speaking his own foreign language, like thinking as a child again, like
reading a poem. For the uncanny predicament of understanding that the
poem puts us into is, to an extent, one that literature itself puts all its
readers in. Once, asked what it meant, de la Mare replied:
Every poem, of course, to its last syllable is its meaning; to attempt any
paraphrase of the poem is in some degree to change that meaning and its effect
on the imagination... whereas a scrap of science is for the time being a self-
contained announcement of what is an ascertained fact, universally provable by
those intelligent enough to comprehend it. You can’t prove a poem: it proves
you.^45
128 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism