Online NewsHour: Shel Silverstein -- May 11, 1999



	SHEL SILVERSTEIN

May 11, 1999

Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky celebrates the poetry of the late Shel Silverstein.

April 27, 1999:
Cary-Morison Ode.

April 5, 1999:
Robert Pinsky contemplates war.

March 30, 1999:
The mission of warfare.

Feb. 16, 1999:
Robert Pinsky contemplates the impeachment trial.

Feb. 16, 1999:
Robert Hayden.

Browse the NewsHour's coverage of Poems.

'Adult Work' by Silverstein

Shel Silverstein and his work

The Giving Tree, a controversial lesson

Selected poems by Shel Silverstein

Shel Silverstein, the beloved and immensely popular author of poems for children, died yesterday. By an odd coincidence, tomorrow is the birthday of Silverstein's great predecessor Edward Lear, the master of limerick and nonsense, praised by T.S. Eliot among others. Lear was born in 1812, Silverstein in 1932. Shel Silverstein like Lear was an illustrator as well as an author. His books include Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, and Falling Up. I'll pay Silverstein the tribute of reading a couple of his poems along with one by Edward Lear, who I think was one of Silverstein's models. Here, just for a taste of the rhythm, is Silverstein on his beard:

MY BEARD

My beard grows to my toes,
I never wears no clothes,
I wraps my hair
Around my bare,
And down the road I goes.

This recalls some lines from Lear's poem on himself:

How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.

His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.
He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
Leastways if you reckon two thumbs;
Long ago he was one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.

There is a side of Shel Silverstein's writing that is softer and more overtly sweet than anything I know by Edward Lear, and those qualities appear in the title poem of Where the Sidewalk Ends:

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

I salute these two very successful and professional practitioners of that difficult genre, the playful.


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