The Child Poetess 'Minou Drouet'

'O tree,
you drawing of the reckless boy, the boy so extravagantly poor
that he cannot buy coloring pencils,
who drew you in bad lines with the brown pencil left over
from drawing geography maps.
O tree,
I am coming to you —
console me, that I may remain I, I.'

No, this is no school exercise that the teacher forced the child to copy. This is splendid poetry, poured out by a child's dewy pen, after the clock on the mantelpiece had struck its five strokes. And after a short sigh. And after pulling the hairpin from the mad blond locks. And after a serious smile: the smile of a dangerous woman on the innocent lips of a little girl.

And the poetess continues her call:
'O tree, you are my friend
you are like me
heavy-laden with music
under the fingers of the wind
that strips away your leaves
like a tale of the jinn.'

'Minou Drouet' is a child poetess from France who has never once gone to school. For her teacher is the mother who adopted her, and who gives her lessons every evening in reading, arithmetic, and geography... And there is also the music teacher.

I believe that music — those fleeting sessions the child Minou spent at the piano — had a palpable effect on the unfolding of her gift and its early ripening. It also left a sweet strain of melody in her every expression, and in every letter. Let us hear these melodies in 'Song':

'My heart is a light boat
made of moonbeams
its sail breaks in the wind —
its sail woven of clouds, clouds the color of blood,
that break, they too, against the cheek of the sky.

Like a fingernail splitting my outstretched fingers,
the red fingers of my anguish,
which would beg forgiveness
because they cannot close properly
upon the voice of the great melody.'

No sooner had these poems appeared in a small pamphlet, distributed by 'Julliard,' the well-known French publisher, to the critics and the newspaper houses, than a child of eight had created the 'Minou Drouet' problem. For the first time the public was distracted from the bicycle race, and split into two camps:

One that does not believe these poems are by a child who ought to be amusing herself with her doll, not composing verse — the whole story being that the woman who adopted her dictates to her what she writes.

And the other, which believes in the rare gift that God caused to burst forth out of the innocence of childhood; the leader of this camp, 'Professor Pasteur Vallery-Radot' of the French Academy, defended Minou, explaining:

We must admit, when genius appears, that we cannot explain it: neither heredity, nor place, nor any interpretation our reason imposes has any connection with its appearance. It is a strange gift — a divine gift, as some call it. A gift that permits the individual

to see, to hear, and to feel what is hidden from the mass of ordinary persons...

Until he says:

Genius is a frightening gift... Even the gifted person cannot explain it, for he — the gifted person — is no more than an instrument of discharge. No more than a receptacle, to put it more exactly.

And he asks at last, demonstrating that Minou is a child poetess — a great one:

Why should a child poetess not be able, in the first years of her life, to give expression to the wondrous gift deposited within her? Have we not known child prodigies in arithmetic — Pascal; and in music — Mozart?

As for the 'Figaro littéraire,' it championed the poetess with a warm defense by 'André Rousseaux,' in which he said:

I am anxious that Minou may perhaps write in the future — or may never write again! It is possible that no production at all will follow these fifty pages of the adopted child! But the little star that has appeared in our sad world will shed a light no less pure than that of the great stars. And we shall always remember her appearance — together with the swiftness of her extinction — in every commonplace literary season.

As for 'Minou's' own defense, it was her quiet cry, brimming with childhood. Heavy-laden with giving. Colored with imagination. Singing with music...

'Is it a crime, if we sing what stirs in our hearts?'

Is it a crime, if we sing what stirs in our hearts?

An answer I whisper in the ear of every great poet who is no longer a child. I whisper it in the ear of every man. In the ear of every woman. In the ear of everyone who tries to silence the heart's speech and strike it dumb forever, so as to carve the heart into a trumpet into which he empties the rattle of a head weighed down by the din of materialism. And partisan passions. And racial prejudices.

'Minou' was once asked: Do you compose verse in the 'alexandrine' manner — that is, with the line of the poem resting on twelve feet?... She thought sadly, and answered:

We do not make poetry. A cloud passes... something flows out... We have no part in it: it is the cloud that is responsible.

No, my verses have no feet, and my verses have no wings!

The poetess answered well. No — in her poems there is not so much as a period, or a comma, or a vowel mark... They are all one picture, smoothly unrolling, bedewed with the mysterious, soaring spirit of childhood. In the poem of the clouds, for instance, she says:

'O clouds
you are a hedge of feathers'

Then she says:

'you are mountains crawling toward me
that can break nothing of me'

And then this calling out! The apostrophe at the opening of every poem embodies for us the child's attempt to seize the thing and feel it, so as to soar with it, and from it, into the far... the far distance:

'O eyes
streaming with the anxiety of night
kindle in the four corners of the world
the fires of the beacons made of your recovered flame.'

And the poetess never strays far from the world of childhood — and this is the most eloquent proof with which to convince the disbelievers in her gift:

'O blue road
where are you going?
The moon has colored your skirt blue
to weave upon it a long ribbon of paper
on which the willow's trunk has drawn two boughs of itself
and wide-open hands
of plane-tree leaves.'