THE STAR IN THE PAIL

Nevertheless, we still find that his bent for cheerfully working up rhyme and meter--even playful forays into limericks, triolets, and runover rhyme--smacks too much of vacuous gymnastics. So often the words, even the very sense of the lines, seem to have been chosen chiefly because they fit. Thus, ""Clouds are white,/black, pink, or mocha;/yellow's' a dish of/ tapioca""--a comparison that seems to have no purpose except that it ends the poem with a rhyme. (This same verse contains the elegant error ""yellow looks well."") Elsewhere a child meditates on being ""In the Middle"" between the elephant and the flea in a puzzling, unaccountably punctuated stanza: ""Perhaps the flea is unaware of this:/Perhaps I'm not what elephants would miss."" Of course there is the sheer fun of seeing McCord straightarm his way to that final couplet; as long as one isn't bothered by the fact that so many observations are neither apt nor particularly true.