I should like to imagine
A moonlight in which the machine-guns of trouble
Will be silent....
Do you remember, my dear,
Long ago, on the cliffs, in the moonlight,
Looking over to Flatholme
We sat ... Long ago!...
And the things that you told me ...
Little things in the clear of the moon,
The little, sad things of a life....
We shall do it again
Full surely,
Sitting still, looking over at Flatholme.
Then, far away to the right
Shall sound the Machine Guns of trouble
_Wukka-wukka!_
And, far away to the left, under Flatholme,
_Wukka-wuk!..._
I wonder, my dear, can you stick it?
As we should say: "Stick it, the Welch!"
In the dark of the moon,
Going over....
"THERE SHALL BE MORE JOY ..."
The little angels of Heaven
Each wear a long white dress,
And in the tall arcadings
Play ball and play at chess;
With never a soil on their garments,
Not a sigh the whole day long,
Not a bitter note in their pleasure,
Not a bitter note in their song.
But they shall know keener pleasure,
And they shall know joy more rare--
Keener, keener pleasure
When you, my dear, come there.
* * * * *
The little angels of Heaven
Each wear a long white gown,
And they lean over the ramparts
Waiting and looking down.
_Walter De la Mare_
The author of some of the most haunting lyrics in contemporary 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.