Songs of Childhood.

by Walter de la Mare.

_Preface_

The Romantic poets rediscovered a pastoral and Biblical dream: that a child was the most innocent and the wisest of us all. Wordsworth hailed him as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" And in the next generation Victorian novelists took that dream seriously enough to make children the heroes and heroines of their most searching fictions. There had been no "children's literature" to speak of before, except for the oral and "popular" tradition, including lullabies and _Mother Goose_, some of which go back as far as Tudor and even medieval times.

Children's literature today is an immense and complex domain; and leaving aside for the present the works composed by children themselves, what remains varies tremendously in skill and delight, as well as in subtlety and intention. So I shall also set aside those minimal "vocabulary-building" tales and verses whose small virtues are rarely more than therapeutic, and direct myself only to that specialized but most important category--poems written by a skilled and adult poet but addressed to an audience of children who are likely to be read to until they are skillful enough to read the same verses for themselves.

The dangers for the poet in addressing so composite an audience are enormous: cuteness, coyness, archness and condescension are only the most obvious ones. Some great writers of children's verse--Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear--have successfully hedged themselves against these dangers by insistent comedy and parody (Carroll's "serious"

children's verse is maudlin and embarra.s.sing). By this means they have contrived what the child will take as lovely, unintimidating, mysterious, rational nonsense, and what the adult will recognize as a travesty or burlesque of something very edgy indeed. Thus, Lear's "The Dong with the Luminous Nose" and Carroll's "Jabberwocky" are, respectively, bright and disguised versions of gothic terror and misery on the one hand, and medieval knightly exploit on the other, both rendered innocuous for the nursery and ridiculous for the adult.

The risks of seriousness have been successfully avoided.

The poetry of Walter de la Mare sings boldly and beautifully without any of these hedges and condescensions. His work has the honest candor of the border ballads and the fairy tales: as well as unmitigated joys, they are full of the dangers and horrors and sorrows that every child soon knows to be part of the world, however vainly parents try to veil them. A child's curiosity about the forbidden will insist on being satisfied; and better by verse than otherwise. This poetry is also musically astute and demanding; it may surprise and alert the parental reader; and it has its share of archaisms and poeticisms, which, contrary to adult surmise, bemuse and fascinate children. And it must be admitted that it is also relentlessly British; but then, so is much good children's literature.

As a poet (he was also a gifted novelist and short-story writer) de la Mare was praised by T. S. Eliot ("the delicate, invisible web you wove") and by W. H. Auden ("there are no good poems which are only for children"). His technical and linguistic skills are not, as Auden rightly points out, a matter of indifference to children, who are in the very business of learning language, as well as other facts of life, and who are particularly sensitive to verbal rhythms, as Iona and Peter Opie have splendidly demonstrated in _The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren_.

Just as important, this is a poetry of charms and spells, witches and dwarfs, ogres and fairies, full of dangers, omens, riddles and triumphs. In "The Ogre," for example, two sleeping children are about to be plucked by an enormous ogre from their home:

Into their dreams no shadow fell Of his disastrous thumb Groping discreet, and gradual, Across the quiet room.

But he is stopped, spellbound, abashed and defeated by the mother of the children, who is in another room and, all unaware of the danger, is singing a version of the Coventry Carol (which, in its original, is addressed to the Christ Child) as a lullaby to her new-born baby.

I would guess that any child fortunate enough to grow up with these poems ringing in memory's ear might have a remarkable reservoir of music and excitement available to him. That is not a small gift.

Anthony Hecht

_ANTHONY HECHT teaches in the English Department of the University of Rochester. He is the author of several books of poetry, of which the most recent are_ The Hard Hours _(1967) and_ Aesopic _(1968). His poems appear in many anthologies and he has contributed to the_ Hudson Review, _the_ New York Review of Books, Quarterly Review of Literature, _and other periodicals. He also translated (with Helen H. Bacon) Aeschylus'_ Seven Against Thebes _(1973)._

THE GNOMIES

As I lay awake in the white moonlight, I heard a sweet singing in the wood-- 'Out of bed, Sleepyhead, Put your white foot now, Here are we, 'Neath the tree, Singing round the root now!'

I looked out of window in the white moonlight, The trees were like snow in the wood-- 'Come away Child and play, Light wi' the gnomies; In a mound, Green and round, That's where their home is!

'Honey sweet, Curds to eat, Cream and frumenty, Sh.e.l.ls and beads, Poppy seeds, You shall have plenty.'

But soon as I stooped in the dim moonlight To put on my stocking and my shoe, The sweet, sweet singing died sadly away, And the light of the morning peep'd through: Then instead of the gnomies there came a red robin To sing of the b.u.t.tercups and dew.

BLUEBELLS

Where the bluebells and the wind are, Fairies in a ring I spied, And I heard a little linnet Singing near beside.

Where the primrose and the dew are, Soon were sped the fairies all: Only now the green turf freshens, And the linnets call.

LOVELOCKS

I watched the Lady Caroline Bind up her dark and beauteous hair; Her face was rosy in the gla.s.s, And 'twixt the coils her hands would pa.s.s, White in the candleshine.

Her bottles on the table lay, Stoppered yet sweet of violet; Her image in the mirror stooped To view those locks as lightly looped As cherry-boughs in May.

The snowy night lay dim without, I heard the Waits their sweet song sing; The window smouldered keen with frost; Yet still she twisted, sleeked and tossed Her beauteous hair about.

O DEAR ME!

Here are crocuses, white, gold, grey!

'O dear me!' says Marjorie May; Flat as a platter the blackberry blows: 'O dear me!' says Madeleine Rose; The leaves are fallen, the swallows flown: 'O dear me!' says Humphrey John; Snow lies thick where all night it fell: 'O dear me!' says Emmanuel.

TARTARY

If I were Lord of Tartary, Myself and me alone, My bed should be of ivory, Of beaten gold my throne; And in my court should peac.o.c.ks flaunt, And in my forests tigers haunt, And in my pools great fishes slant Their fins athwart the sun.

If I were Lord of Tartary, Trumpeters every day To all my meals should summon me, And in my courtyards bray; And in the evenings lamps should shine, Yellow as honey, red as wine, While harp, and flute, and mandoline, Made music sweet and gay.

If I were Lord of Tartary, I'd wear a robe of beads, White, and gold, and green they'd be-- And small, and thick as seeds; And ere should wane the morning-star, I'd don my robe and scimitar, And zebras seven should draw my car Through Tartary's dark glades.

Lord of the fruits of Tartary, Her rivers silver-pale!

Lord of the hills of Tartary, Glen, thicket, wood, and dale!

Her flashing stars, her scented breeze, Her trembling lakes, like foamless seas, Her bird-delighting citron-trees In every purple vale!

THE BUCKLE

I had a silver buckle, I sewed it on my shoe, And 'neath a sprig of mistletoe I danced the evening through!