Overheard on a Saltmarsh

Story

A conversation unfolds between a greedy goblin and a beautiful nymph – the goblin wants the nymph’s precious beads and asks her to give them to him again and again, but she repeatedly refuses.

Why we chose it

An unusual poem that intrigues children.

Where it came from

Harold Monro (1879 – 1932), born in Brussels to Scottish parents, was a poet and the founder and editor of the magazine Poetry Review and Poetry and Drama. He also owned the Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, where many Modernist and Georgian poets, including T. S. Eliot, met before and after the First World War. He first published his strange dialogue poem Overheard on a Saltmarsh with illustrations by Charles Winzer alongside several of his other poems in one of the cheap ‘rhyme sheets’ he printed and sold at the Bookshop. The poem subsequently appeared in his collection Children of Love (1914).

Where it went next

Overheard on a Saltmarsh is arguably Monro’s best-known poem. It has become a regular feature of school poetry anthologies. The success of the poem with younger audiences came as a surprise to Monro, who had not intended it for children. None of his other poems are as well-known. The Poetry Bookshop continued to play a significant role as a meeting place for poets until 1935 and the press Monro ran from within the shop championed poets who are now household names, such as Robert Graves. Despite this, Monro ended his life in relative obscurity.

Associated stories

Monro’s other poetry collections include Strange Meetings (1917), Real Property (1922), and The Earth for Sale (1928). The Poetry Bookshop press published first books by Robert Graves, Charlotte Mew and Richard Aldington, and its ‘rhyme sheets’ featured the likes of Ezra Pound.