Selected Riley Child-Rhymes

James Whitcomb Riley (1849 to 1916) was an American writer from Indiana who began by writing newspaper verse in the Hoosier dialect for the Indianapolis Journal in 1875. He became so popular that he was known as the Hoosier poet, and his readings and books made him one of the best known poets in the United States. His favorite authors, it is said, were Burns and Dickens.

The poems in this selection, published in 1905, are romanticized and mostly boyish verses about childhood, family and the small pleasures of everyday life. Some are comic, some are tender, and a few are meant to give a pleasant shiver. The best known, Little Orphant Annie, which warns children about the goblins that will get them if they do not behave, remains a favorite for reading aloud on a dark evening.

Riley's language is plain and rhythmic. He liked to use country speech, with its dropped letters and its turns of phrase, and in this he belongs to the tradition of local color writing in the United States. Some readers may find his approach sentimental, but there is great skill in his sense of sound and in the way he sets a scene in just a few lines.

The recording has ten short tracks and lasts around twenty-five minutes. It is read by volunteers of LibriVox, and works well for reading aloud, for classrooms and for a short moment of nostalgia. Riley's poems belong to a time when verse was recited at home, and they still work beautifully in that setting. The short tracks make it easy to hear one or two poems at a time, or to share a favorite with a child before sleep. A cheerful, unpretentious collection.