His round cheek wans
In the candlelight [.. .]This intimation by sound-quality is equally important to his ‘adult’
verse, too, as in ‘The Mountains’, whose iterated sibilants in ‘still’, ‘icy’,
‘frosty ulys’ and hard ‘c’ in ‘cold’, ‘sculptured’ and ‘secrecy’ mimic the
effect of the scraping and cutting of the ice-sculptor’s chisel:
Still and blanched and cold and lone
The icy hills far off from me
With frosty ulys overgrown
Stand in their sculptured secrecy.No path of theirs the chamois fleet
Treads, with a nostril to the wind;
O’er their ice-marbled glaciers beat
No wings of eagles in my mind.
The poem’s rhythm also suggests what it says, as the comma and
dropped stress after the double force of ‘fleet / Treads’ makes the reader
accentuate them, as if nimbly but carefully picking a way over the words
like the chamois on the rocks. As if to compensate, the ‘ice-marbled
glaciers’ have an awkward transition between ‘d’ and ‘gl’ and one too
many stresses to keep a regular rhythm, forcing the reader to slide
hurriedly over the sounds as if slipping and scrambling over an icy glacier.
Such intimations hover on the edge of our everyday, adult experience
of reading, but de la Mare felt that the sounds of poetry could bring them
back, for in them a moment of our own childhood turns out to be still
present:
What laws of phonology and of harmony regulate these sequences [of poetic
sound] may not yet have been discovered. We become acquainted with these
laws in the nursery, with Rattle blue beads in a blue bottle... also with the
schoolboy counting out formula Eena deena deina duss... or to take a more
sublime example... ‘Full fathom five’.^25
Hence poetry is less a return to childhood than a realisation that
childhood is always here, as the nursery rhyme can ‘spirit us back, not
into the irrevocable past, but into the ever-present, ever new, and limitless
realm of childhood’.^26 By including Shakespeare in his list, of course, de
la Mare’s point extends beyond the nursery: through its formal patterning
of words, all poetry to some extent marks sound (and silence) as constitu-
ent elements; it is the very possibility of the disjunction of sound from
sense that marks the possibility of line-endings, and consequently of a
Walter de la Mare’s ideal reader 117