Mine was not news for child to know - Walter de la Mare's Motley

The difference between a Walter de la Mare children’s poem and one not so labeled can be slight.  Motley (1918), the book that followed Peacock Pie, begins with “The Little Salamander” and “The Linnet,” with language and subject little different than in the children’s book.  Following the one book, with the other, I saw the traces of the children everywhere:

Perchance upon its darkening air,
The unseen ghosts of children fare,
Faintly swinging, sway and sweep,
Like lovely sea-flowers in its deep…   (“The Sunken Garden”)

The scene is of course “Latticed from the moon’s beams” – the moon is ever-present.  Soon enough, the language thickens, and becomes more grammatically complex, with more poetic inversions, for example, and two new subjects appear.  The first is the love poem, “The Tryst,” for example:

Flee into some forgotten night and be
Of all dark long my moon-bright company…
Or “The Ghost,” about a lost love, or its illusion:
A face peered.  All the grey night
    In chaos of vacancy shone;
Nought but vast sorrow was there –
    The sweet cheat gone.

The last line, borrowed by Scott Moncrieff, now turns the narrator into Proust’s Marcel and the ghost into Albertine, in which case she’s better off without him.

The other new subject can be guessed from the 1918 date of publication.

They are all at war! –
Yes, yes, their bodies go
‘Neath burning sun and icy star
To chaunted songs of woe,
Dragging cold cannon through a mire
Of rain and blood and spouting fire,
The new moon glinting hard on eyes
Wide with insanities!  (from “Motley”)

The speaker is a Fool, left behind as usual.

Mine was not news for child to know,
And Death – no ears hath.

After the three pages of “Motley” – long for de la Mare – it was hard not to think that every poem in the book was a war poem of some kind, if I could only grasp the metaphor.   In “The Marionettes” the European theater is converted into a puppet theater – “’Tis sawdust that they bleed” – that one is easy enough.  The Fool returns with a melancholy “Fool’s Song” – “’Tis sad in sooth to lie under the grass.”  De la Mare blends two stories, portraying Alexander the Great enthralled by the song of the Sirens, hoping that poetry will end war, not now, certainly, but “Come the calm, infinite night” (“Alexander”).

Although there are plenty of cryptic metaphors and lines, Motley is more often direct in its statements than was The Listeners.  The last few poems are a call to Beauty that would likely have made no sense before the war.  Pure aestheticism then; something else now.

Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour.  Let no night
Seal they sense in deathly slumber
     Till to delight
Thou have paid they utmost blessing;
Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
     In other days.  (from “Fare Well”)

And quiet did quiet remain - Walter de la Mare's Peacock Pie at the edge of All the Ages

Another children’s book, Walter de la Mare’s Peacock Pie (1913), once a famous book, more in England than in America.  It’s a beauty, mysterious and evocative (but evoking what?).  Rarely twee.  Enjoyably odd.  An exemplar, complete:

The Horseman

I heard a horseman
    Ride over the hill;
The moon shone clear,
    The night was still;
His helm was silver,
    And pale was he;
And the horse he rode
    Was of ivory.

Either that gets me asking questions and wanting to know more, or it’s nothing.  And I have to be willing to accept, I suppose, that this is it, that the rest of the story has to come from my own imagination.  The poet’s job is to catch that one sublime moment.

A few poems do tell more complete stories – one, “Sam’s Three Wishes,” seems to borrow Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence – but more often something has just happened, or is about to happen, or should happen but does not.  “So I know not who came knocking, / At all, at all, at all” (“Some One”).

Maybe a kid and the moon stare at each other:

Full Moon

One night as Dick lay half asleep,
    Into his drowsy eyes
A great still light began to creep
    From out the silent skies.

It was the lovely moon's, for when
    He raised his dreamy head,
Her surge of silver filled the pane
    And streamed across his bed.

So, for awhile, each gazed at each —
    Dick and the solemn moon —
Till, climbing slowly on her way,
    She vanished, and was gone.

An ordinary event becomes like a supernatural visitation.  The very next poem inverts the idea.  “’I’m tired – Oh, tired of books’” says “The Bookworm.”  He wants Nature, unmediated, but his reason is mysterious.  “’Something has gone, and ink and print / Will never bring it back.’”  The poems are built on these gaps.

“The Bookworm” has one of my favorite lines:

To hear the hoarse sea-waters drive
   Their billows ‘gainst the shore;

Or favorite phrases – “hear the hoarse sea-waters.”  De la Mare is good with sounds, colors, animals, like the miller’s rat-hunting cats:

 Then up he climbs to his creaking mill,
Out come his cats all grey with meal –
Jekkel, and Jessup, and one-eyed Jill.  (from “Five Eyes”)

Peacock Pie ends with a section titled “Songs” that is the strangest in the book, building to a weird climax.  The songs are of “Secrets,” “Shadows,” “Enchantments” and “Dreams.”  The title phrase finally appears, but in “The Song of the Mad Prince”:

Who said, “Peacock Pie”?
   The old King to the sparrow:
Who said, “Crops are ripe”?
    Rust to the harrow:
Who said, “Where sleeps she now?
    Where rests she now her head,
Bathed in eve’s loveliness”? –
    That’s what I said.

The next stanza is even weirder.  This song is worthy of Hamlet, assuming we take him as genuinely mad.

The last song  is like the first I quoted, but bolder.  The imagination leaps past the poem, while within it all is still.

The Song of Finis

At the edge of All the Ages
     A Knight sate on his steed,
His armour red and thin with rust,
    His soul from sorrow freed;
And he lifted up his visor
    From a face of skin and bone,
And his horse turned head and whinnied
   As the twain stood there alone.

No bird above that steep of time
    Sang of a livelong quest;
No wind breathed,
        Rest:
“Lone for an end !” cried Knight to steed,
    Loosed an eager rein —
Charged with his challenge into Space:
   And quiet did quiet remain.

If you have read Michael Moorcock – honestly, is it not like a compressed Moorcock novel?  He loved de la Mare.  A livelong quest at the edge of All the Ages!  Let’s go!

An apple, a child, dust - Walter de la Mare's The Listeners and Other Poems

The poetry book for today is The Listeners and Other Poems (1912) by Walter de la Mare.  Simpler Pastimes is throwing a Classic Children’s Lit party in April – we had so much fun with Pinocchio last year – and I was thinking of reading more of de la Mare’s poetry for children, likely the 1914 Pigeon Pie.  But it is not always clear to me what de la Mare’s distinction is between poetry for children and for adults.  The Listeners is full of flowers and dreams.

Dreams

Be gentle, O hands of a child;
Be true: like a shadowy sea
In the starry darkness of night
        Are your eyes to me.

But words are shallow, and soon
Dreams fade that the heart once knew;
And youth fades out in the mind,
        In the dark eyes too.

What can a tired heart say,
Which the wise of the world have made dumb?
Save to the lonely dreams of a child,
        “Return again, come!”

This is clear enough – one set of poems is for children, another for former children, yearning for their childhood, or parts of it.

The Listeners is like An Adult’s Garden of Verse.  There are even weeds.

from The Bindweed

The bindweed roots pierce down
  Deeper than men do lie.
Laid in their dark-shut graves
  Their slumbering kinsmen by.

Yet what frail thin-spun flowers
  She casts into the air,
To breathe the sunshine, and
  To leave her fragrance there.

Which is exactly my dilemma when fighting bindweed.  For the sake of the flowers I would love to keep them, although I will note that the blossoms are not fragrant.  Maybe English bindweed flowers are fragrant.

“Winter” is on the next page.  Its last stanza:

  Thick draws the dark,
  And spark by spark,
The frost-fires kindle, and soon
Over that sea of frozen foam
  Floats the white moon.

Adult poems are perhaps a matter of attitude, or melancholy beauty.  These lines are delightful in the shift of sounds, “ah”s and “k”s shifting into “f”s, “oh”s and “ooh”s.  The image is pretty enough, but it is almost swallowed by the vowels.

There are people in The Listeners, too, not just flowers and moods.  Old Susan is a childhood servant – always back to childhood – who sets a good example by reading when not working.

And sometimes in the silence she
Would mumble a sentence audibly,
Or shake her head as if to say,
“You silly souls, to act this way!”

Some characters are more like fairies, or spirits.  Look at this sequence of titles near the end of the book: “Haunted,” “Silence,” “Winter Dusk,” “The Ghost,” “An Epitaph.”  Yep, that’s The Listeners.  The final poem brings in another melancholy, fragrant flower.

“The Hawthorn Hath a Deathly Smell”

The flowers of the field
  have a sweet smell;
Meadowsweet, tansy, thyme,
  And faint-heart pimpernel;
But sweeter even than these,
  The silver of the may
Wreathed is with incense for
  The Judgment Day.

An apple, a child, dust,
  When falls the evening rain,
Wild brier’s spicèd leaves,
  Breathe memoires again;
With further memory fraught,
The silver of the may
Wreathed is with incense for
  the Judgment Day.

Eyes of all loveliness –
  Shadow of strange delight,
Even as a flower fades
  Must thou from sight;
But oh, o’er thy grave’s mound,
  Till comes the Judgment Day,
Wreathed shall with incense be
  Thy sharp-thorned may.

The poems for adult have thorns.

A dark and livelong hint of death - Walter de la Mare poems, for children and others

Now Walter de la Mare, a writer who like G. K. Chesterton wrote an enormous number and variety of books, but who unlike Chesterton seems to have disintegrated.  At one point his poems for children were quite popular.  I wonder how many of them I might have read as a child.

None from Songs of Childhood (1902), de la Mare’s first book, rang any bells.  Too bad for young me.  The book is comparable to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses or Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song (1872).   Better than Rossetti’s book, actually, although similarly, to use current parlance, dark.  The first poem of de la Mare’s first book of poems for adults (Poems, 1906) declares that

The loveliest thing earth hath, a shadow hath,
A dark and livelong hint of death  (from “A Shadow”)

That hint runs through de la Mare’s early verse, whomever it might have been written for.

Songs of Childhood moves through a child’s day.  The child has trouble arising from bed but is enticed by the gnomes to arise (“Sleepyhead”).  What the gnomes want with the child – well, be suspicious, but perhaps it is all a dream.  The child’s play, encounters with fairies and witches and so on is light and charming, but darkens with the sky.  Soon, the subjects of the poem are ogres and wolves and a dying raven.  The child, with little comprehension, attends a funeral, depicted with great skill:

They took us to the graves,
    Susan and Tom and me,
Where the long grasses grow
    And the funeral tree:
We stood and watched; and the wind
    Came softly out of the sky
And blew in Susan’s hair,
  As  I stood close by.  (“The Funeral”)

Lest one think, as I did, that the funeral was for the children, as these lines strongly suggest, in the next stanza they are having their tea in the nursery, and “Tom fell asleep in his chair, \ He was so tired, poor thing.”

At this point in the sequence, sleep returns again and again, as the day comes to an end and bedtime nears for the young reader.

Sleep, sleep, lovely white soul;
Time comes to keep night-watch with thee,
Nodding with roses; and the sea
Saith “Peace! Peace!” amid his foam.
“O be still!”
The wind cries up the whispering hill –
    Sleep, sleep, lovely white soul.  (from “Lullaby”)

I find it easy to imagine something stronger than sleep behind these gentle poems.

The adult poems are more explicitly attuned to “Death’s stretching sea,” to use the last line of “Sorcery,” one of two poems about Pan in Poems.  Sleep, or the poet’s imagination, offers an entry to a dream-world of gods, fairies and Shakespeare character.  “Who, now, put dreams into thy slumbering mind?” (a question never answered from “The Death-Dream”).

Umbrageous cedars murmuring symphonies
Stooped in late twilight o’er dark Denmark’s Prince:
He sat, his eyes companioned with dream –
Lustrous large eyes that held the world in view
As some entrancèd child’s a puppet show.
Darkness gave birth to the all-trembling stars,
And a far  roar of long-drawn cataracts,
Flooding immeasurable night with sound.  (from “Hamlet”)

There is a hint that Hamlet, in his old age, would become Prospero.  Much more than a hint, since Ariel in mentioned directly.  The strange thing to me was now un-Shakespearian the ten poems about Shakespeare characters were.  De la Mare had converted them into de la Mare characters.

A section titled “Memories of Childhood” most clearly pulls the poems for children and adults together.  De la Mare’s childhood is a sad, lonely place.  This is from “The Echo,” so the first speaker is the poet, , the second the echo.

“Who cares?” I bawled through my tears;
    The wind fell low:
In the silence, “Who cares? who cares?”
   Wailed to and fro.

In this situation you receive the answer you ask for.

Lovely, gloomy things, these early Walter de la Mare poems.

The old frenzy to make some thing - early G. K. Chesterton poems

How about some of those posts where I poke at poets about whom I know nothing?  That’s always fun.  For me.

Since I ran out of British poets of the 1890s whom I wanted to read, I have moved on a bit, to G. K. Chesterton (The Wild Knight, 1900), Walter de la Mare (Songs of Childhood, 1902, and Poems, 1906), and William Butler Yeats (this and that).

The 1900s was Yeats’s decade for Celtic mythological poems.  They mostly bounce of me.  I have read and forgotten them before, and now I have done it again.  By The Green Helmet and Other Poems he is turning into the Yeats I know better.  I’ll set Yeats aside.

Does anyone wandering by have opinions about the plays of Yeats?  I have never read those and am curious.

Chesterton and de la Mare were the same age, and these are early books, poems of poets in their twenties.  Both wrote in a pleasing, straightforward lyrical style, in the line of Housman and Hardy – none of that baroque 1890s stuff for them.  They wrote poems to memorize.  For a time, de la Mare must have been among the most memorized poets in English, his children’s poems, at least.  For both poets, the distinction between poems for children and for adults can be uncertain.  Both poets are explicitly religious, with the difference that Chesterton is Catholic and de la Mare seems to worship fairies.

Early Chesterton at his best:

The Skeleton

Chattering finch and water-fly
Are not merrier than I;
Here among the flowers I lie
Laughing everlastingly.
No: I may not tell the best;
Surely friends, I might have guessed
Death was but the good King’s jest,
    It was hid so carefully.

The early lines join and parody a long tradition of English nature poetry, the last introduce a note of mystery.  Is the grinning skeleton telling the best or not?  “King” is doubled, yes, a secular king and Christ, with the line taking a different meaning for each.

Tolkien fans should seek out “Modern Elfland,” the Scourging of the Shire in 32 lines:

I filled my wallet with white stones,
   I took three foxgloves in my hand,
I slung my shoes across my back,
   And so I went to fairyland.
 But lo, within that ancient place
   Science had reared her iron crown,
And the great cloud of steam went up
   That telleth where she takes a town.

Do not worry, the hobbit champions will soon return from the war and Elfland will be restored.

I suppose I prefer the Chesterton of the grand but grounded metaphors, as in “The Skeleton” or “Cyclopean,” in which the planet is turned into a living monster:

But though in pigmy wanderings dull
I scour the deserts of his skull,
I never find the face, eyes, teeth,
Lowering or laughing underneath.

The end of this one has a sublime moment, when the monster looks back:

Then cowered: a daisy, half concealed,
Watched for the fame of that poor field;
And in that flower and suddenly
Earth opened its one eye on me.

The image of the poet staring in astonishment at and into a daisy, thinking it is the earth looking back at him, that and moments like it are the good stuff in these early Chesterton poems.

The title phrase is in the prefatory poem to The Wild Knight, a poet's apology in which his excuse is that if God can be forgiven for making man, surely a poet can be forgiven for writing poems.