Delightful conceits she has--another is "Sun
Flowers"--but how comes a child of eight to
prick and point with the rapier of irony? For it
is nothing less than irony in "The Tower and the
Falcon." Did she quite grasp its meaning
herself? We may doubt it. In this poem, the
subconscious is very much on the job.

To my thinking, the most successful poems in
the book--and now I mean successful from a
grown-up standpoint--are "For You, Mother,"
"Red Rooster," "Gift," "Poems," "Dandelion,"
"Butterfly," "Weather," "Hills," and
"Geography." And it will be noticed that these
are precisely the poems which must have sprung
from actual experience. They are not the book
poems, not even the fairy poems, they are the
records of reactions from actual happenings. I
have not a doubt that Hilda prefers her fairy-
stories. They are the conscious play of her
imagination, it must be "fun" to make them.
Ah, but it is the unconscious with which we are
most concerned, those very poems which are probably
to her the least interesting are the ones which
most certainly reveal the fulness of poetry from
which she draws. She probably hardly thought
at all, so natural was it, to say that three pinks
"smell like more of them in a blue vase," but the
expression fills the air with so strong a scent that