Pure Poetry
Walter de la Mare : Collected Poems. (Faber. 12s. 6c1.) IT is becoming to pay a small tribute to a real poet in the days when he is still living among us. Amid the clamour of voices seeking to make themselves heard, each perhaps honestly singing his own song—though some are but men of letters paying education's natural homage of imitation to values perceived and, at least partly, enjoyed —it is both a solace and a delight to hear one indubitable master whose reputation is due neither to accident nor circumstance. Mr. de la Mare has had for many years the recognition of the best of his younger and older contemporaries—the only recognition that matters ; but it is doubtful if his excellence has yet been fully recognised. In the limited space of a weekly review it is impossible even to attempt such a recognition, yet something must be said to draw attention to a body of work which will, I believe, place Mr. de la Mare among the English poets whose writings will endure with the language.
Collections of his poems issued in 1920 and again in 1934 are now out of print, but the present volume contains what was in them with what has been published separately since. Although Mr. de la Mare will still, we all hope, write mime, here is enough to enjoy and reflect upon at present, even when it does not contain any of his poems intended for children. These will be published in a separate volume later. Mr. de la Mare has been called an " Escapist " by those who, harassed hi immediate problems, seek from a poet a pre-occupation with, if not a panacea for, their own and society's ills. His themes are not merely of our time but of all time. To imagine that this poet, whose fine and brooding intellect pervades every word he writes, giving them colours and gleams from bound- less depths of understanding, is unaware of the problems that lesser writers flounder among like stranded fishes would be indeed a sign of desperate superficiality. But sup-Erficial judgements are the easiest, and we are too ready to suppose nowadays that by education every- body has the key to a great writer. I would maintain that not since Coleridge has there been such an original and strange imagina- tion at work in English poetry. Let the reader turn to poems such as The Gallias, Reflections, The Snowdrop, Shadow, A Dream, The Phantom The Dark Chateau, The Stranger—I pick a few at random. Is there anything quite like these elsewhere in poetry old or modern? I think not
Every artist is haunted by the desire .to turn the material of his art into pure form. Very rarely indeed is this achieved. In music, Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven occasionally succeed, and this is the greatest music we have. Is it more difficult in poetry? It would almost seem so, for we have ideas, rational ideas, to contend with, and these obstacles at least the musician does not have; but Mr. de la Mare may be numbered among the small band who have at moments attained this summit, in such poems as The Fairy in Winter, Nod, The Moth, Gold, Vigil, The Unchanging and Bitter Waters. And what is transformed counts as well as the successful transformation ; there is still room for preference here but the poetic virtue of all these poems is incontestable. Another quality of this poetry is its music. I doubt whether in subtlety of rhythm and pure music there is in any poetry a greater excellence to be found than in Mr. de la Mare's apparently simple forms. He is essentially a lyric poet, but the perfection of The Tired Cupid, Queen Djenira and Never-to-be is that of a great lyric poet whose imagination surpasses that of the simple pastoral singer: Still and blanched am cold and lone The icy hills far off from me With frosty ulys overgrown Stand in their sculptured secrecy.
So stand the inspired songs of this solitary poet, who speaks to up not only of the world about us but of strange and scarcely imaginablo
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