Artful Anticks — A Closer Reading

The Art of the Unprepared

The title poem, 'The Artful Ant,' introduces a hostess who invites five-score guests without any food. Her solution—'a bright Idea'—is teasingly withheld, leaving the reader to imagine the outcome. This pattern of setting up a problem and then sidestepping its resolution appears in several poems. In 'The Forgetful Forget-Me-Not,' a professor asks the flower about its name, but the flower evades the question by noting rain is coming. The poem ends with the flower admitting it has forgotten the origin itself. Herford uses these non-answers to poke fun at both the characters' pretensions and the reader's expectation of a tidy moral.

Voices in Dialogue

Many poems are structured as conversations, with each speaker given a distinct voice. In 'The Audacious Kitten,' the kitten's repeated refrain 'To look at the Prince of Wales!' contrasts with the cautious narrator's objections. 'The Spider's Tale' embeds a nested narrative: the poet tries to free a fly, but the spider interrupts with a long fable about a prince, a witch, and a 'Flyder.' The spider's tale is itself interrupted by asides and stage directions, creating a layered, metafictional effect. Herford often lets the trickster character have the last word, as when the spider's story ends with the princess driven mad by the Flyder's appearance.

Small Creatures, Large Ambitions

Herford's animal characters consistently overreach their apparent capacities. The kitten plans a sea voyage; the ant attempts to feed a crowd from nothing; a dormouse features in a 'deceitful' episode. Even the forget-me-not, a tiny flower, dismisses a professor's inquiry with cool condescension. The poems' humor arises from the gap between the characters' grand schemes and their actual situations. In 'The Birds' Farewell,' the birds write a polite letter to a little maid, promising to return in spring and learn new songs—but the postscript undercuts the sentiment by asking her to 'present our respectful regards to your cat.' The collection consistently treats its miniature protagonists with affectionate irony.

Readers will find that Artful Anticks rewards attention to its formal play: Herford varies line lengths, rhyme schemes, and stanza structures across the poems, and often embeds dialogue within narrative frames. The table of contents lists 35 pieces, many of which are short enough to be read aloud. The poems do not form a continuous story but share a tone of gentle mockery toward both human and animal pretensions. Approaching them as a sequence of comic vignettes rather than a unified work will best reveal their cumulative wit.

There’s a particular ache in rereading Herford’s verse now, that kitten’s logic tangled so gently with rebellion. I keep thinking of that old moralist, who somehow belongs beside it, not as a companion but as a quiet echo from a different shelf. Their shared mischief lingers, almost like a season I’ve misplaced. The infant moralist — Edition Insights brings that feeling back, tender and unresolved.