WHEN DAISIES PIED AND VIOLETS BLUE

Illustrating eight songs and a speech (Mercutio on Queen Mab) from Shakespeare, Mary Chalmers paints the soft green meadows with delightful flowers, winged fairies and tripping animals in Elizabethan costume, but -- not surprisingly -- overlooks such matters as the ""foul ways"" of winter in her Christmas card scene for the frosty song in Love's Labour's Lost or the whole sexual undercurrent (from treading birds to the implications of the cuckoo's call) in the spring song. Even her ""full fathoms five"" scene with its lovely underwater dream quality is more fanciful than rich and strange, and though C. Walter Hodges tells us in an appended note that the songs were only made to sound pleasant and pass the time and we needn't bother about what the doxy (which he defines as ""somebody's sweetheart"") is doing over the hill, we wouldn't wish to prejudice a child's first view of Shakespeare with these uniformly prettified interpretations.