british poetry in the age of modernism

to find oneself a stranger within one’s own language. It was the aural
cat’s-cradle of de la Mare’s verse that Eliot singled out in ‘To Walter de
la Mare’ as the source of its disturbing power:

By those deceptive cadences

Wherewith the common measure is refined;

By conscious art practised with natural ease;

By the delicate, invisible web you wove –

The inexplicable mystery of sound.

For a poet as precise as Eliot, ‘inexplicable mystery’ is something of a
tautology, yet in fractionally returning to linger over his puzzlement –
inexplicableanda mystery – he catches the very de la Marean moment of
hesitation, suspension or intuition that there is something going on
outside the reader’s definite awareness which has, again, just been missed.
The implication of ‘web’, though, is that having allowed oneself to
hesitate is to find oneself trapped. This situation of finding oneself
entangled within something, rather than independently free and outside
it, is basic to de la Mare’s verse and the way it wants to be read. It
underlies his love of the Nursery Rhyme, whose sound-texture evokes the
child-like state of absorption in and by language, and also his admiration
of its anonymous, un-original authors who are the subjects of poetic
language as well as its users. It is also at the heart of his explorations of
the uncanny, the intimation that one’s innermost self is already being
shaped by an intimately alien presence or force. And as such, it implies a
poetry for which the exteriority of formal sound-pattern will prove to be
entirely integral.

sound poetry

For de la Mare, an awareness of sound as sound or its relative, silence, is
for the adult the nearest approach to reading like the child learning
language. ‘We may be able in some degree to repeat the process through
whichallour vocabulary has gone from childhood onwards’, he sug-
gested, ‘if we open, say, a dictionary at random; in search this time not of
meanings, but merely of verbal sounds – their meanings as yet unknown to
us’.^18 His poetry does this, first of all, by its concentration on sound-
texture, making familiar words strange simply by requiring its adult
readers to hear them againas sounds, as de la Mare believed we all must
have as children.

114 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism