The Natural Poetics of Sarah B. Royal

Literary history likes names. It organizes poets into movements, schools, generations, and styles. Modernism, Imagism, Symbolism, Surrealism, Confessional Poetry, Ecopoetry, and countless other terms allow critics to identify shared ideas and artistic tendencies. Such classifications are useful when examining established writers who knowingly participated in, or deliberately responded to, the literary culture of their time. They become less certain when applied to a child’s writing.

Sarah B. Royal began composing poetry before she understood that poets could belong to movements. Her earliest saved poem dates from around third grade, when she was approximately 8 or 9 years old. She believes there were other poems even earlier, although they were not preserved. That beginning matters. Poetry was not first an intellectual identity she chose, nor a literary program she entered. It was something that rose naturally from imagination, emotion, faith, sound, and the inward need to make language carry what ordinary speech could not.

The appropriate literary term for works produced during childhood and adolescence is juvenilia. The word does not describe a poetic form. It does not mean that the work is childish or slight. It identifies the period of the author’s life in which the writing was created. This distinction is essential for Lost in the Lost and Found. These selections are not poems written for children. They are poems written by a child. Because of that, they should be read with a double attention: tenderness toward the young writer and seriousness toward the artistic, emotional, and spiritual record she left behind.

The earliest poems show a child trying on many ways of making meaning. “Love” is brief and direct, almost proverb-like in its movement from sweetness to kindness and then to the recognition that love is “hard to find.” “Fiddle-head Tongue Twister” delights in sound for sound’s sake, letting alliteration become motion. “Promise” is simple, but already reaches toward companionship and travel, imagining love as movement through a wider world. In “The Tree,” the child compresses beauty and mortality into one image: the tree is “sparkling gold against the sun,” home to birds, yet must perish to become home for some. A young poet has already understood that shelter, beauty, death, and usefulness can belong to the same image.

These poems do not need to be inflated beyond what they are. They are early. They are sometimes plain. They sometimes rhyme because rhyme is the available music of childhood. Yet they are not empty exercises. “Thanksgiving” turns the holiday feast upside down by imagining the turkey’s point of view. “The Hunt” follows the lion with patient attention, building suspense through movement and stillness before the leap. “Who am I” becomes a miniature philosophical spiral: the child asks identity questions so basic that they become almost metaphysical. The poem does not solve the self; it circles the self, and that circling is part of its truth.

Some poems emerged from school assignments. Forms such as acrostics and patterned exercises gave the young writer structures within which imagination could operate. Yet school instruction alone cannot explain the continuing desire to write outside the classroom. At home, Royal read dictionaries and encyclopedias for pleasure. She moved through the alphabet searching for rhyming words. One of the most important gifts she received was a set of three books: a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a rhyming dictionary. To an adult, these may appear to be practical tools. To a young poet, they were opening doors.

The dictionary expanded the world by expanding meaning. The thesaurus revealed that words have relatives, neighbors, and hidden pathways. The rhyming dictionary showed that sound itself could connect otherwise separate ideas. This helps explain why the early work moves so easily between play and seriousness. The child is not only expressing emotion; she is discovering that language has architecture. She is learning that words can be chosen not merely because they say something, but because they echo, answer, balance, surprise, or open another door to a corridor of doors.

The poem “Composition” may be the clearest early statement of this relationship with language. The poem describes words flowing freely, “springing out from lead,” while dreams and desires form from the writer’s head. Its most important claim is that the mind is “at my fingertips.” The child has discovered the body of writing: thought moving through hand, pencil, pressure, and page. She also recognizes that writing may contain both “wisdom and foolishness,” “short, and or long.” This is not a child claiming mastery. It is a child recognizing vocation.

Readers may see qualities in the juvenilia that resemble later literary movements. “The Secret Place,” with its forest, yellow grass, bird’s nest, golden water, silver fish, whispering wind, and giggling grass, has the concentrated image-world of a lyric sanctuary. A critic might call parts of it imagistic, symbolic, pastoral, or even ecopoetic. “Dusk to Dawn” moves through color, moonlight, storm, and morning in a way that turns the day into a sequence of emotional weather. “Midnight Romance” imagines a stallion breaking free into the night, an image of wildness and release that could be read symbolically. These comparisons can help readers notice craft, but they should not be allowed to take possession of the poems.

Royal did not begin with a literary theory and then attempt to demonstrate it. She began with words. A child may independently discover methods that resemble the techniques of adult movements without knowing those movements exist. To say that “The Secret Place” uses vivid sensory imagery is more accurate than declaring the young writer an Imagist. To say that “The Tree” carries symbolic force is more useful than forcing the child into Symbolism. To notice the ecological feeling in poems of trees, animals, weather, and water is helpful, but it should not erase the fact that the origin is personal vision rather than literary affiliation.

The distinction matters because labels can sometimes diminish originality. If every striking image is explained by a movement, the private act of discovery disappears beneath terminology. Royal’s juvenilia reveal a poet learning through creation. Form was not an ideology. Rhyme was not an allegiance. A dictionary was not a scholarly instrument. These were ways of reaching toward something sensed before it could be named.

The young Sarah B. Royal did not need to understand the history of poetry in order to enter it. Her earliest poems should therefore be read before they are classified. They matter because they preserve the moment when a child discovered that language could become more than communication. It could become imagination made visible. It could preserve what memory might lose. It could speak when ordinary speech was insufficient. Most importantly, it could become a lifelong calling.