Shel Silverstein has a new book out this week.
Hopefully the name sounds familiar to you, but if it doesn’t let me share with you a few of the book titles he’s famous for: The Giving Tree and Where the Sidewalk Ends.
I must confess that I have never been a fan of Shel Silverstein. I think as a child I may have been turned off by his drawings which I think have a lot in common with the illustrations in Roald Dahl’s books, in the sense that they creep me out. (I still get the shivers thinking back to the drawing of Mr. Twit’s beard and what he kept there. Ugh.)
But mostly, I think I haven’t been a fan simply because I haven’t read much of his work, just a poem here or there.
Yesterday, though, I decided to buy his new book, published posthumously, and entitled Every Thing On It. Being a Kindle fan, it’s not often that I buy a book in the flesh, but there is something still to treasure in flipping through actual pages.
And as I flipped through Silverstein’s latest work, I saw the same old creepy pictures, a boy with a cat in his stomach, another with a boy with a snake coming out his mouth and somewhere else equally if not more so undesirable. I’m sure it’s probably appealing to little boys and girls.
But mixed in with the craziness were thoughtful poems about life and death, what we yearn for, and what’s truly important in life.
In his poem The Stairway, Silverstein writes, “I climbed the stairway to the sun/To fill my eyes with burning gold.” But once he got there, what he found was something much, much less than what he expected. “And there the air was damp and cold/And down below the earth shone bright.” He resolves to go back down and not climb those stairs again.
It is a lesson on perspective. Sometimes we have to get close to something to see that it is not nearly so beautiful as we thought from afar and sometimes we have to step back to truly appreciate where we are.
Shel Silverstein’s writing always has a message and he doesn’t shy away from hard and difficult topics even as he writes for children. His book The Giving Tree offers a lesson on selflessness. Even though we may end the book angry at the boy who takes and takes and takes from the tree, we cannot deny that the tree who has sacrificed its life for the boy has done a beautiful thing.
It is a lesson that echoes the Bible, from the death of Jesus on the cross to the plea of Paul to the Philippians in chapter 2 verses 3-4: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”
And so now I see Shel Silverstein in a different light. I can look past the odd drawings and embrace the message within the words.
