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written by masters of the English language, or in masterful translations from ancient languages. Recycle those conference handouts, teachers, for herein lies eight years of nourishment and edification for your students! Their poems are not merely main lesson content arranged to scan and rhyme. In many of the poems in this collection we all but meet the living and breathing poet, as well as the age in which that poet worked, and a world of soul and spirit that would otherwise have remained mute. We teachers and parents will teach these poems and be elevated, for we have heard the voice of an Initiate. Our students and our children, no less significantly, will speak these poems and be elevated as, for the first time, they hear their own voice. In the first four grades, it is essential to choose and work with poems that have a regular, predictable rhyme scheme, e.g. rhyming couplets, and a strong and predictable rhythm. Both of these poetic qualities strengthen that part of the child termed by Rudolf Steiner the “etheric body,” or “body of formative forces,” or “life body.” It is this aspect of the child’s being that serves all later growth and health on a physiological basis, and serves the unfolding of the memory on the level of soul. In this respect, all poems are mnemonic devices, playing this role in branches of culture as diverse as religious ritual and modern advertising. And because the awakening of memory is so interwoven with poetic recitation, it is important that the primary grades child learns directly from the teacher’s recitation of the poem, rather than by reading the poem. And it is no less important that the teacher learns the poem by heart, before bringing it to the child. In particular, what Steiner termed the “rhythmiccirculatory system,” the interplay of breathing and the circulation of blood, is enlivened and regulated by this type of poetic recitation. By fifth grade, the interplay of breathing and circulation is essentially stabilized, and it needs far less rhythmic support than in the earlier years. For the rest of the student’s time in the grade school, the etheric body withdraws and what Rudolf Steiner described as the “astral body,” or “soul body” assumes a position of growing importance. Now it is the life of feeling that must be educated along with the memory. The subtleties of meter (particularly iambic pentameter in English) and the nuanced harmonies of alternating rhymes (as in the abab/cdcd/efef/gg of the sonnet) intrigue and surprise the adolescent’s burgeoning soul forces, giving form to otherwise stochastic emotions and elevating them to the level of conscious feelings. Meter, with its occasional irregularities and its connection to the spoken word, here may serve as a healthy antidote to the power of beat that plays such a commanding role in the life of the adolescent. Given the central importance of the poetic experience for the child’s growth and future learning, it is essential that poems not be taught hastily, superficially, or casually. If children do not get to savor every element of a poem, the poem may work upon them, but it will never come to fruition within them. As Alexander Pope (a poet that none of my teacher trainees could ever