Children's Verse: Four Styles

N. M. Bodecker's Let's Marry Said the Cherry is a slim volume of high-quality nonsense verse. Mr. Bodecker's forte is playing inventively with words within the bounds of demanding nonsense formulas. While the title poem is based on the simple "Cock Robin" formula, others are more complex and original. "If I Were an Elephant," for example, employs stanza pairs in which the second stanza offers a comic definition for an alternative meaning of the noun that concludes the first stanza:

If I were an elephant,I would love my trunk.If I were a junk man,I would love my junk.

You don't know what a junk is?It's an ancient Chinese craftthat's not quite like a clipperand not quite like a raft.

The most engaging aspect of Let's Marry is that one is constantly coming upon a new poem written according to one of two nonsense formulas. Seven of the thirty-three poems are descriptions of imaginary islands. The cleverest is "The Island of Yarrow":

The island of Yarrowwas long, low, and narrow,too long to hoeand too slim to harrow.They tried with a plow,but the sea filled the narrowdeep furrow that oncewas the island of Yarrow.

The other recurrent type, which appears nine times, is the nonsense portrait of such a figure as

Sitter Bitter(baby-sitterViolet Amanda Bitter)

who took her duties literally and sat on babies, knitting and drinking tea as she worked. Each poem of this type ends with a section beginning "When they said . . ." or the like, followed by a description of the subject's response:

When they cried:"AMANDA BITTER!Most outrageous baby-sitterBITTER! You get off that knee!"She inquired:"Want some tea?"

Mr. Bodecker's poems are almost subtle (if the term can be applied to nonsense verse) in their dependency on nuance and the arch turn of phrase. His black-and-white drawings are equally elegant, detailed, and controlled; the lines are crisp, resembling those of an engraver, and frequently appear to have been drawn with a straightedge and compass.

Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends could hardly be more different in character. The poems are raucous and zany, and the drawings sprawl delightfully across the page. In at least nine instances, poem and illustration are so interdependent that the child—or adult, for that matter—has the pleasure of making connections and sharing a joke with the poet. For instance, in "The Loser," a boy has lost his head—literally. He can't look for it since his eyes are in it, can't call to it because his mouth is in it, and so on, so he guesses he will "sit down on this rock" and rest for a minute. Illustration: he is sitting on his lost head. Again, "Melinda Mae" begins on a two-page spread showing a little girl with a fork sitting at a table occupied, and overflowed, by a whale. Text:

Have you heard of tiny Melinda Mae,Who ate a monstrous whale?She thought she could,She said she would,So she started in right at the tail.And everyone said, "You're much too small,"But that didn't bother Melinda at all.She took little bites and she chewed very slow,Just like a good girl should . . .

(Turn to the next two-page spread)

. . . And in eighty-nine years she ate that whaleBecause she said she would!

(Illustration: same chair, same table, but Melinda Mae is eighty-nine years older and the whale is reduced to curlicues of rib.)

Silverstein has gifts rarely found in children's poets...