Book Review: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
May. 26th, 2025 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerEugene 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.
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.
