreaming in addressing the self’s relational struggles in its worlds of familial, social, and naturalist love. The volume shows how these three kinds of love complement one another, essentially erasing any ontological and ethical distinctions between them and establishing a cooperative approach consistent with Richards’s own worldview. Richards herself was known for prioritizing collective identity and well-being, in a fascinating parallel to the way her poems work, even at the risk of self-effacement (Calhoun 333). Giving an example of this tendency, Rose Norman has called the title of Richards’s autobiography When I Was Your Age (1892) “a gesture that unites adult storyteller with child-listener” (113) and that throughout the text “Richards subsumes her childhood self within the story of her family” (105). The child in the poems, we shall see shortly, is also invited to join the community and not to stand alone in tension with it. And although her work directs our attention to an earlier stage of life than the sonneteers do, in which the relationship between speaker and addressee is that of a parent or wise adult figure and a child, they share a penchant for identifying sleep and dreams as related ways of establishing normalized socialization; the young learn acceptable practices that produce harmony for the good of all groups involved.
7Coming to terms with the dichotomies characterizing sleep and dreams has a final framework: The evolving reputation of research on children’s poetry, which was considered, until recently, a less serious topic of study than other poetic forms largely because of this structuring principle. As Roderick McGillis writes of Vladimir Propp, who “organized a taxonomy of the folktale by setting out the component parts of a body of stories,” the folktale’s “binary oppositions” are relevant to “children’s books where we have the binaries child /adult, experience/innocence, independent/dependent, capable/less capable and so on” (19). Most oneirocritical poems, from the aubade and sonnet to Richards’s lullabies, seem to share this feature as a starting point. In both, proper nighttime psychosomatic conditions are violated and metaphorized: The beloved imagined as accepting her lover’s advances is bringing “light” versus the “darkness” of rejection; the “wakeful” lover pursuing the difficult goal of requited love expresses frustration with the “unaware” beloved, and so on; likewise, the stubborn child resisting sleep prevents their own and others’ rest despite or perhaps because of the pleas of the caregiver, and the caregiver-child as well as the child-nature relationships must resolve into normalcy.
8The analogy between these two forms of poetry and their binaries, the love sonnet and the children’s poem, then, is facilitated through their shared concentration on oneirocritical contexts. Bringing the latter into the critical context established by the former legitimizes the scholarly pursuit of explication. Until about twenty years ago, the children’s poem was considered neglectable by literary researchers, deemed “the province of folklorists, psychologists and educationalists” (Rudd 6–7), and, similarly, about the subgenre this article mainly will address, that of the lullaby, “little ha[d] been written … though it is a most natural form of song and has been declared to be the genesis of all song” (Opie 17). The lullaby’s own pragmatic openness to multiple influences and disparate source material only reinforces its manifold appeal; Peter and Iona Opie claim that “the nursery rhyme, which by tacit and universal consent may be either said or sung, is resorted to by the mother for the soothing and amusement of her child without thought of its origin” (3). After the Opies’ pioneering research, the lullaby has received far more sophisticated treatment in the critical literature. This article may well be the first time that such contexts have been brought bear on Richards’s work, thus arguing for its relevance to this history.
9In an implicit refinement of that earlier scholarship, one researcher recently has observed that “poets frequently depart from this convention of pragmatic, simple, female-voiced song to craft deceptively complex layerings of character and voice in the guise of a sleep song” (Whearty 825). Such poems can contain “a contest of wills,” be “contractual,” list “actions in and around the home” as well as provide “thoughtful meditations on loss, desire, neglect, death, and despair” (825). Another critic notes that their social dimension involves unity as a goal if not an achievement: “In lullabies, the pragmatic roles of the ‘I-singer’ and the ‘you-listener’ are blurred in a joining together of bodies taking place in a calmness of movement. The identification between lulling and lulled subjects enables emotional and sonorous learnings” (Di Marco 49). This essay, then, takes as its starting point the “blurring” within Richards’s lullabies between caretaker and child, and, as stated earlier, among the natural, animal, and human worlds her poetry creates. Conflict inherent in a child’s inability or resistance to sleep produces the desire for regulation that would eradicate the dichotomies evident in oneirocritical contexts, as the tensions disappear with successful integration into the environment.
10Richards not only viewed poetry as coterminous with caretaking, she also may have even implied that to create poems while tending to children in the nursery, those children must literally be asleep. In Stepping Westward, one of her popular autobiographies, she states that her first daughter Alice’s very body provided the means of literary production: “[T]he first baby was plump and placid, with a broad, smooth back which made an excellent writing desk. She lay on her front, across my lap; I wrote on her back, the writing pad quite as steady as the writing of jingles required” (156). Can one assume (or hope) that the baby was asleep during these writing sessions? Regardless, In My Nursery indicates the importance of sleep and dreams from the very first pages; Richards’s dedicatory poem to her mother, Julia Ward Howe, alludes, at the start of the second quatrain, to having been sung lullabies as a baby: “Hushed upon your tender breast, / Soft you sang me to my rest” (“To My Mother” v–vi, ll. 4–5). Relatedly, insomnia provides a circumstance that either signals or fosters mischief and deception, while sleep itself highlights practices around bodily and mental health that not only affect the child but also the caregivers, bringing them all into more well-organized sociability. Finally, dreaming becomes an interpretive space in which imagination is at once scrutinized and valued. Of the collection’s 147 poems, most around a page long, and many of them illustrated, about fifteen or ten percent contain references to sleep and dreams.
11The first lullaby, “Johnny’s By-Low Song” (15–16), starts with a tone of mutuality, in the first-person plural, stating that both the speaker and the child together are taking their “rock-away horse” (l. 1) elsewhere, “[f]ar away in the sunset gold” (l. 3). The “lovelier land than can be told” (l. 4) has birds singing “lullaby” (l. 8) and flowers that “nod” themselves to sleep (l. 6). The poem later progresses into a distinction between the two figures through features reminiscent of Homer’s gates of false and true dreams. Instead of a set of ivory and horn, two sets of the former divide the sleeping children by gender. The caretaker stays behind as the child enters the “land” of sleep, and at this point crucially the language of mutuality shifts to second and third person: “So shut your bonny two eyes of blue, / Or else they never will let you through” (ll. 12–13). No longer a “we,” Johnny is asked to assimilate with “them,” the other, model children: “Why, they all fell asleep, dear, long ago; / For how could they keep awake, you know?” (ll. 21–22). Johnny’s joining the group occurs only when nature reappears, a subtly paratactic “and” creating a seamless transition between “clouds” and human child:
The brook in its sleep goes babbling by,
And the fat little clouds are asleep in the sky;
And now little Johnny is sleeping too,
So open the gates and pass him through. (ll. 37–40)
12The mixture of sound (“babbling”) and the silent but personified and diminutive “fat little clouds” leaves a final image of peaceful quiet from earth and sky, which stand apart from the plant- and animal-oriented movement and sounds of the chorus’ two pastoral features: “[F]lowers” that seem to “nod” off and “birds” who “sing by-low!” The final stanza’s achievement of the conditions of sleep suggests the chorus’ figures accomplish their tasks of ushering it into being.
13The collection’s next three lullabies appear a few poems later: “Song of the Little Winds” (24), “Good-Night Song” (25), and “Another ‘Good-Night’” (26). They are all list poems, in addition to being lullabies. As Debbie Pullinger notes about the list in children’s poetry:
[It] can be a response to infinity: either to quantity that cannot be enumerated, or to quality that cannot be described. Second, it can be an expression of two opposing but equally powerful human impulses: desire for abundance and excess, which is an expression of release and abandon; and the satisfaction of collection, which is an expression of containment and control …. This above point is also a ‘tension’: Paradoxically, then, even as it points beyond itself to the infinite and the ineffable, the finite, enclosing form of the list, with its patterns of rhythms and rhymes, simultaneously works to reassure the child that, for the duration of the poem at least, the sprawling abundance of the world is contained within language. (223)
14The “reassurance” element in the first of these poems consists, I would argue, with the cooperative element among plant, animal, and human lives mentioned at the start of this essay: The poem’s sleeping birds contrasted with wakeful winds whose work of doting on them serves as a means of interactive support, “[k]issing them, fanning them, soft and sweet” (“Song” 24, l. 3). Soothing appears again in the second stanza’s personified “rose-mother’s breast” where the winds are “[r]ocking the buds” (l. 7) to sleep; finally, the last stanza’s wind brings children into the same state via its “[s]inging so sweet in each little one’s ear / He thinks his mother’s own song to hear” (ll. 11–12). The movement from bird to flower to child to nature’s successful imitation of maternal singing allows the “containment” to consist of agreeably shared work, as the oneirocritical context calls for a harmonizing of tensions among elements whose persistence would generate emotional and social chaos.
15“Good-Night Song” and “Another ‘Good-Night’” follow similar structures in moving from non-human to human sleepers, starting with an anthropomorphized sun-addressee, in the first of the two, that is instructed to change its crown for a “gray night-cap” (l. 3). Then after moving to the “[s]ky” (l. 5), which is excluded from this physiological process—“Not a wink of sleep for you. / You must watch us all the night” (ll. 6–7), the “flowers” (l. 9), “birds” (l. 13) and finally the “child” (l. 17) become sleepy. A striking division between the poem’s sun and flowers on the one hand and the birds and child on the other consists of the second set of two being made to sleep by outside forces (including the sound of leaves on the tree, which acts as the birds’ lullaby), while the first couple must act to achieve this goal on their own as directed by the speaker, who tells them “shut your eyes” (l. 4) and “shut up / Every swinging bell and cup” (ll. 9–10). “Another ‘Good-Night’” contains birds, wind, and flowers as well as bees who are being asked to hush their “drowsy hum!” (l. 4) in service of the central figures in the poem, the “two children” (l. 8). The logic of the first stanza’s list ordering is animal followed by plant life, with Pullinger’s “containment” evidenced in its ending with human interaction. The next stanza’s lists move down the body, a blazon, from “eyes” (“Another” l. 9), to “lips” (l. 11) ending at “feet” (l. 13) commanded to stop “your dancing” (l. 14). The two sets of lists, explicitly environmental followed by the human body, introduce this second component for the first time in Richards’s lullabies. The cooperation among the plant, animal, and human life these poems depict rewards them all with harmonious interconnectivity. Their orchestrated and mutual calm works.
16Other poems about sleep later in the collection contain lists to organize the landscape’s relationship to children’s sleep; “Sleepyland” (46–47), the longest of these, gives children under three a place to travel to “[a]ll the lovely morning” (ll. 16, 24, 32), as the refrain goes, and places them in a highly interactive and benign relationship with the animal world. Two three-line sequences of anaphora reveal that, before waking, they “[s]aw” (ll. 13, 14, 15) a pastoral landscape, and “[h]eard” the “winds,” “doves,” and “cows” (ll. 13–15), followed by their participating in the birdsong as well as dancing and riding on mythical creatures. Just as the lists of activities name and thus explicate the scope of the child’s imaginary interactions with the universe, the statement of the age limit for this practice is justified as a source of initial exclusivity followed by familial sociability; otherwise, the mother will continue to be alone and “out in the cold” (l. 39). Two more paired poems, “Bed-Time” (64) and “Bird-Song” (65), appearing on facing pages, offer a brief “good-night” (“Bed-Time” l. 12) to the child whose “toes” (l. 1) and “fingers” (l. 5) have practiced tucking themselves in to initiate the sleep process. The transition between night and day is comforting and full of positive interactions, including kissing “a loving good-night” (l. 12) to the child. “Bird-Song” (65) is a rare poem in the voice of the birds themselves; the animals describe their performance of “singing” (l. 19), their “working” (l. 5) from morning through evening, aligning their song to the accompanying flora, before going to sleep and repeating the process again the following day: “Waking up once more to all the wonder of the world” (l. 20).
17The two poems with whose variations on the oneirocritical tradition this article concludes are “Young (One)’s Night Thoughts” (31–32) and “Tommy’s Dream; Or, The Geography Demon” (71–73). The “Night Thoughts” subgenre, as Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts” illustrates, usually highlights a speaker’s sense of separation, faced with wakeful, turbulent, and existential musings putting them at odds with the rest of humanity. The premise animating “Young (One)’s Night Thoughts” is a more socially grounded oppositional relationship: a baby’s chatty defiance against the mother’s wishes that they fall asleep. Wakefulness is not a crisis but a devious source of delight for one and a problem for the other. Each stanza is a series of themed and rhymed commands issued from the baby to the mother, to “‘[d]ance’” (l. 9) or “[s]ing” (l. 17), as if reversing the typical ways adults expect children to perform on demand and subverting the expectation that nighttime will be restful. If night thoughts rely on opposition between despair and levity, here the turmoil is inflicted on the mother by the young. The baby imagines the mother having become impatient and starting to “scheme” about how to be released from this dynamic as she currently is permitted only to be “dreaming / Of rest” (ll. 13–14). Instead of being tortured by her own thoughts, she is subject to the child’s provocations (commanding her to “dance,” “prance,” “sing” and “bring” “toys”). The mother is not haunted by an inner demon or mental crisis but by a very tangible problem. The poem’s clever variation on the type, thereby, also brings the child-caregiver relationship into what is normally an extremely isolating event. A monologue, “Young (One)’s Night Thoughts” never discloses the mother’s account of the event; it is one of the few poems in the collection that does not achieve any mutually agreeable conclusion. By contrast, the mother’s role in “Tommy’s Dream; Or, The Geography Demon” is that of sole resolver of the source of her son’s nightmare. She determines that a monster’s appearance in his sleep after the boy studies his geography lesson was brought on by eating his aunt’s cake.
18Few scholars have done more than Etti Gordon Ginzburg to argue persuasively that Laura Richards’s oeuvre, her poetry in particular, deserves a more prominent role in the critical study of children’s literature. In an article on In My Nursery, she compares Richards’s career and work to those of Edward Lear, noting the following distinction between the two poets: “It follows that because Lear ostensibly writes for children but focuses mainly on adults, his poems are easily dissociated from the nursery, let alone child-rearing. In contrast, Richards writes for children, but also about them and their caretakers from the vantage point, as a mother, of an insider in the nursery” (“Edward Lear’s” 296). More specifically, as Gordon Ginzburg writes elsewhere, “burdened by [motherhood],” Richards seems to idealize childhood and yet “[o]n closer observation … quite a few poems seem to challenge the conventionally sentimental representations of children and childhood of the time, either by highlighting negative aspects of children’s behavior or by hinting at parental aggressions” (“Queering” 382). Indeed, “Young (One)’s Night Thoughts” corroborates her speculation from both angles, as the baby rebels against behavioral and relational standards and the mother attempts a corresponding relentlessness: “your scheming / To silence my screaming / Is all of no use” (ll. 14–16). These two efforts cannot be reconciled through collaboration with the natural world.
19In the previous instances we have considered, the lullaby has served as an excellent test case for both the “insider” nature of Richards’s poetry as it delineates a “caretaker” role, explicating and supervising children’s potential waywardness. Perhaps it is fitting to have ended this discussion with “Young (One)’s Night Thoughts,” a poem that overturns what many of the lullabies under consideration have sought to achieve with a playfulness that shows a nuanced understanding of (if not a joking disrespect for) the mother figure and her search for solace. A parody of her lullabies, it satirizes the strictures society imposes regarding sleep. The management of the young remains mostly within reach so long as nature is conspiring to complete the effort; without it, humanity stands alone, sleepless.
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