WALKING RENEWED AMID THE MONUMENTS OF VERSE

Author: By Peter F. Neumeyer

Date: SUNDAY, March 1, 1998

Page: F2

Section: Books

``Pomes Penyeach,'' James Joyce titled his 1927 collection of poetry. The distinguished British collectors of children's folklore, Iona and the late Peter Opie, give you an even better bargain -- 800 poems for three-quarters of a penny each. Such generosity is not a trivial consideration in times when many a glossy children's book may sport 20 labored rhymes at thrice the price.

Household rhymes like those in this assemblage are for oral performance, and as long as they are so applied, they are ``folklore.'' They don't have a fixed text till someone sets it down, at which point they become something else, another genre. For years, the indefatigable Opies haunted playgrounds, recording toasts, taunts, boasts, jump-rope rhymes, and verses for counting out.

Here, the Opies have collected a 221-page, pocket-sized vademecum (the term for a useful book you keep on your person for constant practical reference). They term it ``a gathering of the most familiar verses of our infancy.'' The rhymes are handily arranged by topic (e.g., birds, old women, etc.). To the politically sensitized, an occasional item may appear questionable today, but so would the Talmud, or tales from the brothers Grimm.

Appended are indexes of ``Principal Subjects'' (from ``apple pies'' to ``wrens''), types of rhymes (e.g., tongue-twisters), and first lines. Fifteen pages of browsable notes engage us by their conversational tone, and are clearly cross-referenced to the text. Often -- as in the fascinating explanation of a verse on the subject of the ``willow pattern plate'' -- these notes have the antiquarian enthusiasm of my all-time favorite anthology, Walter de la Mare's ``Come Hither'' (1923), which, like the Chinese pandas' favorite bamboo trees, blossoms inexplicably into reprint about once a decade.

With a keen eye to the immediate utility of nursery rhymes, the Opies have placed at the very end of their book one last verse for when night has fallen, the plug is pulled, and the bath is now really truly over:

Shall we tell a last tale

About a snail?

It jumped in the fire and burnt its tail.

Shall we tell a last tale

About a tub?

The bottom's out or else we would.

Why do many people start children out painting with watercolors, that unforgiving and un-correctable medium? You can't erase it, you can't paint over it, and if you fuss too long, it all turns brown. The splendor of Meilo So's luminous watercolor illustrations is, for me, the initial thrill of Jack Prelutsky's anthology of animal poems, ``The Beauty of the Beast.'' So's glowing decoration and illustrative full double spreads enchant us with her universe of blossoms, petals, humming wings, and calligraphic herds of reindeer aglitter in their clean light. She demonstrates a veritable manual of brush techniques, ranging from dry brush skipping over the ridges of the paper, to the washy-wet intermingling browns of oxen suggesting reflectively the wetness in which they stand.

Prelutsky, the poet who assembled these animal poems from different times and places, is a longtime favorite for children and adults alike. His own verse is often funny, terse, pointed. Reading a discriminating poet's own choices of the poems of others -- ranging from the canonical to the unknown -- you know you're in expert hands. There's not an insipid, whimpering, or simpering poem in the lot. It's lovely, in fact, the way poetry anthologies suggest tellingly the predilections of their collectors. Prelutsky's selection here tends to the short line; humorous, bright poems, telling in image, economical in design.

``The Oxford Book of Classic Poems'' is as traditionally British as Saint George's dragon (except for the honorary inclusion of Whitman, Frost, Langston Hughes, and Ogden Nash). With 150 high-quality pages of works such as John Clare's shattering ``I Am,'' Alfred Noyes's galloping warhorse, ``The Highwayman,'' and some too-tame Philip Larkin, you can't really miss, in the same sense that you can't go far awry with a Brahms/Beethoven concert. Actually, I love this book; I walk renewed among its monuments. But be warned, it wears a bowler hat. So it's OK to get fidgety with it -- to strain, stretch for other kinds of poems, counter and original, such as our swift fickle world hurls forth.

Consider, then, ``Earth-Shattering Poems,'' not so much a ``classic'' as a personal collection, assembled and warmly introduced by my colleague, Liz Rosenberg (the Globe's other reviewer of children's books). Here are 56 poems, by authors from Sappho (620 BCE) to Kate Schmitt (1973 CE), derived from many lands, and gathered for wandering and discovery. For myself, this month I'll read and reread Galway Kinnell's thoughts on holding his little daughter in the moonlight, and Czeslaw Milosz's somber rumination on mortality.