Have you ever noticed that it is only when the family is in a hurry that the lost shoe phenomenon occurs? How one cannot be in the vicinity of its mate is a mystery. Especially when summer comes and the shoes are despised, they are found in any number of remarkable places. The Outdoors calls to bare feet, and, consequently shoes are cast aside, some pairs never to be reunited.
Here’s a fun rhyme from one of the beloved poets of my childhood, who, as I consider it, may be the first poet I made a personal connection with. He had a lifetime fascination with the special imagination of childhood, and in his poems, you can tell he never quite lost that gift himself. –Liz
The Lost Shoe
by Walter De La Mare
POOR little Lucy
By some mischance,
Lost her shoe
As she did dance :
‘Twas not on the stairs,
Not in the hall ;
Not where they sat
At supper at all.
She looked in the garden,
But there it was not ;
Henhouse, or kennel,
Or high dovecote.
Dairy and meadow,
And wild woods through
Showed not a trace
Of Lucy’s shoe.
Bird nor bunny
Nor glimmering moon
Breathed a whisper
Of where ’twas gone.
It was cried and cried,
Oyez and Oyez!
In French, Dutch, Latin,
And Portuguese.
Ships the dark seas
Went plunging through,
But none brought news
Of Lucy’s shoe ;
And still she patters
In silk and leather,
O’er snow, sand, shingle,
In every weather ;
Spain, and Africa,
Hindustan,
Java, China,
And lamped Japan ;
Plain and desert,
She hops hops through,
Pernambuco
To gold Peru ;
Mountain and forest,
And river too,
All the world over
For her lost shoe.
—– —– —–
Photo by Erin Tegeler
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Liz! What fun to see you and Mr. De La Mare here! Thanks for introducing me to yet another poem of his that I’d not read.