children think and feel, and so in 1915 Poetrymagazine published some
experimental ‘imagistic poems’ by the children of its editors, because it
felt their direct and uncompromised perspective might be well adapted to
the new form. EvenBlastshrieked its approval for the same reason:
IN THE SAME WAY THAT SAVAGES, ANIMALS AND CHILDREN
HAVE A ‘RIGHTNESS’, SO HAVE OBJECTS COORDINATED BY AN
UNCONSCIOUS LIFE AND USEFUL ACTIONS.^16
But de la Mare would remain unblessed byBlastbecause his work is the
opposite of the fresh, unconventional and unbiased. Like the nursery
rhymes he admired, everything in it is already familiar: its diction is archaic
and its imagery of castles, witches, flowers and graves plainly hand-me-
down Romanticism. It has no eye on the object, and its verse-form is
extraordinarily precise and regular. Anyone familiar with Romantic poetry
and especially Christina G. Rossetti has heard it all before. But for a writer
fascinated with the anonymous processes of nursery rhymes, having heard
it all before is an advantage, for if the best poetry becomes itself as it is
passed on, then author and reader alike will find themselves becoming the
‘shrine of ancient memories’. De la Mare uses an unoriginal vocabulary to
talk about the experience of dis-origination, in other words, and the way
that his vocabulary’s fadedness connotes both over-familiarity and a sense
of fading away makes this poem from his best-selling collection of 1912 ,
The Listeners, a representative of many others:
The flowers of the field
Have a sweet smell;
Meadowsweet, tansy, thyme,
And faint-heart pimpernel;
But sweeter even than these,
The silver of the may
Wreathed is with incense for
The Judgement Day.
An apple, a child, dust,
When falls the evening rain,
Wild brier’s spice`d leaves,
Breathe memories again;
With further memory fraught,
The silver of the may
Wreathed is with incense for
The Judgement Day.
(‘The Hawthorn Hath
a Deathly Smell’)^17112 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism