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 through and through with the sad little beauties of the world.  You will want to put out a bowl of fresh milk on the doorstep to appease the banshee—­did you not know that the janitor of your Belshazzar Court would get it in the morning.

One of the secrets of Mr. de la Mare’s singular charm is his utter simplicity, linked with a delicately tripping music that intrigues the memory unawares and plays high jinks with you forever after.  Who can read “Off the Ground” and not strum the dainty jig over and over in his head whenever he takes a bath, whenever he shaves, whenever the moon is young?  I challenge you to resist the jolly madness of its infection: 

    Three jolly Farmers
    Once bet a pound
    Each dance the others would
    Off the ground. 
    Out of their coats
    They slipped right soon,
    And neat and nicesome,
    Put each his shoon. 
    One—­Two—­Three—­
    And away they go,
    Not too fast,
    And not too slow;
    Out from the elm-tree’s
    Noonday shadow,
    Into the sun
    And across the meadow. 
    Past the schoolroom,
    With knees well bent
    Fingers a-flicking,
    They dancing went....

Are you not already out of breath in the hilarious escapade?

The sensible map’s quarrel with the proponents of free verse is not that they write such good prose; not that they espouse the natural rhythms of the rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this is all to the best, even if as old as Solomon.  It is that they affect to disdain the superlative harmonies of artificed and ordered rhythms; that knowing not a spondee from a tribrach they vapour about prosody, of which they know nothing, and imagine to be new what antedates the Upanishads.  The haunting beauty of Mr. de la Mare’s delicate art springs from an ear of superlative tenderness and sophistication.  The daintiest alternation of iambus and trochee is joined to the serpent’s cunning in swiftly tripping dactyls.  Probably this artifice is greatly unconscious, the meed of the trained musician; but let no singer think to upraise his voice before the Lord ere he master the axioms of prosody.  Imagist journals please copy.

One may well despair of conveying in a few rough paragraphs the gist of this quaint, fanciful, brooding charm.  There is something fey about much of the book:  it peers behind the curtains of twilight and sees strange things.  In its love of children, its inspired simplicity, its sparkle of whim and AEsopian brevity, I know nothing finer.  Let me just cut for you one more slice of this rarely seasoned pastry.