'Books gone, the Terror Were of Brute and Dunce'

“Shakespeare a crumbling clot of wisdom left / In old men’s cranies of all else bereft.” 

It feels that way sometimes. Every fat man with ready patter? Falstaff. Every snotty grad student? Hamlet. A naively idealistic young woman? Miranda. We watched a crime movie last week in which the camera lingered on a woman studying her bloody hands. Of course: Lady Macbeth. After a recent series of academic talks I was obligated to endure, what came to mind? “Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.”

 

The poem quoted is Walter de la Mare’s “Books,” published in the July 1906 issue of The Bookman. What are cranies? A poeticizing of “crania” – heads, brains. At a certain age you start to understand and even prize the importance of what remains after decades in your skull. Pope distilled the risk: “The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, / With loads of learned lumber in his head.” But the world is a more entertaining place with a headful of poetry and prose. De la Mare again:

 

“Heroes, saints, martyrs—O, what dust would lie

On their lean bones sole-shrined in memory!

Nay, this bright Universe, dust, seas, and suns,

Books gone, the terror were of brute and dunce . . .”

 

De la Mare (1873-1956) was among the first poets I read as a kid. Much of his verse is Janus-headed. You can’t tell if it faces backward or forward, is written for children or grownups, kids or so-called sophisticates, and it doesn’t really matter. I sense de la Mare has not been cancelled but ignored into oblivion. One can think of few poets less attuned to our time and taste, which means we probably ought to pay attention to him. Do yourself a favor and read his novel Memoirs of a Midget (1921). Randall Jarrell has the last word on him:

 

“De la Mare is a hopeless romantic? Yes; but whose Law is it that a hopeless romantic cannot write good poetry? Reading de la Mare, one often has a sense of delicate and individual boredom, and wishes him a better writer than he is; but the man who would wish him a different writer would wish the Great Snowy Owl at the zoo a goose, so as to eat it for Christmas.”

 

In the March 22, 1919, issue of The Living Age, de la Mare published an essay, “Books and Reading.” He begins, as he often does, with a childhood memory – reading Gulliver’s Travels (in a “bowdlerized edition,” as many of them still are), for the first time, on Christmas morning. He calls it his “first rememberable book,” as it may have been mine. De la Mare isn’t milking nostalgia. He poses a serious question:

 

“It was, indeed, a crucial moment. What manner of man, he fondly speculates, would he have been to-day if he had remained, as he was born, illiterate?”