Songs of Childhood

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Title: Songs of Childhood
Author: Walter de la Mare
Commentator: Anthony Hecht
Release Date: November 19, 2007 [EBook #23545]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SONGS OF
CHILDHOOD ***
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Songs of Childhood
by Walter Ramal
[Walter de la Mare]
_with a preface for the Garland edition by_
Anthony Hecht
_Garland Publishing, Inc., New York & London_
1976

Bibliographical note:
This facsimile has been made from a copy in the Beinecke Library of
Yale University. (Iq.D373.902)
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data De La Mare,
Walter John, 1873-1956. Songs of childhood.
(Classics of children's literature, 1621-1932)
Reprint of the 1902 ed. published by Longmans, Green, London, New
York.
"Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), bibliography of his books for
children": p.
SUMMARY: A collection of forty-seven poems about subjects and
experiences familiar to children.
[1. English poetry] I. Title. II. Series.
[PR6007.E3S6 1976] 821'.9'12
75-32200
ISBN 0-8240-2310-2
_Printed in the United States of America_
_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 embarrassing). 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