'Let Us Do Away With Elegiac Drivel!'

Call it coincidence, if you must. It’s certainly not a theme I was looking for. Formerly a guilty pleasure, Walter de la Mare now is a pleasure without qualification. I’ve shed my sophistication and surrendered to his voice. On Friday, in a borrowed library copy of Poems (1906), a title – “Autumn” -- caught my eye. I wasn’t expecting verse about the death of a child or, perhaps, childhood:

 

“There is wind where the rose was;

Cold rain where sweet grass was;

And clouds like sheep

Stream o'er the steep

Grey skies where the lark was.

 

“Nought gold where your hair was;

Nought warm where your hand was;

But phantom, forlorn,

Beneath the thorn,

Your ghost where your face was.

 

“Sad winds where your voice was;

Tears, tears where my heart was;

And ever with me,

Child, ever with me,

Silence where hope was.”

 

De la Mare is often pigeonholed as a writer of verse for children, and he was – but much more. Inevitably I was reminded of a former newspaper colleague and his wife. Their infant son died on Father’s Day more than thirty years ago. I’ve never attended so sad a ceremony. It moved me to reread Peter Dr Vries’ greatest novel, The Blood of the Lamb (1961).

 

On the same day I was reading de la Mare, I read X.J. Kennedy’s first collection, Nude Descending a Staircase (1961), yet again. I remembered “Little Elegy,” with the dedication “for a child who skipped rope”:

 

“Here lies resting, out of breath,

Out of turns, Elizabeth

Whose quicksilver toes not quite

Cleared the whirring edge of night.

 

“Earth whose circles round us skim

Till they catch the lightest limb,

Shelter now Elizabeth

And for her sake trip up Death.”

 

But I had forgotten “On a Child Who Lived One Minute”:

 

“Into a world where children shriek like suns

sundered from other suns on their arrival,

she stared, and saw the waiting shape of evil,

but could not take its meaning in at once,

so fresh her understanding and so fragile.

 

“Her first breath drew a fragrance from the air

and put it back. However hard her agile

heart danced, however full the surgeon’s satchel

of healing stuff, a blackness tiptoed in her

and snuffed the only candle of her castle.

 

“Oh, let us do away with elegiac

drivel! Who can restore a thing so brittle,

so new in any jingle? Still I marvel

that, making light of mountainloads of logic,

so much could stay a moment in so little.