Likes & Dislikes

THE FOX OF PEAPACK--E. B. White-- Harper ($2).

It pleasures me, at end of day, To hear Boake Carter's baleful lay, The lullaby of world decay. . . .

Light versifiers usually do better cataloguing their dislikes than celebrating the small pleasures that come their way. But the light verse of 39-year-old Elwyn Brooks White is gentle; his hates are mild, his enjoyments various and even in a Manhattan summer he can find a number of innocent pleasures--the "noble step" of a Childs hostess, Sunday morning at Bedford and Barrow Streets, wheeling a baby carriage through the park, and the warm days when

Apartment life grows unafraid

For those whom heat has got a grip on,

And pretty maid

With undrawn shade

Doth loll about with just her slip on.

In The Fox of Peapack, Poet White has collected 68 poems, including five rhymed book reviews, some songs of "childbirth, paternity, and routine domestic disturb-ance," love songs and a few on cosmic subjects which he says he included only to keep his franchise. His dislikes--inverted sentences in TIME, the works of Walter B. Pitkin, publicity, perfume and economic theory--stir up Poet White only briefly, and the only really bitter work in his collection is addressed to Vittorio Mussolini, inspired by Vittorio's description of his "exceptionally good fun" bombing Ethiopians. Of TIME Poet White complains:

Cold ran the blood of a Finnish farmer,

Backward the flight of a sentence in TIME.

Fair was the weather prediction and warmer,

Thin was the normal American dime. . . .

But his indignations tend to play out quickly and he seems more at home in an easygoing, sentimental mood, as when he writes of his son: Up to the cornfield, old and curly,

I took Joe, who rises early.

Joe my yearling, on my shoulder,

Observed the old corn growing older.

And I could feel the simple awe

He felt at seeing what he saw. . . .

And being present at the birth

Of my child's wonderment at earth,

I felt my own life stir again

By the still graveyard of the grain.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.