Knowing about people

There are three ways in which a writer knows about people: by remembering, by noticing, and by imagining.

A.A. Milne, quoted in Goodbye Christopher Robin by Ann Thwaite

A.A. Milne

The three ways A.A, Milne observes that writers know about people -- remembering, noticing and imagining -- are the same ways any of us knows about people, although for non-writers, what is only imagined about people can lead to trouble, as when one imagines reasons for a slight that may not be true at all.

When Milne wrote those words he was referring to his own poetry, specifically to those poems that comprise his first book of poetry intended for children, When We Were Very Young (1924).

The word we in the title indicates memory is at work in these poems, both for the author and his readers. His first-person poems, such as "The Island," clearly suggest Milne is relying on memories of his own childhood. The closing lines read:

And I'd say to myself as I looked so lazily down at the sea:
"There's nobody else in the world, and the world was made for me."

No man is an island? But Milne could remember, as any of us might, being young enough to imagine himself the center of the world.

These poems were written before the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. His son, Christopher Robin (whom he called Billy) was quite young at the time and and his observance of his little boy clearly inspired several of Milne's poems, such as one called "Hoppity." It begins:

Christopher Robin goes
Hoppity, hoppity,
Hoppity, hoppity, hop,
Whenever I tell him
Politely to stop it, he
Says he can't possibly stop.

The poem "Jonathan Jo" may have been based on a real person, but even so the young poet probably relied mostly on his imagination to pen lines like these:

Jonathan Jo
Has a mouth like an "O"
And a wheelbarrow full of surprises;
If you ask for a bat,
Or something like that,
He has got it, whatever the size is.

Most of the poems must have required all three, some remembrance, some observance and some imagination. Take, for example, the poem "Rice Pudding," which begins:

What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She's crying with all her might and main,
And she won't eat her dinner -- rice pudding again --
What is the matter with Mary Jane?

Milne didn't have a daughter, so he had to imagine a little girl, but are little girls who are tired of rice pudding any different than little boys who are tired of rice pudding? And Milne probably remembered being forced to eat too much rice pudding, or something similar, in his own childhood.