WALTER DE LA MARE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 474, 23 July 1948, Page 11

WALTER DE LA MARE

]T will astonish many readers to be told that Walter de la Mare is now 75. Here is a tribute to him by EILEEN DUGGAN, broadcast the other evening by 2Y A. OETS write against the handicap of a changing language. In the long range of centuries, words written to-day may become as archaic as Chaucer’s. It is a humbling thought, but none has been less daunted by that prospect than Walter de la Mare, whose last book, published in his seventies, has met with so deferential a welcome. He has shown infinite. variety in theme and in form, refusing to be bound by convention in metre, yet confessing to such respect for the sonnet that he counsels a modest hesitancy before attempting it, finding it like Chinese ginger jars where not the syrup alone but the jar is delightful. What then is his secret, his essence? To Robert Lynd it is that undying homesickness of poets which you find in men as diverse as the authors of The Hound of Heaven, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, and, of course, the psalms; and which makes them return "Hating their journey, homeless, home." James Stephens, trying to place Ruth Pitter, said that her poetry belongs to no known class, but can be called pure poetry. The same detached ecstasy can be found in Walter de la Mare. Chesterton felt that the world would never lose wonders, but its tragedy would be to lose wonder. In poetry and in prose, de la Mare has a certain magic which is the adult equivalent of the silver nutmeg and the golden pear. He can

be called creative in his own right, because where others draw from human experience and use the mind as a lens, he goes out of the body into a world of fairies, midgets, and gnomes. These can curse as well as bless. He never so abandons himself to fancy as to forget that this earth is a cockpit of good and evil; nor does he ever go so far into their country as to forget his own. "English," he wrote, "is a marvellous fiddle, echoing almost in every sentence one says or writes with mapy tongues . «+. while the words of which it is made were rooted in the soil of the people and were brought to ripeness by the dews and rains and suns of the northern heavens." And again, "The English love light," and weary sometimes of winter because it shortens the days. He said that he remembered only one season as cold as the terrible winter after the war. He was in England all through the war, and said that the way in which dangers and difficulties were confronted and surmounted seemed to him miraculous. To realise their magnitude one had orfly to ride for half-an-hour on a London bus. In one of (continued® on next page)

WALTER DE LA MARE

(continued from previous page) his excursions into what may be termed human poetry he gives the Good-night of a grandchild in war-time: ' "Heaven bless you, child!’ the accustomed grown-ups saidTwo eyes gazed mutely back that none could meet, Then turned to face Night’s terrors overhead. Though he is the kin of Chrystabel, the Ancient Mariner, and La Belle Dame Sans Mercis the emanations from his land of faery ate as English as his landscape in "Nod." T may sound an awesome qualification to be a friend of death, but he is so much so that one wonders if there is a Celt in his ancestry, for, in Celtdom and the Celtic fringe, death is as natural as life. "Look thy last on all things lovely," would be understood as well by a Gael or a Breton. It somehow makes him a full man, this ease among tombstones, for he has made a familiar of the old enemy of the flesh-rex tremendae majestatis-without divesting him of dread or majesty. This ease is not founded on mere nonchalance. To the riddle of existence he has made his choice of answers. Though I should sit By some tatn in thy hills, Using its ink As the spirit wills To write of earth’s wonders, Its live, willed things, Flit would the ages On soundless wings Ere unto Z My pen drew high, Leviathan toid, And the honey-fly: And still would remain My wit to tryMy worn reeds broken, The dark tarn dry, All words forgottenThou, Lord, and I Very few poems are selfless. In that he comes near to the wisdom and the anonymity of the birds to which song is praise. NTO this world" he has entered so deeply that he claims "it is possible to see both burning sun and black night together." That is his acceptance of the power of imagination in the ancient battle between body and spirit. There is a sonnet by another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, which might be a description of de la Mare’s own individual mind which is, intrigued, captivated, obsessed, by the conflict between the natural and the supernatural, the per‘sonal and the impersonal, the ‘national and the universal. It is "All things counter, original, ‘spare, strange." Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how? ) { ye oe swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, Walter de la Mare was born ‘at Charlton in Kent in 1873. . His first book, Songs of Childhood, published in 1902 under the name of Walter Ramal. ‘His works include metaphysical: poetry and metaphysical prose. The terrible burning odyssey of "The Traveller," a long, philosophical poem which crowns one of his last volumes, The Burning Glass, and which sets the seal: on his position among the major poets of our age, leads to this conclusion: Ay, beg eg Traveller toopose 1 " dust, though once in life ela Yet from whose gaze a flame divine burned through: A son of God-no sport of Time or Fate.

It is a delight to remember that New Zealand has, in Katherine Mansfield, a link with Walter de la Mare. They were what Ruth Pitter would call "blood relations of the mind." The New Zealand writer nafnes him among the guests she culled so carefully for the dream home which she planned meticulously, even to the black earth in its garden, and which was her comfort in days when she was racked by pain and loneliness on the Mediterranean Coast. His poem on her has something of the symbols of a brotherhood, a society, closed. to the general, but open to the particular, of which the rites are known only to the unworldly, and to children, Indeed, many of his poems have been written with children running round him. It has, too, something of that heightening, that patina of unreality over reality which she sought in her own prose. It has been his desire for years to visit New Zealand, a wish doubtless whetted by Katherine Mansfield and Ian Donnelly. So real was it that he wrote once half-humorously, half ruefully, that he would be willing to come "as a stowaway or even as a castaway"; but latterly the hope has faded, for the seventies, he says, are a nafrow cage.