meaning different from prose, dependent on the semiotics of sound and
spacing as well as the semantics of the dictionary.^27 Yet de la Mare’s
implication is that we do not grow in understanding the laws of sound in
poetry from the nursery to Shakespeare: to read poetry as poetry – even
the most sophisticated poetry – is to find ourselves reading like the
child we thought we had left behind. As Auden remarked of de la
Mare, his poetry makes us experience language in the way that the child
does, something which is new in itself, not just an ‘instrument for
interpreting’.^28
Yet it remains a question as to how much we can ever know about this
experience: one can dispute the empirical claims of de la Mare’s account
of children reading, but there is a more philosophical issue at stake, as
indicated by the difficulties of Auden’s own argument at this point:
In all cultures, however, there is one constant difference between children and
adults, namely, that, for the former, learning their native tongue is itself one of
the most important experiences in their lives, while, for the latter, language has
become an instrument for interpreting and communicating experience; to
recapture the sense of language as experience, an adult has to visit a foreign
country.^29
But learning a new language is not the same as learning one’s first.
Learning a foreign language involves translating terms already known, but
the experience of learning one’s native tongue is not describable, or
perhaps even thinkable, until one has already begun to learn it, until
one is within it and can use it. As Adam Phillips remarks, learning a
language changes everything about the child’s self-understanding, for ‘it is
not simply one life in terms of another, because that other passionate life
had no terms’.^30 This sense of language as an all-involving experience –
one from which the experiencer cannot be detached – was what de la
Mare most valued in the young: ‘that quite young children, however, can
be completely illusioned, transported, immersed in conditions of mind
produced solely by words, cannot be questioned... it is probable even
that the emotion exceeds even that of the writer of the story involved’.^31
Such fascination made the child the ideal reader of all lyric poetry, for
without sophisticated comprehension of the sense, they can hear the
sound as meaning in itself:
Eleven words in inexplicable collusion: ‘Brightness falls from the air, Queens
have died young and fair.. .’ What do they mean, what is the secret implication
of them all? – that the imagination of man transcends reason, that in some far
solitary quiet his spirit may free itself from the reality which enslaves his senses,
that, so enthralled, it may speak in a beauty of rhythm and music beyond the
118 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism