mere significance of words... Here he is really and indeed telling out his heart
in a kind of trance that is life at its most intense.^32
Children interested de la Mare as a conduit to other realms, not as a
touchstone of the everyday. As a result his children’s verse is less about
representing children as they are – his children are never noisy or in a
gang, for example, and do very little other than read and dream – than it
is the objective correlative of a sort of ideal child-reading experience,
entranced precisely because children have much less sense of detached
self-awareness to fall back on. For grown-ups, though, this sort of de-
pendency requires a readjustment of normal priorities, as Ezra Pound
recognised in a sensitive and generous review:
If youtryto read De la Mare he simply declines to impress you. If you keep De la
Mare on your shelf until the proper time, a time when all books disgust you and
when you are feeling slightly pathetic, you may open him querulously. And
gradually, your over-modernised intellect being slightly in abeyance – if you are
favoured of the gods – it may dawn on your more intelligent self that Mr. De la
Mare is to be prized above many blustering egoists.^33
TheNew Freewoman’s forthcoming change of title makes that last word
even more significant. De la Mare’s children’s poetry deals with moments
when a normal sense of self-awareness and the critical faculties that go
with it are suspended, for drawing attention to sound is also, in part, a
measure of how far the poem has removed its (and its reader’s) attention
from everyday sense-making. In ‘The Dunce’, for example, the child left
dully alone in the corner can suddenly hear the minute sounds excluded
by daily living, the ‘buzz’ of a fly, the sound of the thrush outside, a clock
ticking; and in being so distracted, he is enabled to notice the absence of
sound itself in the sunlight’s ‘silent shine’. And the point of ‘Someone’ is
that its first line is never proven at all:
Some one came knocking
At my wee, small door;
Some one came knocking
I’m sure – sure – sure;
I listened, I opened,
I looked to left and right,
But nought there was a-stirring
In the still dark night.
Only the busy beetle
Tap-tapping in the wall,
Only from the forest
The screech-owl’s call,Walter de la Mare’s ideal reader 119