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As an introduction to the bcst of all anthologies for the young, Come Hither, Mr. de la Mare wrote a parable. A schoolboy named Simon has hcard from bis mothcr about a wondcrful place of "trees, waters, greco pas tures, rare birds and flowers" called East Dene. Setting out one rnorning to look for it, he comes to an old stone house in a hollow called Thrae, and makes the acquaintance of its owner, Miss Taroone. When he asks her about East Denc she gives him a strange look but does not answer. She tells him, how-ever, that Thrae is not hcr only house, and speaks of Sure Vine "as a family mansion, very ancient and magnificent." She also tells him about a great traveler, Mr. Nahum.

I could not at first make head or tail of Mr. Nahum. E ven now I am uncertain whethcr he was Miss Taroone's brother or her nephew or a cousin many times removed ; or whether perhaps she was really and truly Mrs. Taroone and he her only son; or she still Miss T aroone and he an adopted one. I am not sure whether she had much love for him, though she appeared to speak of him with pride. What I do know is that Miss Taroone had nurtured h1m from bis cradle and had taught him all the knowledge tha t was not already bis by right of birth . .. . Strangely enough, by the looks on her face and the tones of her voice, Mr. Taroone was inclined

W ALTER DE LA M ARE

to mock a Ji ttle at Mr. Nahum bccause of his restlessness. She didn 't seem to approve of his leaving hc.r so much-though she herself had come from Sure Vine.

T he namcs are easy to translatc and the general drift of the para-ble is clear. Because of his peculiar postion as a travelcr in search of a joy which he has yct to find and can only imagine in tcrms of an innocent happncss which is no Jonger his, every man, whcther as a writer or a reader of poetry, dcmands two things which, though not absolutely incompatible with each other, are not easy to reconcile complctely. On the one hand, wc want a poem to be a beautiful object, a verbal Garden of Eden which, by its formal perfeclion, kccps alivc in us the hopc that there exists a state of joy without evil or suffcring which it can and should be our destiny to attain . At the sa me time, we look to a poem for somc kind of illumination about our prcsen t wandering condition, since, without self-insight and knowledgc of the world, we must err b!indly with little chancc of realizng our hope. We expect a poem to tell us some home truth, howevcr minor, and, as we know, most homc truths are neither prctty nor pleasant. One might say that, in every poct, thcre dwclls an Ariel, who sings, and a Prospero, who comprehends, but in any particular poem, sometimes cven in the whole work of a particular poet, one of the partners plays a greater role than the other. Thus Campion , one of de la Mare's favori te poets, is an example of an Aricl-dominated poet in whose work verbal beauty is almost everything, and what is said matters very littlc. In Wordsworth's The Prelude, on the other hand, Prospero dominates and Ariel contributes very little ; it might almost have been wri tten in prose.

Though the role of Prospero in de la Mare's poctry is much greatcr than one may realize on a fi rst reading, it would not be unfa ir, I think, to call him an Ariel-dominated poet. Certainly, his most obvious virtucs, thosc which no reader can fail to sec immediately, are verbal and formal, the delicacy of his metrical fingering and the graceful architecture of his stanzas. Neither in his technique nor his sensibility, does he show any trace of influences other than E nglish, either continental, like Eliot and Pound, or Classical, like Bridges. The poets from whom he seems to have learned most are the Elizabethan songwriters, Christina

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Rossctti and, I would rashly guess, Thomas H ardy. Like Christina R ossetti, he is a master of trisyUahic substitution and foot in-version ; thc reader's ear is continually excited by rhythmical variations without evcr losing a scnse of the underlying pattern. In thc prcclominantly anapacstic movement of the following stanza, for cxample, how s urprising and yet convincing is thc suelden shif t to a trochaic movement in the fifth linc and to a spondaic in the sixth.

Wickct out into thc dark That ~wings but one way;

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Keeps so many like ourselvcs As f f ' ' poor pmmg human creatures I rom some assured, yet goldcn heritagc? ' ~eeps us Jamenting beneath all our happy la~ghter SJ!e~ce: dreams, hope for what rnay not come after' Whtle hfe wastes and withers, as it has for mortals ,

Age on to age, on to age. '

H is late long poem, Winged Chariot is a sur .. ance. He sti ll writes as . 1 . , . , pnsmg pcrform-

d . . . a ync poct, not as an epic o d .

an It IS better read perhlps like I M . r ramattc, 1

. . ' ' , n emonam as a f yn cs wHh a meter and th . . . , senes o

. . . . ' eme m comrnon, but readers h . ~nly f~mhar wJth his early poetry will find somethincr thc; ~o a~~ evcr laVe predicted, a talcnt for mctaphysical wit. o u

Thc dwindling candle with her pensivc light ~:tes. out the lc~den watches of the night .

d, 111 that scrvJce, from herself takcs flight.

* * *

F~te was app.Jied. Hcr See-Saw would not stir. Mctn sat dcad-ccntre and grirnaced at her Her prizes? None could shine where none ~ould er!" So every dunce was a philosopher. '

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Cowcd ?Y the spectrc for which 'no man waits ' O_bsequ_wus hirelings of the witless Fates, , Time pms down ev'n Dictators to their 'dat , es.

De la Marc wrote ma specifically in mind and ~~ :~em~l Wit~ an audience of children pub_Jished in a vol~me by theims~~v:~.teTh:o~~: ~hepsr:c~~~1el bceoen vemence but it must b f ' n-d ' . nevcr e orgotten that, while there are so goo poems which are only for adults, because the me adult expenence in their readers th y presuppose are ni f h. , ' ere are no good poems w h ich

o y or e lldren. Human beings are blessed with th ~~ remember; conscquently, to grow old m eans for use :o~w;r Iscard but to accumulate ; in every old man, there still lives ~

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child, an adolescent, a young man and a midclle-aged one. It is commonly betieved that chi ldrcn are, by nature, more imaginative than adults, but this is questionable. l t is prohably the case only in cultures like our own which put a higher social and economic valuc upon practica] and abstract thinking than upon wonder and images; in a culture which put a high value on imagination and a low one on logic, children might well appcar to be more rational than adults, for a child is not, by nature, more anything. In all cultures, however, the re is onc constant diflcrence between children and ad ults, namcly, that, for the formcr, learning thei r native tonguc is itself one of the rnost important cxpericnces in thcir lives, while, for the latter, Janguage has bccome an instrument for in-tcrpreting and communicating cxperience; to rccapture the sense of language as cxpcrience, an adul t has to visit a foreign country.

What the chile!, and the child-in-thc-adult, most cnjoys in poetry, thcrefore, is thc manipulation of language for its own sake, thc sound and rhythm of words . There is a deplorable tendency in the United States, which I hope and pray has not sprcad to the Unitcd Kingdom, to think that books for children should use a very limitecl vocabulary, and that verses for them should be writtcn in the simplest and most obvious mcters. Th is is utter non-sense. The sures! sign that a child has a fecling for language is that he talks like an aflected adult and always uses a polysyllabic word when a monosyllabic one would do.

As a revelation of the wonders of the English Language, de la Mare's poems for childrcn are unrivaled. (The only ones which do not seem to me quite to come off are those in which he tries to be humorous. A gift, like H ilairc Belloc's for the comic-satiric is not his; he lacks, perhaps, both thc worldliness and thc cruelty which the genrc calls for. ) They include what, for the adult, are among his greatest "pure" lyrics, e.g. , Old Shellover and T he Song of the Mad Prince, and their rhythms are as subtle as they are varied. Like all good poems, of course, they do more than train the ear. They also teach scnsory attention and courage. Unlike a lot of second-rate verse for children, de la Marc's descriptions of birds, beasts, and natural phenomena are always sharp and accurate, and he never prcttifies experience or attempts to conceal from thc young that terror and nightmare are as essential characteristics of human existcnce as Jove and sweet dreams . There is another

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re~pect in which, as al! wri ters of good books fo r them know cht!dren diffcr fro . h '

. . . . m. g' own-ups, t ey ha ve a far grcater toleran ce fot didacttc mstructw n, whether in facts or morals. As Chesterton observed:

The child. does not know that rnen are not only bad frorn good motives, but also oftcn good from bud motives. There-for~ ~he .chJ!d has a ~Jearty, unspoiled, and unsatiable ap-petitc .fot n~ere morahty, for thc mere difference betwcen a good httie g1rl anda bad littlc girl.

Without e ver , being trcsome, de in M a re is not afraid to instr uct the ~oung. W ha t cou!d be more pructically useful than his mne-ml onic r:hymc Stars, or mo re educative, morally as wcll as musically t 1an Ht.f? - '

Hi ' handsome hun ting man Firc your little gun. ~ Hung ' Now the animal ls dead and dumb and done. Never~norc to pee~ again, creep again, leap again, Eat OJ s lcep or dnnk again. Oh, what fun!

In cons idering the work f , . . , . . o any poct, 11 ts always easier and

saf1cr to disc.uss the role of Ariel than that of Prospero. There is

on y one Ancl to a langutgc b t t ' . h ' ' u Jcrc a re as many P rosperas as t ere are poets. We can describe what o ne poet docs with the language and compa t 1 h

re I WJt 1 w a t another poet has done but we cannot compare th ' ' ' f e persp ectrvc on life of any poct with that ~ any other becausc each is unique. That is why pocts thcmselves a:te bcmg askcd what their p oems " mean" because, in order to

s_wer such a question, they would have to know th 1 . wh1ch as Th 'd . . . emse ves

, . oreau saJ , !S as Imposstble as sceing oneself from the back Without turning one's head. Every poet wili sccond de la Mare's statemcnt in his prefatory note to O Lovely England.

What a write r has to say about his "pocms" and th . su.btc~rancan. watcrs, is often d angcrous, and may be ev~~ ~cenhfically maccura te. Verbal and metrical craftsmanship ts another matter. . . .

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But, as readers of poetry, wc can no more help asking, "What is it about this p oem, aside from its formal beauties or defects, which makes it sympathctic or unsyrnpathc tic to me?", than wc can help tryng to analyze the qualities of a fellow human being to whom, positively or negatively, we respond. V..1hat we "see" in a person or a p oem may be quite wrong aml is certainly only part of the truth but, if we talk about ether, we can only say what we see.

Though all poetry is, ultimately, about human nature, many poems do not Jook at man direc tly, but at what he is not, the non-human part of creation which, by convention, we cal! "Nature" ( though it m ay al so contain human artifacts) . In the work of certa in pocts, and de la M are s one of them, the Jandscape speaks. His pcrsomll landscapc is derived from two sources. Firstly, there is the countrysidc of pre-industrial E ngland, so beautiful in an unsp ectacular way,- and so kindly in climate. (Perhaps, h aving never suffercd from bronchtis, I a m biased. ) The setting of one poem is a railway-junction, in another the lyric " I" rides a bus, there are a few rcferenccs to water-milis, but otherwisc there is n o machincry and no modern building.

As the work of som e of thc G corgian poets bcars wtness , the danger of thc English iandscape as a poetc ingred ient is that its gentleness can tempt those who !ove it into writing genteely. De la Mare was protected from this. firstly by his conviction that what our senses p crccivc of the world about us is no t al! there is to know, and, secondly, by his sensc of the powers of cvil. This does not mean that he s a Buddhst who rcgards the sensory world as illusion, or th at he would call what we normally are blind to super-natural. His view, I take it, is that our eyes and ears do not lie to us, but do not, perhaps cannot, tell us the whole truth, and that those who dcny this, end up by actu ally nar rowing their vision.

What is called realism is usually a record of life at a low pitch and ebb viewed in thc sunless light of day-so often a drab waste of gray and whitc, and an east wind blowing.

What we would scc, if our senses and imagination were keener, might be more beautiful than anything we have known.

I t scemed to be a housc which mght at any moment vanish bcforc your eycs, showing tself to be but the outer shell or

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hiding place of an abode still more enchanting . ... If you ev.er sat .and watched a Transformation Scene in a panto-m.une, . d1d you suppose, just befare the harlequin slapped w1th h1s wand on what Iooked like a plain brick-and-mortar wall , that it would ins tantly after dissolve into a radiant coloured scene of. trees and fountains and hiddcn beings-growmg love!Jer m the1r own showing as the splendour spread and their haunts were revealed? Well, so at times I used to feel in Thrae.

On the other hand, the most beautiful object might turn out to be hiding something ncither beauti ful nor friendly.

Maskcd by tha t brilliant weed's dcceitful green, No glint of thc dark water can be secn Which, fcs tering, slumbcrs, with this scum for It is as though a facc, as false as fair. Dared not, by smiling, show the evil the~e.

* * *

Darkness had fall en. L opcncd the door: And lo, u stranger in thc empty room-A marvcl of moonligh t upon wall and f!oor. The quiet of merey? Or the hush of doom?

screen.

Nor, whatcver it might turn out to be, can we be certain that, were we mortals to be confronted by the truth, we could endure it.

Might that secret, if divulged, aH wc value most bewray! Make a dream of our real, A night of our day .. ..

The other element, more romantic and more disturbing, in the de la Mare Iandscape is partly derived from Grimm's Maerchen and similar folk-tales, and partly from drcams.

Still and blanched a nd cold and Ione The icy hills far off from me

With frosty ulys overgrown Stand in thcir sculptured secrecy.

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No path of theirs thc ehamois fieet Treads with a nost ril to the wind;

O 'er thcir iee-marblcd glaciers beat No wings of eaglcs to my mind .

Again, the overes timation of dreams and the subjective life shown by some of the lesser R omantic poets, can beeome boring, for most peoplc are even le~s original in their dreaming than in their waking life; thcir dreams are more monotonous than their thoughts and oddly enough, more Jiterary. Fortunately, de la Marc, as those who have rcad Behuld This Dream er will havc learned, was one of those uncommon pcrsons whosc dreams are really original. L ike Blakc, he possessed the rarc gift of havng visions whilc awake. (Mcscaline and lysergic acid can, it now seems, confer it on us dullards. ) He te lis, fo r instance, how once, aftcr drcaming that the Flora of Primavera herself was at that moment passing beneath his bedroom window, he woke up, went to the window, and therc, sure enough, she was in the street.

She sat, uplifted, ethcreally lovely, surrounded by her at-tendant nymphs and amorini, and crowned and wreathed with flowers. I t was with rapes of ftowers, also, that her nymphs were drawing slowly on hcr low flat Car on its wide clumsy woodcn whcels, like gigantic cotton-n.:els .

"E vcry artist," said Santayana, " is a moralist though he needn't preaeh," and de la Mare is one who doesn 't . His poems are neither satrica! nor occasional; indeed, l eannot recall eoming aeross in h is work a single Proper Namc, whether of a person or a place, whieh one could identify as a real historical name. Nor, though he is a lyric, not a dramatic, poet, are his poems " personal" in the sense of being self-confessions; the I in them is never identieal with the Mr. de la M are one might have met at dinner , and none are of the kind which excite the curiosity of a b iographer. Nevertheless, implicit in all his poetry are eertain notions of what constitutes the Good Life. Goodncss, they seem to say, is rooted in wonder, awe, and reverence for the beauty and strangeness of creation. Wonder itself is not goodness-de la Marc is not an aesthete-but it is the only, or the most favorable, soil in which goodness can grow. Those who lose the cap acity for wonder may become

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clcver but not intclligent, they may lcad moral lives themselves, but they will become insensitivc and moralistic towards others. A sense of wonder is not somcthing we havc to learn, for we are born with it; unfortunately, wc are also born with an aggressive lust for powcr which finds its satisfaction in thc cnslavement and destruction of others. We are, or in thc course of our history we have become, prcdatory animals likc the mousing cat and the spotted flycatcher. This lust for powcr, which, f we surrender complctcly to it, can turn us into monstcrs likc Seaton's Aunt, is immancnt in evcry child .

Lovcly as Eros, and half-naked too, He hcaped dried beach-drift, kindlcd it, and, lo! A furious fu rnacc roared, the sca-wincls blcw . Vcngcance divinc! And death to evcry foe! Young god! and not cv'n Nature eycd askance The ft rc-doorncd Empirc of a myriad ants.

Tt is only with thc hclp of wondcr, then, that we can dcvelop a virtuc which wc are ccrtainly nol bom with, compassion, not to be confuscd with its conceit-crcated counterfeit, pity. Only from wonder, too, can wc learn a stylc of bchavior and speech which is no lcss precious in art than in life; for want of a bctter word wc cal! it good-manners or b reeding. though it has li ttle to do with ancestry, school or incomc. To be well-bred means to have rcspcct for the solitude of o thcrs, whcther they be mere acquaintances or, and this is much more difficult, persons we lave; to be ill-brcd is to importune attcntion ami intimacy, to come too close, to ask indiscreet questions and makc indiscrcct rcvclations, to lecture, to bore.

Making a selcction from the work of any poet one admires is a job which cannot be done satisfactorily bccausc onc is always conscious that everything he wrotc, evcn the second bcst, should be read. De In Marc has, in my opinion, been very shabbily treated by anthologists; in their sclcctions, most havc been content to copy each other, and few have included poems he wrotc after 1920. This is a gross injusticc to a poet who continued to maturc, both in technique and wisdom, till the day of his death.

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1 havc always enjoycd Chcsterton's poctry and fiction, but. I mu~t d lit that until I started work on a selcction for a ~ubllsher, 11

a n ' d f h' on fict10nal prose was many vcars sincc l had rea any o !S n - _ h'

T he rc~sons for my neglect were. I think, two. FlfStly. . IS reputation as an anti-Scmite. Though he denied the charge and did, certainly, denounce H itler's pcrsecution, he cannot, I fear, be completely exoneratcd.

I said that a particular kind of Jcw tended to be a ty~ant and another particular kind of Jew tended to b~ a t~altor. 1 say it again. Patent facts of this kind are pe:m1tted m the criticism of any other nation on the planet: lt IS not counted illiberal to say that a certain kincl of F renchman tends to b l l cannot see why thc tyrants should not be e sensua . . . . 1 b they called tyrants and the traitors traltors mere y ecausc happen to be membcrs ~f a racc persccuted for other rea-sons and on other occaswns.

The disingenuousness of this argument is revealed by the. q~iet shift from the term nation to the tcrm race. !t_ is al:Vays ~ermlSSlble to criticize a nation (inc!uding Israel). a rehgwn (mcludmgOrtho; dox Judaism) ' or a culture, beca use thesc are the creations o

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