Poem of the Day: ‘The Janitor’s Boy’

We have a soft spot for the 1920s poetry of Nathalia Crane here at The New York Sun, and we don’t much care who knows it. Even among the set of women poets who found fame in the 1920s — women much featured in our Poem of the Day column: Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), Elinor Wylie (1885–1928), Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) — Nathalia Crane remains our girl.

Of course, “girl” is the operative word. The Sun published her poem “The History of Honey” in 1922 and only later learned that the author was just nine years old. In 1924, Crane (1913–1998) gathered her work in a book called “The Janitor’s Boy: And Other Poems,” with an afterword by Edmund Leamy, our predecessor as the Sun’s poetry editor. The title poem was a favorite among the Sun’s readers, and it remains Crane’s most republished poem.

The reason isn’t hard to find. In ballad-meter quatrains — four-foot lines alternating with three-foot, rhymed abcb — “The Janitor’s Boy” is a high-wire act that somehow balances childish sensibility with adult competence at verse. Balances childish innocence with a frisson of coming sexuality. And even even balances the twee with the unruly: “He’ll carry me off, I know that he will, / For his hair is exceedingly red.”