Gossamer & Ghosts

THE FLEETING AND OTHER POEMS-- Walter de la Mare--Knopf ($2.50).

In an age of minor poets, as the present has been called, Walter de la Mare does not seem an alien. Whether or not some of his more famed contemporaries are first-rank poets or not, even his friends have never put him in a false position of greatness. His most popular books have been rhymes for children and fairytales; his best poetry has been both gossamer and ghostly. In this collection, his first book of verse in six years, readers will not find such little masterpieces of suggestion as "The Listeners" or "The Suicide." Poet de la Mare is 60, and it is easier for young poets to dream dreams than for old ones to see visions. Some of the magic has gone out of his voice, but his tones are still unmistakable.

In "The Feckless Dinner-Party," a gro- tesque parable of how a sophisticated group of diners were led astray by the butler ("Toomes") into the dark, silent cellars, the broken conversational lines may remind the reader of de la Mare's famed relation, Robert Browning, but the theme and its unraveling are very delaMare. "Thus Her Tale" tells of a suicide's ghost that still haunts her undiscovered bones, hidden in a thicket. In "The Owl," a baker's wife and daughter are shamed and frightened out of their wits and into their true selves by the silent gaze of a mysterious beggar. Poet de la Mare loves not only poetic language and tricks of speech, but poetic words as well: whist, clomb, darnelled. He writes swang instead of swung because he likes the sound.

Last poem in the book, "Dreams," is an attack on psychoanalysts and all who would search the title to imagination-- those who

. . . deem the wellspring of genius hid

In a dark morass that is dubbed the Id.

and a stout profession of de la Mare's poetic faith:

And Conscience less my mind indicts

For idle days than dreamless nights.

The Author. Few apprenticeships to the Muse have been served in less promising quarters than Walter John de la Mare's. When he had twitched off the cassock of St. Paul's Cathedral Choir School he went to a high stool in the London office of Anglo-American Oil Co., spent 18 years there ploughing barren columns of figures. To overcome his environment and catch his Muse's eye, young de la Mare let his black hair grow long and wavy, attired himself according to his idea of the Latin Quarter. And while he kept others' books he wrote three of his own: Songs of Childhood (under a pseudonym, "Walter Ramal"), Poems (1906). Henry Brocken, his first novel. Scholarly Herbert Asquith being Prime Minister, Bookkeeper de la Mare was placed on the Civil List for a pension of -L-100 a year. Though he has often had to make the pot boil in various ways he never went back to an office. Hard worker, he has published more than 25 books. Broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced, unaffected, Walter de la Mare looks less like a poet than most poets, more like a sea-captain. Unclubbable, retiring, he lives in London's suburbs with his wife and four children, when he goes to the city likes to eat a hearty English lunch at such an ungossamer, unghostly chophouse as Simpson's on the Strand.

Other books: (prose) The Three Mulla-Mulgars, The Return, Memoirs of a Midget; (poetry) Collected Poems, The Veil and Other Poems, Come Hither (anthology).

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