POETS AND POETRY.

COLLECTIONS OF MR. DE LA MARE'S POEMS.* MOST readers will feel in looking through these collections of Mr. de la Mare's work that nobody since Shakespeare and Cole- ridge has written quite suoh good magic poetry. There are, of course, as many different kinds of magic poetry as there are of elves, fairies, witches, hob-goblins, ogres, and spells. Mr. Robert Graves' magic, for instance, is as a rule rustic, personal, intimate : its genius a kind of chawbacon Puck. Coleridge's was lofty, almost architectural :-

" So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers was girded round : And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossom'd many an incense-bearing tree.. ."

Shakespeare had nearly all the several sorts of magic at his command. He could write tersely of his witches, " They made themselves air, into which they vanished "—a skin-creeping sentence if ever there was one—or the extreme Georgianism of " Come unto these yellow sands," or " When that I was but a little tiny boy."

By the by, we commend the study of these two poems to Mr. Alfred Noyes and the conservatives who complain that the Georgians are too fantastic, too wild. Mr. de la Mare's magic is usually of the sort that we should class with Ariel's " Sea Dirge " :—

" Nothing of him that doth fade, But bath suffered a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell : Hark 1 now I hear them—ding-dong bell."

The reader may open these two volumes of verse almost anywhere and find poems of this sort of calibre :- " Not a wave breaks,

Not a bird calls, My heart, like a sea, Silent after a storm that hath died, Sleeps within me.

All the night's dews, All the world's leaves, All winter's snow Seem with their quiet to have stilled in life's dream All sorrowing now."

A good many people—the present writer confesses to have been at one time among them—find Mr. de la Mare's verse a little unsatisfying, a little airy, limpid, and inhuman. But somehow now so many pieces are collected together, the short poems seem to reinforce one another and they create a remarkable atmo- sphere with their subtle cadences, the niceties of their rhythm and the extraordinary propriety of their vocabulary. The poems are like silk threads which are individually fragile, but which, woven together, make a fabric of unmatched fineness and strength, and are capable of taking on the softest, clearest colours. Some of the poems for children are exceedingly suc- cessful. His understanding of the child's imagination is extra- ordinarily sure—as sure as his delicious humour in such poems as " Mrs. Grundy," which could as little have been written by anybody else as the more characteristic and most subtly beau- tiful " The Sunken Garden," a poem which we cannot forgo

quoting in its entirety :— " Speak not—whisper not ; Here bloweth thyme and bergamot ;

Softly on the evening hour, Secret herbs their spices shower, Dark-spiked rosemary and myrrh, Lean-stalked, purple lavender ; Hides within her bosom, too, All her sorrows, bitter rue.

Breathe not—trespass not ; Of this green and darkling spot, Latticed from the moon's beams,

Perchance a distant dreamer dreams ;

• (1) Poems. 1901-1918. By Walter de bs Mare. Two vols. London: Constable. 127e. lid. net.)--(2) A Child' Day. Same author and pub- lisher. 178.1—(3) Peacock Pie. Same author and publisher. Llnstrated by

bit. W. Heath Robinson. (128.] Perchance upon its darkening air, The unseen ghosts of children fare, Faintly swinging, sway and sweep, Like lovely sea-flowers in the deep ; While, unmoved, to watch and ward, Amid its gloomed and daisied award, Stands with bowed and dewy head That one little leaden Lad."

" Collected Poems " have an ugly sound of finality. We trust that Mr. de la Mare moans no harm by his two volumes.