There are many pitfalls for the writer of " verses
for children," but Mr. Humbert Wolfe in his Cursory Rhymes (Benn, 6s.) has neatly avoided them all and managed— surprisingly, when one considers the difficulties of a large-scale poet in such a field—to give us that enchanting thing, a book of childhood verse which is neither patronizing nor affectedly nonsensical. As the poet himself puts it :— " don't think that
I am trying to write, as though I were one of you.
or writing (which is
even worse) what I suppose
a child prefers."
No, Mr. Wolfe writes as himself, which is the way Lewis
Carroll—who had two selves—wrote. So we get the delicious picture of the fairy's Acerbity in the Matter of Clothes :-
" Then, as to her dresses,
she kept in the attic a bevy of silk-worms, and worked them emphatic at widening petals and taking a scan in a gown that a spider had stitched in a dream ; "
There, whether the• poem is simple enough for children or not you have the child himself writing, with the added art of years. Most would-be entertainers spend their time trying to struggle back into sailor suits ; which is not only impossible, but absurd.. * * * *
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