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JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY , THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT HOME

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY
THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT
by Thomas Earl Williams with primary illustrations by Katherine Kuonen and the great assistance of Robert Tinsley with Riley artifacts, Copyright, 1997, Thomas Earl Williams

Part 23

BUD

RILEY AS A CHILD TUCKED

ALL INSIDE ‑

"THE CHILDREN'S POET"
BOOKMARK FOR RILEY DAY PROCLAMATION 1949
BOOKMARK FOR AN ASIDE ON RILEY AND PALMISTRY

620 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

RILEY AS A CHILD TUCKED ALL INSIDE
THE "CHILDREN'S POET"

Perhaps the one "fragmented" Riley self not men­tioned in "The Flying Islands of the Night" or in the Buzz Club series was the part of himself as "Bud." That is because Bud was Riley as a "tucked-away-inside" elfin child: innocent, hopeful and unwearied. He was a child who never surrendered to life but stayed strong and knew the truth of dreams.

Two great circumstances seem to have per­mitted Riley to become the child he wished to be more overtly in his older age. The first was fame Fame permits a person to be who he wants to. The second was the death of the father, Reuben Riley in 1893, the strong disciplinarian who

would never have approved such odd behavior as a man acting the child.

When it came time that Riley's child-self could spring forth, Bud was waiting to appear. Bud was Riley who could not grow up. Why? Perhaps it because the world of Riley's childhood was so fascinating and charming that he simply did not want to escape it. From his childhood memory comes "Little Orphant Annie."

LITTLE ORPHANT ANNIE' (1885)

INSCRIBED
WITH ALL FAITH AND AFFECTION

Bud Riley going on six. (Neg.C7169, IMCPL-Riley Collection, Indiana Historical Society.)

Will Vawter's illustration of the poem, "Little Orphant Annie" for the book. RILEY CHILD-RHYMES WITH HOOSIER PICTURES, pub­lished in 1905. Vawter illustrated more than a dozen Riley books including five collections issed by Bobhs-Merrill after Riley's death.

To all the little children: - The happy ones; and sad ones;

The sober and the silent ones; the boister­ous and glad ones;

The good ones - Yes, the good ones, too; and all the lovely

bad ones.

BUD • 621

Little Orphant Annie's' come to Our house to stay,

An' wash the cups an' saucers up, an' brush the crumbs away, An' shoo the chickens off the porch, an' dust the hearth, an' sweep,

An' make the fire ³, an' bake the bread, an' earn her board­an-keep:

An' all us other childern, when the supper-things is done, We set around the kitchen fire an' has the mostest fun, A-listenin' to the witch-tales 'at Annie tells about,

An' the Gobble-uns 'at gits you

Ef you

Don't

Watch

Out!

Wunst they wuz a little boy wouldn't say his prayers', -An' when he went to bed at night, away up-stairs,

His Mammy heerd him holler, an' his Daddy heerd him bawl. An' when they turn't the kivvers down, he wuzn't there at all! An' they seeked him in the rafter-room, an' cubby-hole, an' press, An seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an' ever'-wheres, I guess; But all they ever found wuz thist his pants an' roundabout: -An' the Gobble-uns '11 git you

Ef you

Don't

Watch

Out!

An' one time a little girl 'ud allus laugh an' grin,

An' make fun of ever' one, an' all her blood-an'-kin;

An' wunst, when they was "company," an' ole folks wuz there, She mocked 'em an' shocked 'ern, an' said she didn't care! An' thist as she kicked her heels, an' turn't to run an' hide, They wuz two great big Black Things a-standin' by her side, An' they snatched her through the ceilinfor she knowed what she's about!

An' the Gobble-uns git you

622 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

Ef you

Don't

Watch

Out!

An' little Orphant Annie says, when the blaze is blue, An' the lamp-wick sputters, an' the wind goes woo-oo! An' you hear the crickets quit, an' the moon is gray, An' the lightnin'bugs in dew is all squenched away, ‑

You better mind yer parunt,s, an' yer teachurs fond an' dear, An' cherish them 'at loves you, an' dry the orphant's tear, An' he'p the pore an' needy ones 'at clusters all about, Er the Gobble-uns '11 git you

Ef you

Don't

Watch Out!

I. The poem was first published under the name "The Elf Child" in the Indianapolis JOURNAL of November 15. 1885. It was composed in "The Crow's Nest" of the Reuben Riley home known as "The Seminary" in Greenfield, Indiana.

2. As originally published the waif's name was Little Orphant "Allie." "Allie" was the nickname of Mary Alice Smith the given name of the child described. She was an orphan taken into the Riley home during Riley's childhood before the Civil War. She delighted the Riley children with her imagi­native stories and odd ways. When she fed the chickens, she was a queen, she said, throwing gold to the peasants. She pressed her cheek lovingly on the steps of the curving stairway and reported that she could hear fairies and elves whispering underneath. This was Little Orphant Annie. Her mother was dead and she wanted to go to "the Good world where my mother is." The real Mary Alice Smith married the farmer Wesley Gray and settled down south of Philadelphia, Indiana. In her later years, "Little Orphant Annie" was in great demand for visiting

Mary Alice Smith, "Little Orphant Annie." in her older age. She came from Liberty, Indiana where she had lived in the hills. Her mother died, her father left her, and an uncle. John Rittenhouse. from Greenfield came down in a wagon to fetch her to his hometown. She got work at the Riley's. For many years after she left the Riley's. her whereabouts were unknown. Then on September 30. 1882, Riley published a prose piece in the Indianapolis JOURNAL: "Where is Mary Alice SmithT She was soon found after a search by Riley's nephew Edmund Eitel. In January, 1888, Riley brought her to the stage of the Grand Opera House in Indianapolis to great applause at the con­clusion of his readings and repeated the whole story of the little slender orphan dressed in black who was dropped off at the Riley Home and told the Riley children about elves and goblins.

BUD • 623

Hoosier schools to talk to the enthralled children about her years at the Riley home. She called Riley a "tease" and said he drew ugly pictures of his playmates to annoy them and many other remembered tales.

3. Up to the mid-Nineteenth Century, cooking was done in a large open fireplace on the Hoosier frontier. Big coal-burning cast-iron stoves replaced fireplace cooking around the time of the American Civil War in the early 1860's. 4. Riley's childhood in the 1850's was a time of great religious enthusiasms on the American frontier.

There might have been more serious reasons why Riley enjoyed contemplat­ing his life in youth so much. Was it because he was a Hoosier Deutsch child in a transitional "mixing pot" cul­ture? Or was it because depression had deprived Riley of any chance to mature as would another adult? Or had he felt the death of loved ones too deeply to recover? Or was it because his human­itarian and kenotic ideas had given him the peace to become the child again?

I think Riley recalled his childhood so fondly because he had been through so much loneliness and heartache. Rudyard Kipling, the author of the British CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES, may have thought this too when he wrote Riley a poem:

TO J.W.R.

"Your trail runs to the westward,

And mine to my own place;

There is water between our lodges,

And you cannot see my face.

And it is well - for crying

Should neither be written nor seen,

But if I call you Smoke-in-the-Eyes,

I know you will know what I mean."

Both ached for the lost child in themselves.

A pallet of straw located in the alcove where Little Orph ant Annie slept at the Riley Home, Greenfield, Indiana.

624 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

Riley replied to Kipling's poem with his own entitled:

TO RUDYARD KIPLING

"If there be sweet in any song I've sung,

Twas savored for thy palate, 0 my child! For thee the lisping of the children all ‑

For thee the youthful voices of old years -For thee all chords untamed or musical ‑

For thee the laughter, and for thee the tears."

Riley acknowledged tears went into his children's poetry as well as laughter.

In his last years Riley could become a child and "The Children's Poet" per­haps the most joyous appellation he would have. Bud lived in a friendly "Child-World." Riley became Bud and went to live with him there in his dreams.

Riley chose to become Bud when even fame was already available. Riley ultimately was not satisfied with being Krung. The possibility of finding peace as an innocent child can have was too great a draw. Riley had always wished to be Bud.

Although Riley wrote children's poems most of his literary life, he only drew on the "Bud" inside him. Not until 1893 when Riley's father died could Bud be brought out in the open as Riley's companion in real life. This event liberated Riley to become the child of innocence Riley really was but

could never be in reality. Soon came the book A CHILD-WORLD published in 1896 which brought back memories of Riley's life in Greenfield, Indiana when it was a village of three hundred souls where life was fun and mean­ness was not contemplated.

A "roundabout^- or boy's everyday clothes at the time of Riley's boyhood.

BUD • 625

The father's expectation of the son was always that he would take to his own legal profession, marry and raise a family. Riley never did any of these things. By the time the father died, Riley was a child who had outlived most of the life strategy of "The Flying Islands of the Night." Riley had always wanted to live in a world of dreams. Riley once said, "My father did not have a large library, hut a choice one, and among those books there were some he forbade me to read. There were books of fairy tales and mytholo­gy. Soon as he was out of the room, however, I was again sporting with the elves and fairies. It was a wonderful world, because I thought it was real." This world did become totally real after the father died. His was the only hand to shushhhhhh the dreaming.

The rebirth of Bud released a great force of creative energy. Riley's iden­tity as the child permitted him to "make believe" about everything.

Bud was innocent and good. When the child was absent from him, he was not whole. He was as the child in this poem published in the Indianapolis JOURNAL on September 26, 1880:

A PHANTOM

Little baby, 0 as then, come back to me, And be again just as you used to be,

626 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

For this phantom of you stands

All to cold and silently,

And will not kiss nor touch me with its hands.

Bud came back.

Riley regained the spirit of himself as a child. He felt himself in the past in the presence of the living. He once stated to his secretary late in life, "You don't believe in ghosts? Well, I do. The lad I was when I stood in the soli­tude of the woods, by Tharpe's Pond, comes to associate with me at night. He is not a tangible being, not a body you can touch with a finger, but a vivid presence here in my room nevertheless. He is the ghost of my boyhood self, and when he lingers round, my heart is warm, and I revel in past emotions and bygone times." About this child he had no insecurities. He could play with all other identities. Riley's use of pseudonyms is legion. His letters end with signatures outlandishly fake. Sometimes he signs himself as Jamesy O'Reilly or Uncle Sydney. Names meant very little to Riley and he really didn't think them very important. When he submitted the poem "Lord Bacon" to a newspaper he ascribed it to his business manager, Amos J. Walker. In October, 1905, late in his life, he submitted poems entitled, "Three Southern Singers" as being from John Challing. More readily known pseudonyms are "Edyrn," "Jay Whit," "John C. Walker," "Doc Marigold," and "Harrison Driley." He thought nothing of turning his identity into the Irish as "Jamesy 0' Riley" or "Jamesy O'Reilly."

This was not a man in identity crisis. James Whitcomb Riley simply never settled on who he wanted to be until he made up his mind that he really wanted to be the child, "Bud" most of all.

Once when Riley was praised for being the poet who put the real child into American literature, he replied "I have only been trying to do the little fellow simplest, purest justice." He said, "There is always beside me the lit­tle boy I used to be, and I can think his thoughts, and live his hopes and his tragedies now, just as much as I could when I looked like him."

There is a story about this Bud. He not only lived in Riley's imagination, he lived in Riley's reality as well. Riley took walks with him.

In his later years those who knew him, remarked how he delighted to go for imaginary walks with "Bud." "Bud" was of course Riley's own nick­name as a child in Greenfield. Cane in hand he would venture off onto Lockerbie Street and head toward downtown Indianapolis in the company of the make-believe boy, "Bud." "But" skipped ahead of him usually as he

BUD • 627

walked usually about two or three feet. They stopped at a store and Riley bought tobacco and red cinnamon drops for Bud. Riley ate them both. When he ate the cinnamon drops his lips got boyishly and glorious crimson.

As he walked, he conversed with Bud. "There's a beautiful horse, Bud," Riley would say to his youthful companion "Bud." The talk would be of things both understood. "Wonderful morning, Bud," Riley would say.

One day Riley and "Bud" turned from East Street into Market Street just as an automobile was coming around the corner just ahead of Riley. The man was scared to death. When he told a friend about this, Riley said, "I got back to the curb all right but he almost got 'Bud.'"

The world that Bud lived in was a past world of his own youth in Hancock County. What would those days have been like? What was Greenfield like before the Civil War?

We have the benefit of the witness of Lee 0. Harris as to this world. Riley's instructor, Lee 0. Harris, described the scene when James Whitcomb Riley was born and grew up in the 1850's in Hancock County, Indiana. I quote the first stanza of Harris's "The Harvest Days of the Olden Times," first published in the Indianapolis SENTINEL.

THE HARVEST DAYS OF THE OLDEN TIMES

"Oh! the harvest days of the olden time! The ring of the sickles to merry rhyme! The wealth that fell at the reapers feet, With the tinkling sound of a music sweet! My soul is wrapt in a dream today

And over my senses, from far away,

There comes a rustle of grain, combined With the drowsy voice of the summer wind, And my heart o'erflows with a song of praise

For the days - the days

The harvest time of my boyhood days..."

Harris was writing about recollections of the everyday experience of the folk at harvest time in Hancock County before the Civil War.

What would harvest time have been like in Hancock County in the 1850's to write about? Can we picture this land which Bud described in A Child-World?

628 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

Most of Hancock County was still being cleared. Few farms were over 50 acres. The land was plowed with wooden mold-board plows to put in crops between stumps. The stumps didn't bother the farmers though because the crop work was mostly done by hand except for help from oxen pulling a few implements. Rail fences separated fields and the timber was used for fuel in the home fireplaces. The ashes from this made lye for soap. Crops at harvest time were mostly for home consumption. Neighbors didn't see each other very much. For mail, you went into Greenfield to the Post Office for pick up. Then, as today, corn was the principal crop. An average farmer would have had two oxen, a saddle horse, a couple of family cows, possibly a razor back pig or two, and a few chickens. The livestock ran in the woods and corn, oats and wheat was planted by hand. We remember that Greenfield was not a town when Riley was born. It was unincorporated for­est with inhabitants on a National Road huddling together in log cabins. An early memory of Riley was his father returning home with a deer he had hunted slung over his saddle for venison.

The harvest time that Lee 0. Harris was describing was all done by hand. The family cut their corn with corn knives. I should say the stalks were cut in the fields and hauled near the house for hand husking during the winter. Sometimes neighbors would gather in the Hancock County farm neighbor­hoods for a "husking bee." In those days, corn harvesting was often "two step." The first step was when the corn was "topped" with cutting the stalks just above the ears to get the most palatable part of the stalks for livestock feed.

While the settlers of this virgin land of frontier Indiana were busy sub­sisting, the children were given free rein to go to Kingry's Mill, a grist mill, about a mile downstream on Brandywine Crick. The favorite "Swimmin' Hole" was on the way. The boys and girls were said to play Robin Hood up and down the crick. Riley was said to be a small child, not so strong as the others, but clever with ideas for games. He was fascinated with a pirate named Captain Kidd and many fairy tales and mythological figures. His imagination fed many of the children's activities and he was popular as a playmate because he could bring others into his imaginative scenarios.

We might think of this pioneer life as difficult. No, that is not the way our Hoosier pioneer ancestors considered their lives. Providence gave these people their fifty acres and strong hands to cut those stalks and husk the ears of corn. Were they happy'? Were they as happy as we, their descendants?

The second stanza of Harris's poem:

BUD • 629

"I stand again where the breezes toy

With the tangled locks of the farmer boy: I hear the chorus of tuneful birds,

The twinkling bells of the grazing herds, The happy shout and the joyous song,

And the gladsome laugh of the reaping throng: The shout, the song, and the merry peal -Attuned to the ring of the flashing steel -They come me now through the dream maze

From the days - the days

The harvest time of my boyhood days..."

Is Harris glossing over the times he recalls? Is this romanticism? Is this some sort of gross resort to emotion? Where are the disappointments when the ax handle broke, the army worms ate the crops, men could expect to marry early and often because their wives died in childbirthing, or when childhood diseases cut life expectancy to a few years? To some extent, I suppose, "selective memory" of the good times permitted folk to strive and want to go on despite it all. On the other hand, hey! there were and are today joyous touches of life by a providential hand. Harris chose those moments to recall in his poetry.

What about the children? The families took the child care and education of their family youth to themselves. Riley's "Uncle Mart" Riley lived with Reuben and Elizabeth and built a treehouse for Riley and his brother. A swing was dangled from a tree for him to do "skyscrapers." Uncle Mart read to Riley from Nathaniel Hawthorne's TANGLEWOOD TALES when that book came out in 1853. He was also read to by Almon Keefer from a book of sea adventure called, TALES OF THE OCEAN.

Bud has his juvenile idiosyncracies that caused folk to love the old man Riley all the more.

In describing his fictional "Poet" in his novel about Riley of the same name, Meredith Nicholson said, "A certain inadvertence marked the Poet's ways. His deficiencies in orientation, even in the city he knew best of all, were a joke among his friends. He apparently gained his destinations by good luck rather than by intention.

Incurable modesty made him shy of early or precipitate arrivals at any threshold. Even in taking up a new book he dallied, scanned the covers, pondered the title-page, to delay his approach, as though not quite sure of

630 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

the author's welcome and anxious to avoid rebuff. The most winning and charming, the most loveable of men - and entitled to humor himself in such harmless particulars!

The affairs that men busied themselves with were incomprehensible to him.

According to Meredith Nicholson, with his intimate Riley "had a fashion of taking up without prelude subjects that had been dropped weeks before." A child doesn't care much about time sequences.

Riley's nephew Edmund H. Eitel once stated, "The vivid presence of the poet's youth must

have always been with him for he once referred to the part these memories played in the writ­ing of many of his poems. He called these memories his "Dream Youth." Perhaps the psy‑

chologist          might
explain that this

One of Bud's play areas. The dining room at the Riley boyhood home, Greenfield,
'Dream Youth was Indiana with the "tubby hole" (a small enclosed space) at the right rear next to the
a world in itself, cabinet. "Wunst they wuz a little boy wouldn't say his prayers, –/An' when he went
to bed at night, away up-stairs, /His Mammy heerd him holler, and' his Daddy heerd
created out of his him bawl. 'An' When they turn't the kivvers down, he wuzn't there at all! /An they
seeked him in the rafter-room, an' cubby-hole..." (from the poem. "Little Orphant

recollections and

Annie") This is the cubby-hole of the poem.

developed in his

poetic imagination. There was a very definite door to this world. That door was the memory of a deeply felt spiritual experience of childhood."

If we are correct in our assumption that Riley did not seek nor achieve maturation as an adult, but essentially stayed the Hoosier Deutsch child, then "Bud" would provide the most realistic of the heterogeneity of Riley's personality mix. Bud is the child who actually became alive and was the reality of James Whitcomb Riley toward the end of Riley's life. He was a real person if only to James Whitcomb Riley. He was the person who authored the children's poetry which gave Riley great fame. The real Riley was this Hoosier Deutsch child never grown up.

Bud's life was an ima^ginary sphere where Riley could avoid the reali‑

BUD • 631

ties of a world of Social Darwinist thought, depression and alcoholism. William Lyon Phelps says of him:

"HE CARED ONLY FOR POETRY"

"He cared only for poetry, never talked about anything else. He took no interest in politics, and he never voted but once. When he later discovered that by reason of his unfamiliarity in making out the ballot, he had voted for the opponent of the friend who had induced him to go to the polls, he vowed never to vote again. He was extraordinarily neat and precise; his clothes were immaculate, his handwriting was a work of art....He always took infi­nite pains with his verse, considered carefully its technique and the weight of every word. He hated free verse with such uncompromising ardor that he was unable to see anything in Walt Whitman...There was absolutely no taint of vulgarity in the man; his profanity was lyrical. He had a heart of gold, and a genius for friendship. Having missed me one day at the train, he wrote, "I could have wept, had not the Almighty given me the blessed fit of cussin'...(Of Bill Nye, the humorist): The two humorists traveled together -Riley could never travel alone, as he could never find the right train or get off at the right place, having no notion of locating....(His letters) reflect his chronic modesty; he often felt that publishers and lecture bureaus paid him more than he earned. ..His affection for children and his understanding of them, shown not only in his verse but in the natural "equal" way he treated them, were beautifully expressed immediately after his death in a cartoon by Westerman, which appeared in the OHIO STATE JOURNAL, at Columbus. At the foot of a staircase there is crowded group of children looking up, and calling "Good night, Mr. Riley, good night, good night" One of the smallest children, overwhelmed by tears, is being led away. (Verse) was his natural medium of expression...He never got over the torture that afflicted him for hours preceding his appearance (at public lectures). He would eat nothing all day, would groan and wail and lament, could not bear to be left alone; and yet the instant he stepped out on the stage, there was no sign of the ner­vousness or of the agony that had tormented him. I remember once, a few hours before he was due to appear, trying to reason with him. "Why, Jim, there's nothing to be afraid of. You have done this hundreds of times, always done it well. Nobody is going to hurt you. You haven't even got to think up anything to say. All you are going to do is to repeat your own poems. Come on, let's have something to eat, and you'll feel better." He looked at me in amazement. "Eat? My God, hear him talk. Hear him say eat. 1 haven't eaten a mouthful all day." The professor comments, "I am certain

632 ¨ THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

that if he had known he was to be hanged, he would not have suffered so acutely."

William Lyon Phelps is talking here of a child, not an adult.

Riley himself recognized that the boy lived in him and that he was real­ly this child, Bud, wrote a poet on that exact subject entitled, "The Old Man," sometimes called, "Salutation - To Benj. F. Johnson" (Riley's early pseudonym) which closes,

"So to-day, as lives the bloom,

And the sweetness, and perfume

Of the blossoms, I assume,

On the same mysterious plan

The Master's love assures, That the selfsame boy endures In that hale old heart of yours,

Old Man."

The real Riley, the only "ginoine ar-tickle," is the Hoosier Deutsch child filled with kenotic peace who needn't become an adult. We find this Riley in letters which Riley wrote to a child Dory Ann (Edith Thomas Medairy) covering a peri­od of many years. In those letters Riley typically signed his name "Bud.-

In older age, Riley acquired a player piano and when visited by a friend he inserted a favorite "roll" and danced around the room snap‑

ping his fingers in time to the music. The boy in him was always very near the surface of his character.

In his older age, "Bud" kept Riley going. One sees this in two letters writ­ten the same day to an Aunt and a separate letter to her niece both living in New York. In the letter to the Aunt, a poet friend Miss Edith M. Thomas, Riley relates the death of friend, "Youth - Youth - Youth! come down this way again! Then the Dread Shadow even could not blur the glory of the summer as it does. The fourth member of our household had gone on - the fourth in three years and this last a dear old and already sainted Mother! So

BUD • 633

I could not write - nor can I yet, - only in this allusion to reaffirm yet newer, firmer belief in a wholly compensating hereafter. -Simply for all mother's sakes it must be so..."

Then to the little girl, "You needn't think you're so big if have been to Bennington! Maybe this afternoon I'm going to get to go 'way out to Millersville, and eat supper there, 'fore we drive back, and have chicken and white gravy which Uncle Sidney laughs and calls it "kitepaste", an' hot biskits or salt risin' bread, and "milk that's purt-nigh puore cream for the child," as Mrs. Tilley she allus says."... This Bud had quite forgotten the fact that fate sometimes cuts into the innocent pleasures of childhood.

The Riley who wrote from the standpoint of Bud had characteristic themes as identified by the English poet Rudyard Kipling in a letter he wrote to Mrs. Charles Holstein in 1893 - "children and loafing and home life. They are all three of 'em pretty new to a Gipsy (sic) like myself, and I love to hear them sung as they should be."

The idea of these themes derive from the dreams of Riley's own inner essential immature persona. The process is probably similar to his picture of himself in composition in "Tale of a Spider:" "Although by no means of a morbid or misanthropic disposition, the greater portion of my time I occu­py, in strict seclusion, here at my desk - for only when alone can I consci­entiously indulge certain propensities of thinking aloud, talking to myself, leaping from my chair occasionally to dance a new thought round the room, or take it in my arms, and hug, and hold, and love it as I would a great, fat, laughing baby with a bunch of jingling keys.- Riley is that Hoosier Deutsch baby, a child who still can converse with the angels.

RILEY AND PALMISTRY

Bud allowed Riley to do childish and fun things. Riley came to love to have his palm read. A set of Riley's handprints has been preserved in the hook LION'S PAWS by the palmistry reader Nellie Simmons Meier. Ms. Meier claims that her readings were the only ones that James Whitcomb Riley ("our close friend") really "listened to." She describes his hands as "always immaculate." "Mr. Riley was ultra fastidious with regard to his hands and the texture of the skin was remarkably fine." She notes his two hands were very different. The left one, which a palmist calls a "natural" hand (to a right-handed person), reveals a diffident, shrinking, secretive, timid nature, while the "right hand" is the hand of a self-reliant person with great initiative - the hand of a self-made man. The left hand shows a "long

634 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

droop" at the "head line" indi­cating to her great imagination which Riley man­ifested in great "gloomy forebod­ings" as well as in his humor, while the "head line" in the right hand is modified to reveal Riley had

much less diffi‑

culty      with

depression as the

years passed.

She notes: "The qualities that made him a poet were easily found. His smooth fingers showed inspirational qualities, and the pads or cushions on the inside of the nail phalanges reveal him to be supersensitive to everything that went on around him. The mount of Venus was well developed and smooth, indicating a deeply emotion nature responsive to mental contacts and material conditions...The length of the first phalange of the finger of Mercury with the pointed tip showed his gift of expression in speaking or writing...His heart line was the saddest kind of a heart line, for when he lost faith and belief, which he gave in extremes, the awakening disappointment brought a poignant suffering, which found its outlet in his work and enriched his poems...On the mount of the Moon was a whorl, a mark that looked like a thumb print which, with a similar print under and connecting the fingers of Saturn and Apollo, told of extraordinary intuitive powers. On his left hand under the fourth finger there was the unusual "mark of mercury" show­ing whimsy to the highest possible degree. She adds that Riley commented about the spiritual world during a "reading," saying:

"I always think it wonder when I go to the circus, to see a man riding around the ring on a bare-backed horse, keeping a number of colored balls passing from his hands into the air and back again and again, without drop­ping one. But the Great Power has been keeping the rainbow balls of many universes moving through space as He rides in a circuit.-

The inked handprints of James Whitcomb Riley preserved by the palmist Nellie Simmon Meier. She noted most his whimsy evident from the development of the "mount of Mercury" and the "sign of Mercury" faintly visible under the fourth finger in the left hand and also his touch for fantasy established by the "mount of the Moon" with a large whorl "whose sword is sharp enough to cut the line twixt fact and fancy.-

BUD • 635

So ends our recollection of Riley's connection with the strange science, if one may call it that, of palm­istry.

Riley's attitude toward children has become a great controversy. Some believed he sincerely did not love children at all. Often he seemed undemonstratively dignified in the presence of children. This was not cold­ness. The role of "Children's Poet" caused some people to believe he should act clownish or silly to gain the attention of chil­dren. Riley did not do that. He had to make friends with

American heartland children of Riley's epoch. He thought of America

a child in his own way and as "room for the children to play and to grow." John A. Howland pho-

that way was not an artificial tography collection.

or gurglingly effusive way. Children never misjudged him.

Not all childlike behavior was acceptable to Riley. Bill Nye stated that Riley simply could be cool sometimes to a human pest who determined to abuse a casual acquaintanceship from selfish motives of exploitation. Nye is quoted as saying, "a 2-year old child, with its natural sincerity, would be knowing him (Jim) at his best inside ten minutes. Like most men who have learned to despise what is fraudulent and false, he flies to the unbought love of children."

Riley's genius for making adult friends was no less active in making friends with children. It merely expressed itself in an unorthodox and uncon­ventional manner. His genuine love was for the love of childhood.

Meredith Nicholson's assessment of the children's poetry is that "Much of his verse for children is autobiographical, representing his own attitude of mind as an imaginative, capricious child" and he gives the best example as lines from "That-Air Young-Un:"

636 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

THAT-AIR YOUNG-UN (1888)

"Come home onc't and said at he Knowed what the snake-feeders thought when they grit their wings; and knowed Turkle-talk, when bubbles riz

Over where the old roots growed

where he th'owed them pets o' his -Little turripuns he caught

In the County Ditch and packed

In his pockets days and days!"

Riley's poetry celebrates the freedom and selfhood of children. Loyalty and obligation to parents are not its keymarks but rather the license to be young and grow up with the priv­ilege of being a child developmentally in its

sphere. The child is deemed entitled to be loved as an intimate spiritual experience in a world which may be perceived as immoral or impersonal. Riley's poetry poses that each child is entitled to be loved regardless of the family's status, wealth, resources, and practices.

This perception of children is certainly not akin to the current American model of childhood. If one accepts the characterization of my century's child psychologist, Jerome Kagan, a child is urged through childhood toward becoming "psychologically mature." As stated in his THE NATURE OF THE CHILD, "In American families, the primary loyalty is to self-its values, autonomy, pleasure, virtue, and actualization. Most parents accept this criterion for maturity and try to arrange experiences that will make it easier for their children to attain the ideal." A child raised in the current American family is simply not permitted to go "truanting" as the Riley child was. The current ideal of self-grasping and personal gain also seems diffi­cult to conform to the Riley social model of an order based on justice, mercy and compassion.

Riley's child would remain an innocent rather than grow to maturity hard­ened into ways a child would consider unjust.

Perhaps Riley's most lasting sobriquet is as the "Children's Poet." For "Riley Day," on the centennial of his birth in October 7, 1949, the Governor of Indiana officially christened him so.

BUD • 637

RILEY DAY PROCLAMATION OF OCT. 7, 1949
TO ALL TO WHOM THESE PRESENTS
MAY COME, GREETING:

WHEREAS, all who live in Indiana or who have their ancestral roots in Hoosier soil have a special appreciation of the poetry of James Whitcomb Riley because it is the poetry of home, of fields and woodlands, and of the people who made our great state; and

WHEREAS, in the minds and hearts of Hoosiers there has been no other like Mr. Riley who has known so well their native land, their philosophy of life, and their common sense and heritage, or who has possessed the down-to-earth wisdom of the country store, the warmth and humanity of good talk among friends, and the gift of humor and storytelling, or who so greatly found in the daily things of life the elements of goodness and beauty; and

WHEREAS, to all within the state and to millions beyond its borders, James Whitcomb

Riley is known as "The Children's Poet" because he was one who could look on life with the freshness that makes the world to a child a place of wonder and delight, and because he lives forever in his poet­ry and in a great memorial hospital

or

saved has

Children honor Riley on Riley Day 1913. (Lester C. Nagley photo. Courtesy of The

that

Riley Old Home Society. Greenfield. Indiana.)

bettered the lives

of many of the countless little ones for whom he wrote; and

WHEREAS, in the eventful year, the centennial of his birth, when the children of our state have walked in the ominous shadow of a dread disease, Indiana knows how much it owes to him whose warm heart inspired others to make living brighter for childhood; now

THEREFORE, as Governor of the State of Indiana and in accordance

638 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

with a resolution of the General Assembly of Indiana, I proclaim October 7, 1949, the 100th anniversary of the birth of the poet, as

RILEY DAY

throughout the length and breadth of the state... Henry Schrieker, Governor

The children's poetry is almost all a matter of recollection from the poet's childhood. It is written however, or sometimes revised in Riley's latter years. The poet acknowledges this time disparity in many ways none of which seem to matter to children. For example, he dates his "The Diners in the Kitchen" as being from a "session" with his Uncle Sydney in 1869.

Many of Bud's poems were first collected in book form in A CHILD-WORLD. That does not mean that the poems were all written then. "The Bear Story," for example, was first published very late in the poet's career. The story had been polished from tell ings as early as Riley's rambling jour­neys with Doc McCrillus. The poem was first told at Cadiz, Indiana when Riley was with the Doc's medicine show, Riley was entertaining and ran out of songs to sing. The children loved it. Riley then retained it and gave it at the Roberts Park M.E, Church in Indianapolis at a social for children in 1874. Before writing the story down, Riley had told the story for twenty years during his "lectures" around the country and as part of his platform entertainments. First published for the Christmas season of December, 1896, the book A CHILD-WORLD had sold 30,000 copies according to the publisher's journal BOOKMAN by June 1897 and subsequently went into further printings.

All of America of that era came to know "The Bear Story." No story in American literature is more captivating...or rambling. The Alex referred to was Riley's brother Hum (Humboldt Alexander Riley) tragically alcoholic and dead at 25. Riley attributed its idea to an evening gathering in the Riley family when everyone was required to tell a story. This was in the era before there were electronic entertainments and families invented such entertain­ments at home for diversions. Riley's brother, Hum, was five years old at the time and the little guy invented the rambling adventure.

BUD • 639

THE BEAR STORY

That Alex "ist maked up his-own-se'f'

W'y, wunst they wuz a Little Boy went out

In the woods to shoot a Bear.' So, he went out `Way in the Brea'-big woods - he did, - An' he Wuz goin' along -an' goin' along, you know, An' purty soon he heerd somepin' go "Wooh!" 1st thataway - "Woo-ooh!" An' he wuz skeered, He wuz. An' so he runned an' dumbed a tree -A grea'-big tree, he did, - a sicka-more<sup>l</sup> tree. An' nen he heerd it ag'in: an' he looked round, An"t'uz a Bear - a grea'big shore-'nuff Bear!-No: `ruz two Bears, it wuz -two grea'big Bears-One of 'em wuz -1st one's a grea'-big Bear. ‑

But they ist boff went "Wooh!" -An' here they come To climb the tree an' git the Little Boy

An' eat him up!                                                                (a_ (r4Z

An' nen the Little Boy                       ( Cff He 'uz skeered worse'n ever! An' here come

The grea'big Bear a-climin' th' tree to git

The Little Boy an' eat him up- Oh, no! - It `uzn't the Big Bear 'at clumb the tree-I

'uz the Little Bear. So here he come

Climbin' the tree - an climbin' the tree! Nen when He git wite clos't to the Little Boy, w'y, nen The Little Boy he ist pulled up his gun An' shot the Bear, he did, an' killed him dead! An' nen the Bear he failed clean on down out The tree - away clean to the ground, he did - Spling-splung! he Palled plum down, an' killed him, too! An' lit wite side o' where the Big Bear's at.

An' nen the Big Bear's awful mad, you bet! -'Cause - 'cause the Little Boy he shot his gun An' killed the Little Bear. - 'Cause the Big Bear He - he 'Liz the Little Bear's Papa. - An' so here He come to climb the big old tree an' git

640 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

The Little Boy an' eat him up! An' when

The Little Boy he saw the grea'-big Bear A-comin', he 'uz badder skeered, he wuz, Than any time! An' so he think he'll climb Up higher - 'way up higher in the tree

Than the old Bear kin climb, you know. - But he -He can't climb higher 'an old Bears kin climb. - `Cause Bears kin climb up higher in the trees Than any little Boys in all the Wo-r-r-Id!

An' so here come the Brea'-big Bear, he did, - A'climbin' up - an' up the tree, to git The Little Boy an' eat him up! An' so

The Little Boy he clumbed on higher, an' higher, An' higher up the tree - an' higher - an' higher -An' higher'n iss-here house is! - An' here come The old Bear -clos'ter to him all the time! ‑

An' nen - first thing you know, - when th' old Big Bear Wuz wite clos't to him - nen the Little Boy

Ist jabbed his gun wite in the old Bear's motif

An' shot an' killed him dead! - No; I fergot, ‑

He didn't shoot the grea'-big Bear at all -

`Cause when he shot the Little Bear, w'y, nen

No load 'uz any more nen in the gun!

But th' Little Boy clumbed higher up, he did ‑

He clumbed lots higher - an' on up higher - an' higher An' higher - tel he ist can't climb no higher,

'Cause nen the limbs 'uz all so little, 'way

Up in the teeny-weeny tip-top of

The tree, they'd break down wiv him of he don't Be keerful! So he stop an' think: An' nen

He look around -An' here come the old Bear! An' so the Little Boy make up his mind

He's got to ist git out o' there someway! -

`Cause here come the old Bear! - so clos't, his bref's Purt' nigh so's he kin feel how hot it is

Ag'inst his bare feet - ist like old "Ring's" bref

BUD • 641

When he's be'n out a-huntin' an' `s all tired.

So when th' old Bear's so clos't - the Little Boy Ist gives a grea'-big jump fel- `nother tree ‑

No! - no, he don't do that! - I tell you what

The Little Boy does: - W'y, nen - w'y, he- Oh, yes! -The Little Boy he finds a hole up there

`At's in the tree - an' climbs in there an' hides -An' nen th' old Bear can't find the Little Boy At all! - but purty soon the old Bear finds

The Little Boy's gun `at's up there - 'cause the gun It's too tall to rooked wiv him in the hole.

So, when the old Bear find' the gun, he knows The Little Boy's ist hid round somers there, -An' th' old Bear 'gins to snuff and sniff around, An' sniff an' snuff around - so's he kin find

Out where the Little Boy's hid at. - An' nen - nen -Oh, yes! - W'y, purty soon the old Bear climbs `Way out on a big limb - a grea'-long limb, -An' nen the Little Boy climbs out the hole

An' takes his ax an' chops the limb off!...Nen The old Bear falls k-splunge! clean to the ground. An' bu'st an' kill hisse'f plum dead, he did!

An' nen the Little Boy he git his gun       _ An' menced a-climbin' down the tree ag'in -No! no, he didn't git his gun - 'cause when The Bear failed, nen the gun failed, too ‑

An' broked It all to pieces, too! - An' nicest gun! ‑

His Pa ist buyed it!- An' the Little Boy

1st cried, he did: an' went on climbin' down

The tree - an' climbin' down - an' climbin' down! ‑

An' sir! when he 'Liz purr nigh down, - w'y, nen

The old Bear he jumped up ag'in - an' he

Ain't dead at all -ist `tendin' thataway,

So he kin git the Little Boy an' eat

Him up! But the Little Boy he 'Liz too smart

To clinib clean down the tree. - An' the old Bear

He can't climb up the tree no more - 'cause when

642 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

He fell, he broke one of his - He broke all His legs! - an' nen he couldn't climb! But he 1st won't go 'way an' let the Little Boy Come down out of the tree. An' the old Bear

1st growls roun