Songs of Childhood — Themes and Context

Archaic Diction and the Sailor's Voice

In 'The Sailor,' the speaker encounters a mariner who uses consistently nonstandard spellings: 'leetle son,' 'yaller hair,' 'witcherie sweet.' This is not mere whimsy; it creates a voice that is both childlike and alien, as if the sailor has been preserved from another time. The poem's structure—a dialogue in which the boy identifies England's features—builds a sense of uncanny recognition. The sailor's final revelation, that he is 'that same leetle Will' eating bread and butter, collapses adult experience into childhood memory. This technique recurs: de la Mare often uses a child's perspective to frame encounters with the strange or the past, but the language itself carries the weight of adult longing.

The Phantom's Domestic Gothic

'The Phantom' opens with a child, Ann, sent to fetch a Bible from an upstairs closet. The setting is an 'old unfriendly house' where 'vast shadows on the heedless walls / Gigantic loom.' The poem's tension derives from the contrast between the mundane errand and the escalating dread: 'A dreadful cold plucks at each hair, / Her mouth is stretched to cry.' The phantom of the title is not a ghost but a 'wilding child' who sings an old song. This inversion—the supernatural figure is a child, not a specter—undermines expectations. The poem relies on sensory details (taper light, echoing footsteps) and a slow, accumulating rhythm that mimics the child's hesitant climb. It is less a story than a mood piece, and its emotional core is loneliness, not terror.

The Preface's Critical Frame

Anthony Hecht's preface, written for the 1976 Garland edition, provides a scholarly context that the poems themselves do not supply. He traces a lineage from Romantic idealization of the child (Wordsworth's 'Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!') through Victorian novels to de la Mare's 'serious' children's verse. Hecht distinguishes de la Mare from Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, who used 'insistent comedy and parody' to hedge against sentimentality. De la Mare, Hecht argues, takes the risk of seriousness without such buffers. This critical lens is essential for understanding the collection's place in literary history, but it also highlights a gap: the catalog subjects 'English poetry' and 'Children's poetry, English' do not capture the poems' gothic, melancholic, and linguistically experimental qualities.

Readers approaching Songs of Childhood should set aside expectations of cheerful or didactic verse. De la Mare's poems reward attention to their formal craft—rhyme, meter, and the deliberate oddity of their language. The collection is best read aloud, as the sound patterns carry much of the emotional weight. Hecht's preface offers a useful entry point, but the poems themselves remain the primary evidence of a distinctive, unsettling vision of childhood.

I keep returning to the uneasy magic of de la Mare’s poems—how they smile at children while whispering to grown-ups. It makes me think of Hilaire Belloc’s sharper little morals, collected in Cautionary Tales for Children — Reading Notes, another book that never quite stays in its appointed shelf. Both feel like half-remembered rooms where the lamp flickers, and I’m oddly grateful for the chill.