“The dangers for the poet in addressing so composite an audience are enormous: cuteness, coyness, archness and condescension are only the most obvious ones.”
In 1976, Anthony Hecht
wrote the preface for a new edition of Walter de la Mare’s Songs of
Childhood (1902). He doesn’t ghettoize de la Mare, children’s poetry, or
children, though young people are always ripe for condescension. Instead, Hecht
celebrates de la Mare’s ear, his musicality, noting children are “particularly
sensitive to verbal rhythms, as Iona and Peter Opie have splendidly
demonstrated in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren.” (The Opies’
volume is wonderful.) Take “The Mother Bird”:
“Through the green
twilight of a hedge
I peered, with cheek on
the cool leaves pressed,
And spied a bird upon a
nest:
Two eyes she had
beseeching me
Meekly and brave, and her
brown breast
Throbb'd hot and quick
above her heart;
And then she oped her
dagger bill,—
'Twas not a chirp, as
sparrows pipe
At break of day; 'twas not
a trill,
As falters through the
quiet even;
But one sharp solitary
note,
One desperate, fierce, and
vivid cry
Of valiant tears, and
hopeless joy,
One passionate note of
victory:
Off, like a fool afraid, I
sneaked,
Smiling the smile the fool
smiles best,
At the mother bird in the
secret hedge
Patient upon her lonely
nest.”
As a kid, I knew guys who delighted in killing small animals – snakes, any insect, earthworms, shrews and mice. In one case, cats. This was not hunting, merely savagery for its own sake. I’ve killed my share of mosquitoes and roaches, and as a kid I collected butterflies and moths. No more. This was no conscious moral decision on my part. I was responding to a sense of revulsion. The poem's speaker flees without harming the bird or her brood. The “one solitary note” is “one passionate note of victory” – a very de la Marean touch. “Off, like a fool afraid, I sneaked, / Smiling the smile the fool smiles best.” His reaction – and mine – suggest conscience can occasionally alter behavior for the better. Along with the charm of his music, de la Mare respects children enough to trust their moral capacity. Hecht writes:
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