More power to them, say I, and so will your 4-year-old. Rhyme and meter
are godsends for anyone learning to speak, read, sing or joke. They
transform the random sounds we rely on for communication into inevitable
music. They help us remember the lengths of months, the order of the
letters and the worst names to call our siblings. They probably make us
smarter, like listening to Mozart. And they’re particularly effective at
leashing emotions and plots that threaten to break out of control. The only
catch is, they have to be handled with skill.

“Stomp, Stomp! A Dino Romp,” by Bob Kolar, shows the new wave of verse at its
best. Intended for very small people, the text is brief, with at most four
words per spread. Many of those words are onomatopoeias. “STOMP, STOMP!
Hee, hee. THUMP. WHUMP! Look at me!” begins the tale, as the young dinosaur
hero leaves home, kicking over lamps, slamming the door and giggling at
its handiwork. As the dino rampages across the savanna, scattering
animals, it’s the biggest thing in sight. It dwarfs the hippo; even the
lion runs. Then — “Stompity?” — a shadow falls. Big Dino has arrived to claim
its straying offspring. Kolar perfectly captures one of toddlerhood’s joys:
youthful passion comfortingly contained by adult authority, all in 36
rhyming words that don’t miss a beat.

Nothing could be less fussy than this simple, exuberant book, yet a close
look shows Kolar’s exacting attention to detail. With so few words to work
with, he makes every punctuation mark count. His sweet, visually effective
watercolor technique could have been chosen for its symbolism. He draws his
characters and scenery with fine outlines and colors precisely inside the
lines. But by wetting the paper he lets the paint bleed out, creating
energetic haloes around the characters that shade them and give them depth.
It’s a perfect technique for illustrating a story about the boundaries
between the emotional self and the outside world.

Like “Stomp, Stomp!,” Linnea Riley’s “Mouse Mess” uses formalism — collage
illustrations, a verse text — to control its central anarchy. The murine
protagonist waits until the family whose house he shares has gone to bed,
then raids their kitchen, with results that will be familiar to anyone who
has lived with small creatures. The 4- to 7-year-olds who make up the
book’s target audience may not notice how carefully composed this chaos is,
but the crumb-sweepers and spill-wipers reading it to them will. Riley cuts
her olives, apple cores, forks, corn flakes, mice, milk jugs, water and so
on out of paper that she has painted with sponges. The technique keeps
edges sharply defined and shadow free. The dripping, toppling still lifes
that result are oddly static.

Linnea’s text is similarly simple and graphic: “Sniff-sniff, milk and
cheese. Mouse would like a taste of these,” goes a typical spread. For the
most part, she sticks to trochaic tetrameter — lines made up of four
two-syllable feet, with the stress on the first syllable of each foot. It’s
the quintessential childhood meter, the rhythm of jump-rope songs and
witches’ incantations (e.g., “Engine, engine, number nine,” or “Double,
double, toil and trouble”). When Linnea varies the beat, she does so in
ways that don’t confuse people trying to read out loud: It makes no trouble
for the reader that “Sniff-sniff” is a spondee, or double-stressed foot,
and omits the two unstressed syllables called for in the meter. Linnea may leave out the
occasional unstressed syllable, but she never makes a rhyme depend on one,
and she never forces you to rush over words that cry out for stress. It’s a
relief to find such lovely order in a messy kitchen.

Dan Yaccarino’s “Zoom! Zoom! Zoom! I’m off to the Moon!” varies its rhythms
quite a bit more than “Mouse Mess.” But then, the story — a little boy’s
straightforward fantasy trip to the moon and back — has much less emotional
chaos to contain. Yaccarino’s paintings evoke the thrusting rockets,
unearthly angles and sudden changes in acceleration that make being thrown
in the air such a hoot to the book’s 2-to-6-year-old intended audience.
The hero looks like a stylized Tintin, his blond, cowlick-topped head as
round as the fishbowl helmet of his space suit. Each page yields a punchy
epigram, like “There’s outer space all over the place,” or “Moon rocks in a
box.” Occasional imperfect rhymes, such as the one in the title, may
irritate purists. Still, you’ve got to love a book with the line “See you
later, lunar crater.”

Of course, most 6-year-olds and their readaloudtoers don’t know from
tetrameter, spondees and so on, so you might think they wouldn’t be irked
by the misuse of such things. Poetry, however, resembles a certain hirsute
young person in that when it’s good, it’s well worth the admission price,
but when it’s bad it’s awful. Even if your child doesn’t find the bad stuff irksome, you sure will on the 20th reading. And
there’s a whole diaperload of the bad stuff out there.

Take Bill Maynard’s “Incredible Ned.” (Please!) The protagonist, poor thing,
has the soul of an artist, which manifests itself by making every noun he
pronounces appear over his head, to the amazement of his friends and the
annoyance of his teachers. (At least, that’s what the text tells us; for
some reason Frank Remkiewicz’s pictures show the objects beside Ned, behind
him, around him — everywhere but over his head.) Maynard unfolds Ned’s story
in anapestic tetrameter — that’s the ba-da-DUM, ba-da-DUM, ba-da-DUM,
ba-da-DUM rhythm for which Dr. Seuss is so justly renowned. To make
Maynard’s book work, though, you kind of have to cram some things in and
stretch some things out. For example, try reading aloud the sentence “No
wonder the children didn’t get their books read.” You said, “No WONder the
CHILdren DIDn’t get their BOOKS read,” right? To fit Maynard’s scheme, you
should have mumbled, “No WONder the CHILdren dint GET their books READ,”
swallowing an entire syllable in “didn’t” and shoving a powerful, important
noun — “books” — furtively under your breath. The whole book is like that.

Of course, cramming some things in and stretching some things out plays an
honorable part in the history of American anapestic tetrameter. “Listen,
my children, and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere”
even begins with a dactyl (DUM-da-da) and sticks in a run of iambs (ba-DUM) for the galloping reader to clatter over
in haste. But Longfellow knew what he was doing, and it works. Furthermore,
Maynard stoops to the most obvious rhymes: “giraffe” and “laugh,” “school” and “fool.” For every
Kolar or Riley, there are dozens of limping Maynards, so read aloud before
you buy.

(The little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead,
by the way, is not the denizen of some anonymous nursery rhyme, as pretty
much everyone thinks. She’s a braindaughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
See — even you know one of his poems by heart. Wouldn’t Great Grandpa be
proud?)

That’s why, in children’s literature, the Nancy Drews and Jim Hawkinses are
joined by an oddly passive breed of heroes: the toys. Like children, toys
rely on people much larger than themselves to meet their basic needs, to
understand them and to pay them the attention that brings them to life.
Like children, they’re allowed a limited scope of action in the world: When
someone decides it’s bedtime, off to bed they go. And like children,
they’re vulnerable to being ignored or roughly treated; there’s not much
they can do to protect themselves from abuse or neglect.

These similarities in their situations make toys easy for children to
identify with. But since every kid is a grown-up to her teddy bear, stories
about toys can also allow children to identify with adults, giving them a
chance to check out what it feels like to belong to the larger world. And
toys make natural imaginary heroes, because that’s their job in children’s
actual lives.

In some toy stories, such as Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin
Soldier,” the heroes stay in role as inanimates, unable to move or speak on
their own. Their inability to make themselves recognized often frustrates
them. Though Andersen’s eponymous soldier goes on a long, dangerous
journey, for example, not a step of it is due to his agency. He gets
knocked from a window, swept into a gutter, swallowed by a fish, hauled
from the water, miraculously restored to his original family by the cook
and ends his life when a little boy — his rightful protector — throws him
in the fire for “no reason at all.”

By nature unswerving and steadfast (the Danish word has the postural
connotations of our word “upright”), the tin soldier takes pride in his
refusal to complain or fight against his fate. After he tumbles from the
window, Andersen tells us, “the maid and the small boy went down at once to
look for him, but although they came very near to treading on him, they
still couldn’t see him. If the tin soldier had shouted, ‘Here I am!’ they
would have found him right enough, but he considered it wasn’t done to cry
out when he was in uniform.” The idea that the soldier could choose to
shout, of course, is a heart-wrenching piece of Andersen’s signature irony.
The only course of action really open to the tin soldier is to feel
passionately, while making a virtue of passivity. Children are likely to
recognize his strategy of acting brave because he has no other choice.

In other stories (certain chapters in the Mary Poppins books, for example),
toys get to speak and move, though usually with some proviso: only at
night, only in the toy chest, only when the grown-ups aren’t around. E.T.A.
Hoffmann’s “Nutcracker” is one of these. Forget about sugarplum fairies –
this dream is half nightmare. Roberto Innocenti’s illustrations for a
recent edition of the tale properly evoke its menace. Nutcracker is
strangely helpless for a fairy-tale prince. Wounded by a thoughtless boy
(they’re everywhere, aren’t they?), the hideous enchanted prince loses a
battle to his mortal enemies, the mice. To survive, he needs help from the
heroine, a girl named Marie.

In Innocenti’s version, the villain — a seven-headed, red-eyed Mouse King
drawn in sinister pastel tones — couldn’t be further from cute. As Marie
shrinks from page to page, the scenes take on the desperate chaos of a
battleground — or a child’s messy bedroom. Has Marie dreamed the whole
thing? Following the conventions of such stories, the only people who
believe her are her brother, Fritz, himself a child, and Godfather
Drosselmeier, Nutcracker’s weird creator/uncle. Adults who can follow
children into the toy world are scary, suspicious figures. Nutcracker blurs
the boundaries between people land and toyland. Not only can creepy
Godfather Drosselmeier move between worlds, but Marie herself goes off to
live in Nutcracker’s Marzipan Castle at the end. This confusion is part of
what makes the story so frightening, and it’s unusual in toy tales.

More typical is “The Pasteboard Bandit,” a rediscovered children’s book by
Harlem Renaissance writers Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes. Written in
1935 but published this year for the first time, with lovely Mexican-style
illustrations by Peggy Turley, the book is a typical paralyzed-toy story.
It describes the somewhat passive adventures of Tito, a
papier-mbchi figure who belongs to a Mexican boy named Juanito
and his American friend, Kenny. All three heroes are descended from
artists. Juanito’s father paints clay pots, Kenny’s mother and father are
Greenwich Village artists who have come to Mexico to paint and Tito’s
progenitors could be called sculptors, if you consider toys art. Bontemps
and Hughes clearly do. Their simple, straightforward story seems designed
to break down distinctions like art and craft, rich and poor or North and
South by treating Juanito’s and Kenny’s experiences with equal weight
through Tito’s eyes.

Tito serves as an ambassador between the two boys — another natural role
for a plaything. He understands English and Spanish, though of course he
can’t speak either. And at the book’s end he travels home to New York with
Kenny, a gift from Juanito and Mexico. Tito’s big moment comes (in a
chapter tellingly titled “Tito Becomes a Hero”) when he rescues the boys
from an abandoned mine. He does this in typical toy fashion, by simply
standing there. Kenny’s parents, searching for the boys, notice him at the
mouth of the tunnel where Kenny and Juanito left him as a lookout. To
reward Tito for pointing the way to their sons, both sets of parents paint
him: Juanito’s father refreshes his clothes, which ran when he got wet, and
Kenny’s mother paints a huge portrait of him. Tito is proud to find himself
the size of a real man.

For all their helplessness, Tito, Nutcracker and the tin soldier aspire to
masculine roles. It’s no accident that they’re a pair of soldiers and a
bandit. They may be the littlest or even the timidest of men, but they
still care about being manly: Tito, like any boy, would hate to have anyone
confuse him with a doll. (Another mini-genre, the doll books, similarly
opens a window on the littlest women.) Does a child’s — or a toy’s –
passiveness make him feminine? If toy stories explore the child’s role in
an adult world, these three do a fascinating job of separating the boys
from the men.

Children are not born knowing the way, though — they have to learn it, by keeping their eyes and ears open. A lot comes in through those eyes and ears, noise as well as information. Stories distill some of the chaos, picking out details worth particular
attention, and giving a shape and meaning to what might otherwise make no sense.

Grown-ups, whose job it is to help children find their way, tend to fill their stories with signposts in the form of boldly highlighted morals. (Miss L.’s many stories were meant to instruct as well as entertain.) That’s obvious to most people when they
think of 19th century children’s classics. “Heidi,” “The Secret Garden,” “Peter Rabbit,” “The Snow Queen,” even that tender swashbuckler, “Treasure Island,” all blare intricate riffs on: Grow up good.

Though it’s harder to see today’s message because it so pervades our lives and language, current books are just as preachy. They merely preach a different moral: Grow up healthy. Books as unlike each other as “Sarah, Plain and Tall,” Patricia McLaughlin’s somber tale of broken hearts healing, and “In the Night Kitchen,” Maurice Sendak’s ebullient, nude romp through childish desire, give their young readers instruction in psychological doctrine.

That’s not to say those books are bad. Though the worst of the old and new sound as though they were written by Puritans or guidance counselors, many are marvelous. And not because they transcend their moralizing, but because they do it so well. Children
love morals: they want the witch to die; they want the new mommy to make home a loving place again. Even for today’s readers, “Little Women” owes a lot of its appeal to saintly Beth March, not solely to rebellious Jo.

The March girls, whose author didn’t supply them with children’s books of their own, take the same sort of delight from passionately reading and discussing John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” that my contemporaries and my friends’ children get from “Little Women.” Though Bunyan’s 17th century Christian allegory, a long voyage to end all long voyages, is hard to read these days, the sisters’ enthusiasm rings true. “Pilgrim’s Progress” supplies them with fantasy that’s ballasted by significance, just as books
like Sendak’s inspired odyssey, “Where the Wild Things Are,” do for modern children.

In a very general way, the old stories are in favor of repression, the new ones against it. This passage — from the godawful “Children’s Annual 1853,” an anthology of tripe every bit as awful as the worst of today’s psychobabble-spouting bunny rabbits — is a wake-up call to young Victorians: “Now, we must be very pure in our thoughts and desires if we would have pleasant dreams, and live in harmony one with another, because the dream-spirit will take the opportunity, when we are sleeping, to show us all the faults that we have ever done, and will make us see them in spite of our will to close our eyes against them; and this is not the worst that he will do, for he delights to magnify our faults, that he may thereby torment our very souls, more and more.”

In contrast, “Gorilla,” a beautiful picture book by Anthony Browne, uses dreams the modern way — as psychological medicine. The young heroine, Hannah, lives in a sterile, orderly house with her father, who’s always busy. Naturally, Hannah longs for a gorilla, and naturally, her father is too busy even to take her to the zoo. Browne shows her loneliness and his neglect through meticulous drawings of the rooms where they live. In the kitchen’s oppressive morning geometry, Hannah’s father hides behind his newspaper.

She eats her supper sandwich alone with a TV in an empty room
where the TV casts its light, the wallpaper is covered with flowers and butterflies, but beyond that tiny circle, its dark shapes look like wolf heads, bats, and dim, horned things.

Then, the night before Hannah’s birthday, a gorilla comes to her in her
dreams. She’s terrified at first, then delighted. Wearing her father’s coat and hat, the gorilla takes her on a wild (but safe) trip across the rooftops. When she wakes up, it’s her birthday, and her father has finally found time to take her to the zoo.

Browne’s moral is typical of stories concerned with a child’s psychological health. Too busy is bad, he suggests. Too much order is bad. Children need attention, and fathers need to be in touch with the warm, flexible, furry part of themselves — their inner gorilla.

Compared to adult literature, children’s books are still young, scarcely two centuries old (which is one reason the March girls had to make do with “Pilgrim’s Progress”). If they could duck into Miss L.’s tent, doubtless she’d tell them that they’re in for a long voyage. I wonder what the next generation of morals will be about, once our descendants tire of inner gorillas, the way our century tired of self-denying virtue. But one thing I’m sure of — most of the best ones will still have morals.