Long before we could talk we had begun to attach meanings to the words, the
verbal sounds we heard. But we learned those meanings from a mother, a nurse
and perhaps sisters and brothers, not from a book. For the most part, we
discovered what certain words – sounds – were for, that is, not by being taught
them one by one, but from the frame in which they were set – looks and voices –
tender, laughing, scolding, anxious, intent, sorrowful... is there anything in life
to compare with these three achievements – learning as an infant to understand
words, learning to talk, learning to read? and to convert what we read into
images, thoughts, feelings and such a thing as a story?^19
And de la Mare felt that that experience of the emotional quality of
sound itself was not limited to children, but was always present if we had
ears to hear it. ‘[In] writing...ifweboth repeat and listen to the words of
which it is composed, two voices are audible and two meanings are
inherent – that of the verbal sounds and that of the verbal symbols’, he
declared in a lecture to the very grown-up British Academy.^20 The lecture
went on to explain the way mundane sentences such as ‘Is this the nine-
fifteen to London Bridge’ or ‘Dear Sir, I write re your demand for tax’
would leap out at him with alarmingly poetic force, because the inherent
rhythmic structure of the words had unexpectedly coalesced into metre.^21
Elsewhere he drew attention to the ‘oddly exotic cadence’ of everyday
phrases, such as ‘I-was-in-a’, and ‘like-the-one-we’.^22 Hence his children’s
verse returns to that first point of attachment between the two voices of
sound and emotional sense. Some of it seems to have been composed
partly for the sake of saying and hearing the names it includes, as when de
la Mare takes up dialect words because they sound more beautiful, such as
‘shoon’ as the plural of ‘shoe’ – only fairy shoes, however – to rhyme with
‘moon’ in ‘Silver’ and ‘The Ruin’, or the first couplet of ‘I can’t abear’:
I can’t abear a Butcher,
I can’t abide his meat.^23‘Abear’ is a nonce-word to chime with ‘a Butcher’ and ‘abide’. Other
verse seems designed to show off the sound quality of ordinary names, such
as the two lines of ‘The Wanderers’, which simply list the seven known
planets, or the eponymous heroes of ‘Chicken’, ‘Dorking, Spaniard,
Cochin China / Bantams sleek and small’. As in much children’s verse,
onomatopoeic verbs are common, with ‘sizzling’, ‘champing’, ‘ticking’,
‘buzz’, ‘clapping’, ‘tap’, ‘whistling’ and ‘snip’ in the first twenty poems of
Peacock Piealone. However, this concentration on sound makes the
reader aware of the onomatopoeic qualities of other words within the
same poem, as in ‘The Barber’s’:
Walter de la Mare’s ideal reader 115