ary poetry,
Walter De la Mare, was born in 1873. Although he did not begin to
bring out his work in book form until he was over 30, he is, as Harold
Williams has written, "the singer of a young and romantic world, a
singer even for children, understanding and perceiving as a child." De
la Mare paints simple scenes of miniature loveliness; he uses
thin-spun fragments of fairy-like delicacy and achieves a grace that
is remarkable in its universality. "In a few words, seemingly artless
and unsought" (to quote Williams again), "he can express a pathos or a
hope as wide as man's life."

De la Mare is an astonishing joiner of words; in _Peacock Pie_ (1913)
he surprises us again and again by transforming what began as a
child's nonsense-rhyme into a suddenly thrilling snatch of music. A
score of times he takes things as casual as the feeding of chickens or
the swallowing of physic, berry-picking, eating, hair-cutting--and
turns them into magic. These poems read like lyrics of William
Shakespeare rendered by Mother Goose. The trick of revealing the
ordinary in whimsical colors, of catching the commonplace off its
guard, is the first of De la Mare's two magics.

This poet's second gift is his sense of the supernatural, of the
fantastic other-world that lies on the edges of our consciousness.
_The Listeners_ (1912) is a book that, like all the best of De la
Mare, is full of half-heard whispers; moonlight and mystery seem
soaked in the lines, and a cool wind from Nowhere blows over them.
That most magical of modern verses, "The Listeners," and the brief
music of "An Epitaph" are two fine examples among many. In the first
of these poems there is an uncanny splendor. What we have here is the
effect, the thrill, the overtones of a ghost story rather than the
narrative itself--the less than half-told adventure of some new Childe
Roland heroically challenging a heedless universe. Never have silence
and black night been reproduced more creepily, nor has the symbolism
of man's courage facing the cryptic riddle of life been more memorably
expressed.

De la Mare's chief distinction, however, lies not so much in what he
says as in how he says it; he can even take outworn words like
"thridding," "athwart," "amaranthine" and make them live again in a
poetry that is of no time and of all time. He writes, it has been
said, as much for antiquity as for posterity; he is a poet who is
distinctively in the world and yet not wholly of it.

T