'The Delicate, Invisible Web You Wove'

Who wrote this about whose poetry?: 

“For here the water buffalo may rove,

The kinkajou, the mungabey, abound

In the dark jungle of a mango grove . . .”

 

I might have guessed Kipling or some forgotten Georgian poet. Perhaps it’s a verse omitted by Eliot from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). Exotic animals: a mungabey, a West African monkey, and kinkajous, those impossibly cute, tree-dwelling mammals native to Latin America. These lines, near-light verse or verse for children, follow:

 

“. . . And shadowy lemurs glide from tree to tree --

The guardians of some long-lost treasure-trove)

Recount their exploits at the nursery tea

 

“And when the lamps are lit and curtains drawn

Demand some poetry, please. Whose shall it be,

At not quite time for bed?”

 

The author of “To Walter de la Mare” is T.S. Eliot. It was his contribution to Tribute to Walter De La Mare on His Seventy-fifth Birthday, published by Faber in 1948. Eliot’s echoes of de la Mare’s style and subject matter are obvious. Not quite a pastiche, the poem suggests de la Mare’s dreaminess and whimsy. Is it for children or adults? That’s a question we often ask about de la Mare’s poems – and some of Eliot’s, who had largely stopped writing poetry by the end of the nineteen-forties. Eliot was childless but seems to empathize with them and the poet he is honoring, without condescension. Here is de la Mare in a brief essay, “Children and Childhood,” published in the September 20, 1930 issue of The Saturday Review:

 

“Though it doesn’t appear to be usually taken into account, it is certain that children, both in mind and imagination, however little it may be apparent, are likely to be more different from one another even than men and women are different from one another. What is no less certain, or what seems no less likely, is that in certain respects children are even less different from full-sized human beings than they are generally supposed to be. They take the world —and themselves—at least as seriously. They realize their oughts no less sharply than their crosses; and this even though they are midgets in a land of giants who have forgotten much of their language and whose right is often founded solely on force majeure.”

 

At the poem’s conclusion, Eliot asks who to call when it’s story hour? Who will permit “Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?” He answers, addressing de la Mare directly:

 

“By whom, and by what means, was this designed?

The whispered incantation which allows

Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?

 

“By you; by those deceptive cadences

Wherewith the common measure is refined;

By conscious art practised with natural ease;

 

“By the delicate, invisible web you wove -

The inexplicable mystery of sound.”