_Garland Publishing, Inc., New York & London_
1976
Bibliographical note:
This facsimile has been made from a copy in the Beinecke Library of
Yale University. (Iq.D373.902)
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data De La Mare,
Walter John, 1873-1956. Songs of childhood.
(Classics of children's literature, 1621-1932)
Reprint of the 1902 ed. published by Longmans, Green, London, New York.
"Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), bibliography of his books for
children": p.
SUMMARY: 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. And
it must be admitted that it is also relentlessly British; but then, so
is much good children's literature.
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_.
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:
Into their dreams no shadow fell
Of his disastrous thumb
Groping discreet, and gradual,
Across the quiet room.
But he is stopped, spellbound, abashed and defeated by the mother of
the children, who is in another room and, all unaware of the danger,
is singing a version of the Coventry Carol (which, in its original, is
addressed to the Christ Child) as a lullaby to her new-born baby.
I would guess that any child fortunate enough to grow up with these
poems ringing in memory's ear might have a remarkable reservoir of
music and excitement available to him. That is not a small gift.