Hoots—angel-wise—“the Cause”!
And affrights even fear.
There is something in these lines that reminds one of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s black-edged indictment of life.
As we read Mr. de la Mare, indeed, we are reminded again and again of the work of many other poets—of the ballad-writers, the Elizabethan song-writers, Blake and Wordsworth, Mr. Hardy and Mr. W.B. Yeats. In some instances it is as though Mr. de la Mare had deliberately set himself to compose a musical variation on the same theme as one of the older masters. Thus, April Moon, which contains the charming verse—
“The little moon that April brings,
More lovely shade than light,
That, setting, silvers lonely hills
Upon the verge of night”—
is merely Wordsworth’s “She dwelt among the untrodden ways” turned into new music. New music, we should say, is Mr. de la Mare’s chief gift to literature—a music not regular or precise or certain, but none the less a music in which weak rhymes and even weak phrases are jangled into a strange beauty, as in Alexander, which begins:
It was the Great Alexander,