'One Passionate Note of Victory'

“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:

 

 “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.”