Bells and Grass

IN THE introduction to this volume of poems for children, Walter do la Mare tells us that he discovered many of them in an old commonplace book which had been forgotten for thirty-five years. The re-reading of what his self of that time had written aroused that same self in him to write again in the same vein — for our past selves, he says, are not dead but sleeping, and the young vision can be relit in the hearts and senses of the old.

Certainly the voice that we hear in the poems is that of the sweetest singer of this century. The lyrics in this book, do not, of course, have the haunting overtones and subtle sound effects of his more elaborate work, but they sing themselves with an effortless grace and delicious lightness, whether they tell of the goldfinch,

A sip of water,
A twig to sing on,
A prong for nest,
The air to wing on,

A mate to love,
Some thistledown seed
Are all his joy, life,
Beauty, need.

or of

Old Ben Bailey
He’s been and done
For a small brown bunny
With his long gun.

One would like to quote dozens of them: songs of sunshine and singing birds, of moonlight and magic, of fishes and mice: tales of Somewhere and Shadowland, of the Witch of the Woods and the House of Dreams and the land that nobody knows: all full of that mixture of fantasy and precise realism and the unexpected in rhyme and rhythm which young hearts and ears of all ages from seven to seventy delight in. E. D.