Walter De la Mare

“ It seemed 'twas diamonds in the air, or little flakes of frost;
It seemed 'twas golden smoke around, or sunbeams lightly tost;
It seemed an elfin music like to reeds and warblers rose:
'Nay!' Lucy said, 'it is the wind that through the branches flows.'
And as she peeps, and as she peeps, 'tis no more one, but three,
And eye of bat, and downy wing of owl within the tree,
And the bells of that sweet belfry a-pealing as before,
And now it is not three she sees, and now it is not four. ”

“ Then down beside its margent in the crusty snow she kneels,
And hears a magic belfry a-ringing with sweet bells.
But when the belfry ceased to sound yet nothing could she see,
Save only frozen water in the shadow of the tree.
But presently she lifted up her eyes along the snow,
And sees a witch in brindled shawl a-frisking to and fro. ”

“ Come Jinnie, come dwarf, cocksparrow, and bee,
There's a ring gaudy-green in the dell,
Sing, sing, ye sweet cherubs, that flit in the tree;
La! who can draw tears from a well-well-well,
Who ever drew tears from a well! ”

“ His work has the honest candor of the border ballads and the fairy tales: as well as unmitigated joys, they are full of the dangers and horrors and sorrows that every child soon knows to be part of the world, however vainly parents try to veil them. A child's curiosity about the forbidden will insist on being satisfied; and better by verse than otherwise. This poetry is also musically astute and demanding; it may surprise and alert the parental reader; and it has its share of archaisms and poeticisms, which, contrary to adult surmise, bemuse and fascinate children. ”

“ The dangers for the poet in addressing so composite an audience are enormous: cuteness, coyness, archness and condescension are only the most obvious ones. Some great writers of children's verse—Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear—have successfully hedged themselves against these dangers by insistent comedy and parody (Carroll's "serious" children's verse is maudlin and embarrassing) . By this means they have contrived what the child will take as lovely, unintimidating, mysterious, rational nonsense, and what the adult will recognize as a travesty or burlesque of something very edgy indeed. ”

“ There had been no "children's literature" to speak of before, except for the oral and "popular" tradition, including lullabies and Mother Goose, some of which go back as far as Tudor and even medieval times.
Children's literature today is an immense and complex domain; and leaving aside for the present the works composed by children themselves, what remains varies tremendously in skill and delight, as well as in subtlety and intention. ”

“ As a poet (he was also a gifted novelist and short-story writer) de la Mare was praised by T. S. Eliot ("the delicate, invisible web you wove") and by W. H. Auden ("there are no good poems which are only for children") . His technical and linguistic skills are not, as Auden rightly points out, a matter of indifference to children, who are in the very business of learning language, as well as other facts of life, and who are particularly sensitive to verbal rhythms, as Iona and Peter Opie have splendidly demonstrated in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. ”

“ He hates little girls that are rude, are rude,
He hates little girls that are rude.'
Jane tapped at the door of the house in the wood,
And the dwarf looked over the wall,
He eyed her so queer, 'twas as much as she could
To keep from laughing at all, at all,
To keep from laughing at all.
His shoes down the passage came clod, clod, clod,
And when he opened the door,
He croaked so harsh, 'twas as much as she could
To keep from laughing the more, the more,
To keep from laughing the more. ”

“ So I shall also set aside those minimal "vocabulary-building" tales and verses whose small virtues are rarely more than therapeutic, and direct myself only to that specialized but most important category—poems written by a skilled and adult poet but addressed to an audience of children who are likely to be read to until they are skillful enough to read the same verses for themselves. ”

“ ANTHONY HECHT teaches in the English Department of the University of Rochester. He is the author of several books of poetry, of which the most recent are The Hard Hours (1967) and Aesopic (1968) . His poems appear in many anthologies and he has contributed to the Hudson Review, the New York Review of Books, Quarterly Review of Literature, and other periodicals. ”

“ Just as important, this is a poetry of charms and spells, witches and dwarfs, ogres and fairies, full of dangers, omens, riddles and triumphs. In "The Ogre," for example, two sleeping children are about to be plucked by an enormous ogre from their home ”

“ Thus, Lear's "The Dong with the Luminous Nose" and Carroll's "Jabberwocky" are, respectively, bright and disguised versions of gothic terror and misery on the one hand, and medieval knightly exploit on the other, both rendered innocuous for the nursery and ridiculous for the adult. The risks of seriousness have been successfully avoided.
The poetry of Walter de la Mare sings boldly and beautifully without any of these hedges and condescensions. ”

“ A collection of forty-seven poems about subjects and experiences familiar to children.
[1. English poetry] I. Title. II. Series.
[PR6007.E3S6 1976] 821'.9'12 75-32200
ISBN 0-8240-2310-2
Printed in the United States of America
Preface
The Romantic poets rediscovered a pastoral and Biblical dream: that a child was the most innocent and the wisest of us all. Wordsworth hailed him as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" And in the next generation Victorian novelists took that dream seriously enough to make children the heroes and heroines of their most searching fictions. ”