Nothing could be more conventional than smelling the flowers of the
field, and the archaic title seems to belong to another century, but de la
Mare turns the very worn-outness of ‘sweet’ and ‘hath’ into a delicate
balance of menace and pathos. Hawthorn blossom is traditionally not
allowed in the house because its sweetness resembles the odour of
decaying flesh, and hence in the poem the sweet scent is ‘wreathed’
around the branch like smoke, and like a funeral tribute. By combining
the sibilance of ‘sweet’ with ‘smell’, ‘silver’ and ‘incense’, and threading
‘hath’ into ‘hawthorn’ and ‘deathly’, de la Mare also breathes a quiet,
threatening hiss through the poem, like a gas-jet left on. And as the poem
winds on, the deadly smell of hawthorn becomes a ‘memory’ of what is to
come, as if the scent were a reminder of a future which in some sense one
already knows too well. Past and future blur, so that the thought of a
death which is already here makes the old-fashionedness of the vocabulary
quite sinister. It is this peculiar ability to transform the most intimate and
familiar matter into something disturbing – disturbing precisely because it
is already familiar – that is central to de la Mare’s work, just as he found in
the child’s nursery rhymes an experience of loss and vacancy, and it was
what Eliot himself admired in de la Mare, in his tribute poem:
When the familiar scene is suddenly strange
Or the well known is what we have yet to learn
And two worlds meet, and intersect and change.
(‘To Walter de la Mare’)
The difficulty with using the nursery rhyme as an ideal, however, is that
there is simply no way for an individual author to reproduce the lengthy,
anonymous processes of their formation. Eliot’s artist can procure know-
ledge of the Tradition and let it percolate into his sensibility, but de la
MarecouldonlywishhewereMrAnon.WhatdelaMarehadfoundin
the nursery rhymes were poems whose sounds seemed to come into
being in and through people; what he could reproduce in his own verse
instead was the reading context of the nursery rhyme, namely, the
situationofthechildlearningtouselanguage,whocannotdrownthose
sounds in a sophisticated comprehension of the meaning, as experienced
and prose-hardened readers will. It is reading as a child that enables the
adult to re-experience the poem’s sounds at work, and him- or herself as
their conduit; indeed, it is becausehis genres and vocabulary are so
familiar that de la Mare can distract the adult reader’s attention towards
the poem’s aural texture. And yet hearing the sounds of words as one
used to is also what makes them unfamiliar, for to read as a child is also
Walter de la Mare’s ideal reader 113