The Poet in Solitude

Between the nineteen-hundreds and now, there have been huge changes in life and literary thought. Even the rock under the shade of which a poet must pitch his tent, the knowledge of good and evil, seems at times to have shifted on its base. Where there are great changes two kinds of poets can best survive them – the brilliant improviser and the inveterate stoic. I suggest that Walter de la Mare, unlike most of his contemporaries, is the second kind of poet. The grief of knowledge and the knowledge of grief, expressed in the most sensuous and melodious language, has been his constant theme. His poetry is, under the draperies, a modern Book of Ecclesiastes. Those who love de la Mare’s poems, the school teachers and the pastoral sympathisers, will disagree with this judgment. The images of ice and fire, sunset rooms and haunted groves, appeal to them as the legitimate special province of poetry. Rather these images reflect de la Mare’s acutely honest charting of the unspoken fears of Everyman, fears of moral evil and spiritual isolation:

Nectarous those flowers, yet with venom sweet,
Thick-juiced with poison hang those fruits that shine
Where thick phantasmal moonbeams brood and beat,
And dark imaginations ripe the vine,
Bethink thee: every enticing league thou wend
Beyond the mark where life its bound hath set
Will lead thee at length where human pathways end
And the dark enemy spreads his maddening net.

It is a solitary view of experience, in which the poisonous Tree of Life tempts and betrays; countered only in de la Mare’s poetry by a real but over- spiritual Puritan Christianity. The child’s world also (from which he draws his hallucinatory imagery) is besieged by premonitions of evil, the poet himself being represented as a child who has somehow escaped the breaching violence of puberty, sealed in his sunset room of imagination, yet menaced like the child by the fangs and claws of darkness. There is serenity in de la Mare’s later work; but unlike Dylan Thomas, a poet whose vision of life is similarly obsessive andpage 233 grounded in childhood, he has never come to speak of the ‘good dark.’ These matters are perhaps irrelevant to the evaluation of his poetic stature, which is indeed considerable. The volume presents an adequate selection of his work.

1955 (111)