BOOKS OF THE MONTH
POETRY
FLORA. By Pamela Bianco. Verses by Walter de la Mare. Heinemann. 25s. net.
Miss Bianco is twelve years old—at least she was when these drawings were made. There is a sameness about them. Almost all of them contain a rather languishing female face, with something of a primitive Madonna about it and something (if we dare suggest it) of the sophisticated 'nineties. In the coloured and in the more elaborate of the black-and-white pictures the faces are framed in setting of conventional but charming flowers, with, as Tennyson would put it, here and there a rabbit. The drawings are unreservedly amazing for a girl of Miss Bianco's age; if her future progress were to be on a par with her present precocity she would become one of the greatest artists in the world. We cannot assume that; nor, on the other hand, need we rummage in our notebooks for ancient generalisations about the fate of ancient prodigies. Miss Bianco is remarkable now; and she will be what she will be. If we were predicting we should say that she would become a very skilful and charming decorator, a more complicated Kate Greenaway.
She has at least performed one great feat already: she has provided little platforms from which Mr. de la Mare's Pegasus has sprung into the æther. We can imagine nothing which could more finally illustrate how small suggestions may germinate in a poet's mind than the verses which Mr. de la Mare has written to these so slight, so purely decorative pictures. His imagination has been coloured and excited by every smallest hint of a mood; and where, to the passing observant eye, Miss Bianco has left nothing more to be said to the little she has stated herself, anything, a droop of the eyelids, an indicated detail in the background, serves to send Mr. de la Mare off dreaming into remote fairylands. Behind one of Miss Bianco's damsels, slit-eyed and straight-fingered, is a path leading to a small crude building. The wind bloweth where it listeth. On this small thing, missing girl and child and leafy tree, Mr. de la Mare's eye has rested. The outlines have filled in, atmosphere has trembled in, sounds and lights; and the outcome is something of which Miss Bianco never dreamed:
Is it an abbey that I see
Hard by that tapering poplar-tree,
Whereat that path hath end?
'Tis wondrous still
That empty hill,
Yet calls me, friend.
Smooth is the turf, serene the sky,
The timeworn, crumbling roof awry;
Within that turret slim
Hangs there a bell
Whose faint notes knell?
Do colours dim
Burn in that angled window there,
Grass-green, and crimson, azure rare?
Would from that narrow door
One, looking in,
See, gemlike, shine
On walls and floor
Candles whose aureole flames must seem—
So still they burn—to burn in dream?
And do they cry, and say,
"See, stranger; come!
Here is thy home;
No longer stray"?