Book Review: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod

[osprey_archer]

Eugene Field’s poem Wynken, Blynken, and Nod must be catnip for picture book publishers. We had a version published in the 1980s or 90s when I was growing up, and I just recently discovered that Barbara Cooney also illustrated the poem in the 1960s.

Cooney’s illustrations look like white chalk on blue-black paper - some highly textured paper, because she’s worked the texture into the illustrations, so that it’s visible in the sparkle of the moonlight on the water as Wynken, Blynken, and Nod sail their wooden shoe to catch the herring fish that are the stars in the sky.

They are three identical little boys with a soft dandelion fluff of hair, and they sail their shoe back to a tower by the water, where they unload their fish in the shade of the weeping willow. And then - and then - it’s all a dream, for “Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes, and Nod is a little head.” They come together to form one baby, asleep in a cradle draped with a sort of half-tester canopy, which is held above the bed by a hook shaped like the head of a heron.

(This detail of the heron-shaped canopy holder particularly enchanted me.)

This is of course a bedtime poem, and the book would work beautifully as a bedtime book: the illustrations are so enchantingly subdued, the black backgrounds spangled with occasional white dots like stars. It would be lovely to slip into the illustrations and sail on the sea of dew.

Comments

[mific]

These sound lovely - and I found an example online: https://www.coastalrivers.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Wynken-Blynken-and-Nod-illustration-Barnaby-Porter-2000px.jpg

[osprey_archer]

Oh, lovely! Thank you for sharing the link to the picture.

[asakiyume]

Oooh, that's beautiful!

[katherine]

What lovely description!

[osprey_archer]

Thank you! mific shared a link to one of the pictures in the comment above.

[hyperion_swan]

My childhood…! 🌙 ✨ I remember this poem, and illustrated iterations of it… 🥰

[osprey_archer]

Did you have this particular version, or another picture book of it?

[hyperion_swan]

I had another version; my memory is fuzzy on the particulars; but I’ve seen that illustration before too!

[asakiyume]

I think this is something I could enjoy **now**

I think whatever age I was exposed to this poem was exactly the wrong one, so even just hearing the title got my back up just now. And yet the pictures sound beautiful. (Searching... Yes! this is lovely.)

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I can see this poem getting someone's back up at the wrong age. "It's so twee!" scoffs the reader. "I am too grown up for this sort of thing!"

The illustrations are so beautiful, though. The person writing the entry you linked clearly didn't like them very much, but so it goes...

[asakiyume]

I didn't even read the entry! Apologies for linking to something negative--I was truly only looking for more examples of the art.

[osprey_archer]

Ah, no worries! The important thing is that you got to see another one of the illustrations.