There Was a Child Went Forth

“Remember, your inner artist is a child. Find and protect that child. Learning to let yourself create is like learning to walk. The artist must begin by crawling.” ( Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way).

It’s week three of National Poetry Month, and I’d like to invite you to follow me back to my American Literature classroom at Kellogg High School. I often felt that one of the best ways to get my students to take the risk of sharing their own poetry was to encourage them to learn to walk by crawling. To facilitate that, I loved using the concept of “copy change” writing, which essentially is using another writer’s framework for their own ideas.

One of my favorite poems to have my students imitate was the autobiographical verse “There was A Child Went Forth” by Walt Whitman. It worked well in part because Whitman did not use a strict rhyme scheme or rhythm in the poem, so my students that struggled with those concepts didn’t have to worry about those ideas. What Whitman did do in the poem was include a nearly bullet-pointed list of images from his childhood.

My students were required to begin their poem with Whitman’s opening stanza, changing only the pronouns to fit themselves:

There was a child went forth every day;

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became;

And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of

the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

The next step for my students was twofold: 1. Underline or make bold the images that they connected or resonated with, and leave them in the poem; 2. Strike through any images that didn’t describe them, or resonate with their memory, and when possible replace them with a word or words that were similar in category to Whitman’s but instead were a part of their own childhood. In the stanzas below, you can see Whitman’s original verse, followed by my messy, personal copy change version:

The early lilacs became part of this child,

And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red

clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,

And the Third-month lambs, and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the

mare's foal, and the cow's calf,

And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-

side,

And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there--and the

beautiful curious liquid,

And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads--all became part

of him.

The early lilacs became part of this child,

And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red 

purple clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird killdeer

And the kittens mewing for their mother from the box in the garage, Third-month lambs, and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the

mare's foal, and the cow's calf,

And the noisy dog next door, brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-

side, and the backyard irrigation ditch, with water skippers and beetle boatmen, and the muskrats in the canals, and the riffles in the river

And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there--and the

beautiful curious liquid,

And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads--all became part

of him. 

Whitman’s complete poem goes on for several more stanzas, as he talks about school, and family, and home, and community. You can read the entire poem here. I encouraged my students to use as much of it as possible; to not be afraid of their “difficult” memories, but to see them with perspective, from a distance, as Whitman seems to. And finally, they should end their work with the same words that Whitman ended with:

These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now

goes, and will always go forth every day.

Like so many of my assignments for my students, I modeled some of it for them, but I rarely completed it myself. I think I may give it another try, to celebrate both National Poetry Month and the child that is my inner artist.

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Take the “There Was a Child Went Forth” challenge and write your own autobiographical poem modeled after Walt Whitman’s original. Then share it with our online community.

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