ABSTRACT
I hope that I have shown that we should not, whether as educators or as readers, dismiss poems from the oral tradition as ‘childish’. That man in the wilderness; that stoneless cherry; that perfect, rolling, endless ring; that shpond ‘all on re’; that key, that kingdom; that quarreller who broke both his shins, that mysterious journey to Babylon and back . . . they all have, to my senses, in their contexts, the look, feel, sound, smell and taste of poetry. Because so many of these rhymes have links to childhood, and are therefore ‘childlike’ (a far cry from ‘childish’, of course), and because every teacher has been a child, I feel that they might be welcoming to those indi erent to poetry, and even to poetry-haters.
