ion"; and "Peacock Pie"
is the most authentic knapsack of fairy gold since the "Child's Garden
of Verses."

I am tempted to think that Mr. de la Mare is the kind of poet more
likely to grow in England than America. The gracious and fine-spun
fabric of his verse, so delicate in music, so quaint and haunting in
imaginative simplicity, is the gift of a land and life where rewards and
fames are not wholly passed away. Emily Dickinson and Vachel Lindsay are
among our contributors to the songs of gramarye: but one has only to
open "The Congo" side by side with "Peacock Pie" to see how the
seductions of ragtime and the clashing crockery of the Poetry Society's
dinners are coarsening the fibres of Mr. Lindsay's marvellous talent as
compared with the dainty horns of elfin that echo in Mr. de la Mare. And
it is a long Pullman ride from Spoon River to the bee-droned gardens
where De la Mare's old women sit and sew. Over here we have to wait for
Barrie or Yeats or Padraic Colum to tell us about the fairies, and Cecil
Sharp to drill us in their dances and songs. The gentry are not native
in our hearts, and we might as well admit it.

To say that Mr. de la Mare's verse is distilled in fairyland suggests
perhaps a delicate and absent-minded figure, at a loss in the hurly
burly of this world; the kind of poet who loses his rubbers in the
subway, drops his glasses in the trolley car, and is found wandering
blithely in Central Park while the Women's Athenaeum of the Tenderloin
is waiting four hundred strong for him to lecture. But Mr. de la Mare is
the more modern figure who might readily (I hope I speak without
offense) be mistaken for a New York stock broker, or a member of the
Boston Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps he even belongs to the newer order
of poets who do not wear rubbers.

One's first thought (if one begins at the beginning, but who reads a
book of poetry that way?) is that "Peacock Pie" is a collection of poems
for children. But it is not that, any more than "The Masses" is a paper
for the proletariat. Before you have gone very far you will find that
the imaginary child you set out with has been magicked into a
changeling. The wee folk have been at work and bewitched the
pudding--the pie rather. The fire dies on the hearth, the candle
channels in its socket, but still you read on. Some of the poems bring
you the cauld grue of Thrawn Janet. When at last you go up to bed, it
will be with the shuddering sigh of one thrilled t