Farmer's Garden: Rhymes for Two Voices

Bibliography

Harrison, David L. Farmer’s Garden: Rhymes for Two Voices. Illus. by Arden Johnson-Petrov. Honesdale: Wordsong Boyds Mills Press, 2000. 978-1590781777

Review

Farmer’s Garden is a collection of playful poems that exude concrete meaning. The dog’s voice in each poem carries a regular pattern, asking his question in a 3 line format with 2 beats, 2 beats, and 3 beats consecutively.

Rhyme is used consistently in Harrison’s poems with short sounds that early readers are able to easily identify. Examples of this are used in the poem “Beetle” with “fast…past”, “run…sun”, and “do…dew” (Harrison, p. 24). In the poem, “Corn”, the use of the letters ‘r’ and ‘o’ in “corn…row…crow” by Harrison on page 15 creates a common sound through the first half of the poem. The words seem to complement each other which is an extremely important part of poetry.

Personification is a large part of these poems as the dog approaches and speaks to not only animals and insects, but inanimate objects such as a carrot, strawberry, and corn. The foods speak to the dog just as the living things do and describe their life in the Farmer’s garden from its point of view.

Some of the food items in the poems evoke imagery through taste such as the radish “hop(ing) to go in a pot of stew” (Harrison, p. 28). The deer creates a sense of hearing in the reader when repeating “Shhh!” (Harrison, p. 30) to the dog, displaying to the audience that it is night time and silent out in the garden.

The overall mood of this book of poems is light-hearted and playful as the dog wanders from object to object curious as to what it is doing in the garden. A perfect ending is created as the dog and farmer wind up together in the garden.

Poem & Connection

Have students perform this book of poetry as reader’s theater for a class of students, giving one person the dog role, and the other students splitting the other roles. Each student draws their character and tapes it onto a Popsicle stick to be held when he or she is reading their part. An alternative to this would be dividing the students up into pairs and each pair getting one poem to perform. For example, one pair could perform “Mousey” with one student playing Farmer’s Dog and the other person playing Mousey.

Mousey

Mousey, Mousey,

why do you hurry?

Cat is coming!

I must scurry!

Cat is coming?

Hide! Hide!

His teeth are sharp!

His mouth is wide!

Where will you go?

You can’t get far.

Then I will hide

in Farmer’s garden.

(Harrison, p. 11)