Gold locks and black locks,
Red locks and brown,
Topknot to love-curl
The hair wisps down;
Straight above the clear eyes,
Rounded round the ears,
Snip-snap and snick-a-snick,
Clash the Barber’s shears.After ‘snip-snap and snick-a-snick’, it is impossible not to hear the
metallic scything of the blades in ‘clash’ and ‘shears’, or the way de la
Mare’s nonce-verb ‘wisps’ mimics the tiny currents of air visible when hair
floats and twists down to the floor. This acute aural awareness is particu-
larly appropriate to the barber’s, since the scissors come so uncomfortably
close to a boy’s ear during a haircut, but he can only look forward into the
mirror and listen to their small scrapings behind him. And so with
sharpened ears, adult readers may also begin to hear onomatopoeias in
words that, as grown-ups, they would skip over, such as ‘moaned’,
‘snored’, ‘nibble and sip’ and ‘flap’ (all also in the first section of Peacock
Pie). ‘Can touch be suggested by sound, velvet, slimy, pricking, gash – are
they, as we say, good words for what they mean?’ asked de la Mare in a
1920 version of the ‘Craftsmanship’ lecture entitled ‘Poetic Technique’.^24
‘Cake and Sack’ certainly are:
Old King Caraway
Supped on cake,
And a cup of sack
His thirst to slake;
Bird in arras
And hound in hall
Watched very softly
Or not at all.Making the sequence of ‘k’ sounds at the end of ‘cake’, ‘sack’ and ‘slake’
recalls the stickiness of tongue and back palate after a mouthful of cake;
the same muscular contractions at the back of the mouth are repeated to
reverse effect in ‘Poor Henry’ when the ‘k’ sounds sympathise with
Henry’s choking and gagging at the smell of his medicine:
Thick in its glass
The physic stands,
Poor Henry lifts
Distracted hands;116 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism