Children's Verse
The Faber Book of Children's Verse. Edited by Janet Adam Smith. (Faber. 12s. 6d.)
THROUGHOUT her compiling of this admirable anthology the editor had the child between eight and fourteen in mind. The nursery rhyme has been assimilated and the imagination is opening out to greater complexities of thought and feeling. Now, if wisely directed, rhyme and rhythm and the vivid image will do their durable work, laying a foundation upon which the adult imagination will eventually stand ; and so long as the child enjoys the poem it hardly matters much whether he" understands "it or not. (What, for that matter, does the grown-up make of Blake's " He who the Ox to wrath has moved/Shall never be by woman lov'd " ? More than the child makes of Auden's " 0 where are you going ? ' said reader to rider ..." ?) Miss Janet Adam Smith put out her nets not so much
LAIN HAMILTON
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