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(Reproduced with permission - this work may not be reproduced without permission from David Higham Associates.)

In thinking of Walter de la Mare the first thing we remember is always his quality of dream. There is about his work an atmosphere—not so much of sleep, as of half-sleep—a twilight that exists between sundown and night, between dawn and day.

“Escapism” some have called it; but is that true? Is it not rather, as he says in the poem “Dreams”:

Two worlds have we: without; within.  

There is the external daylight world of fact and time, which can be seen, touched, heard, measured and analysed. And there is an inner world apprehendable by some faculty other than the senses or the reason—Blake’s “eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.” Civilisation today recognises the first, but our surface consciousness has become too active for us to see the glimmering world beneath. We call the man who accepts the outer world a realist; the man who accepts the inner world an escapist. Yet is not the realist himself an escapist, always trying to elude the other life which, however he may deny it, still exists within?  

Walter de la Mare denies neither world. Occupying a midway region, he shows us—usually by implication, for he seldom moralises—that the two may be reconciled. We are citizens of both worlds, he says in effect, if only we will claim our rights. It is possible to believe in the heart and spirit without mortifying the flesh or abusing the conscious mind. It is possible to experience all the pain, beauty, transcience of ordinary existence while holding the truth of another timeless life. In fact it is only as we observe the outer world with eyes that have looked on the inner, and judge the temporal by the values of the eternal, that we can see it in true perspective.

Two worlds have we: without; within;
But all that sense can mete and span,
Until it confirmation win
From heart and soul, is death to man.

These lines summarise the times we live in. Our criteria today are fear, reason, money, power, speed, expedience. We cannot wait for the confirmation of heart and soul. The solution offered to this problem by de la Mare—again by implication—is that only in childhood and in dream does modern civilisation provide a meeting-ground for heart and head. To hold both worlds in balance, we have to recapture the imagination of the dreamer and the alertness of the child. We must dream; but dream, as a child does, with eyes wide open.

That is what de la Mare himself has done. No one writing today has a keener, shrewder eye for the natural world. But with him, as with a child, its familiarity has never bred contempt. The world is Eden-new. Everything in it retains its freshness and wonder. A comet flaming across the night is marvellous,

Yet what is common as lovely may be:
The petalled daisy, a honey bell,
A pebble, a branch of moss, a gem
Of dew, or fallen rain—if we
A moment in their beauty dwell;
Entranced, alone, see only them. 

And knowing another world where space does not exist, the poet is not deceived by illusions of size. In imagination’s eye, the largest object and the smallest—Leviathan and the honey-fly—are of equal worth. Not only the hills are beautiful but

The speck of stone
Which the wayfaring ant
Stirs—and hastes on.

Somehow that word “wayfaring” endows the ant’s movements with value and purpose.  

It is this microscopic adjustment of vision which gives his verse on animals and insects its peculiar tenderness. With a fly, we see

A rosebud like a feather bed,
Its prickle like a spear.

With the rabbit we hear the

         . . .stamp, stamp, stamp
Through dim labyrinths clear—
The whole world darkened:
A Human near!

And a mother-mouse, crouching in her nest “with tiny eye in fear upcast” as the owl flies over, takes on for a moment the significance of a human mother in an air-raid shelter.  

De la Mare has sometimes been criticised for never attempting some great work like a play or an epic. We might as well complain of Chopin for not composing a symphony. In the world of art, as in the world of nature, size is less important than quality. And it is this poet’s extraordinary power of seeing the universal in the particular, and expressing it in so perfect a form, that has given his work its greatness. It has its limitations, which he has recognised. But within those limits how incomparable!  

No poet since Campion has been so exquisite a craftsman. None has possessed a surer ear for rhythm, or blended so subtly with speech the phrasing and cadences of music. In technique, as in wisdom, he has much to teach us—especially those who write or read words with only the prosaic, logical, scientific stratum of the brain:

O Poesy, of wellspring clear,
Let no sad Science thee suborn,
Who art thyself its planisphere!
All knowledge is foredoomed, forlorn—
Of inmost truth and wisdom shorn—
Unless imagination brings
Its skies wherein to use its wings.

Two worlds have we: without; within;
But all that sense can mete and span,
Until it confirmation win
From heart and soul, is death to man.
Of grace divine his life began;
And—Eden empty proved—in deep
Communion with his spirit in sleep

The Lord Jehovah of a dream
Bade him, past all desire, conceive
What should his solitude redeem:
And, to his sunlit eyes, brought Eve.
Would that my day-wide mind could weave
Faint concept of the scene from whence
She awoke to Eden’s innocence!

Starven with cares, like tares in wheat
Wildered with knowledge, chilled with doubt,
The timeless self in vain must beat
Against its walls to hasten out
Whither the living waters fount;
And—evil and good no more at strife—
Seek love beneath the tree of life.

When then in memory I look back
To childhood’s visioned hours I see
What now my anxious soul doth lack
Is energy in peace to be
At one with nature’s mystery:
And Conscience less my mind indicts
For idle days than dreamless nights.

~  (I) From Collected Poems, (Faber & Faber), with the author’s permission.