The Velveteen Rabbit Or How Toys Become Real

Here’s an excerpt from a cute little story from my childhood. “The Velveteen Rabbit Or How Toys Become Real” by Margery Williams with illustrations by William Nicholson.  Not the children’s novella I mentioned yesterday, but still a very nice story. It’s about the beloved plushed velveteen rabbit of a young boy who wishes to be Real.  Now, there seems to me to be two versions of Real used here and I must say that I prefer the Skin Horse’s version, the end was just the icing on the cake.

Picture is depicted in washes of yellow, red, grey and black. A small stuffed rabbit perches atop a mound of books so as to talk with the skin horse face to face. There's an old fashioned doll set on the floor, being propped against the mound of books with a candle and holder in front of them."

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.  “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Title: The Velveteen Rabbit Or How Toys Become Real
Author: Margery Williamson
Illustrator: William Nicholson
Pub. Date: 1922
Pages: 40 pages
ISBN:   0380002558
Publisher: Avon Books

Tempus Omnia Sed Memorias Privat

Title Translation – ‘Time Deprives All But Memories’

It’s been a while, I’m sorry to say. I suppose we’ll do with more poetry on the subject of Time – in one way or another. But! For those uninterested there’s a rousing children’s  book review and except tomorrow!  Excellent descriptive writing for a children’s novella, really, and so close to unknown – was quite happy to remember it. But, to the poetry ~

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow–
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand–
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep–while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

- ‘Dream Within A Dream’ by Edgar Allen Poe

As sunlight wanes
Beyond the horizon
Of Yesterday & Tomorrow;
The pondwater ripples,
My Reflections are laid low -
You can’t hold on to Forever.

- ‘Time’ by S. Seelye

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

~

Time is a wealth of change,
but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.

~

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time
like dew on the tip of a leaf.

- ‘Poems On Time’ by Rabindranath Tagore

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

- ‘Because I Could Not Stop For Death’ by Emily Dickenson