Books, “Reservoirs To Rest In”

by

Frank X. Roberts, Ph.D.

Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), though perhaps best known for his poetry, was a master of English prose writing, turning out, between 1895 and 1956, numerous short stories many of which are today considered to be some of the best ever written in the genre.

De la Mare’s short stories have recently been collected and published in two volumes: Short Stories 1895-1926 (1996), and Short Stories 1927-1956 (2001), edited by his grandson, Giles de la Mare. Walter de la Mare also published, early on in his writing life, five novels.  While none of these when published were, in modern parlance, “best sellers,” enlightened contemporary criticism has revised upward earlier negative estimations of two of de la Mare’s novels, both of which have been republished  for twenty-first century readers. These are: The Return (1910), republished in 2004, and Memoirs of a Midget (1921), republished in 2009.  As do many of de la Mare’s short stories, The Return reveals the influence on de la Mare of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, admitted by de la Mare to be an author whose works he became enamored of at quite an early age.

Walter de la Mare in his time was also a highly respected literary critic, writing reviews over many years for periodicals such as The Times Literary Supplement, and others. In addition, de la Mare wrote essays on literary topics, published either separately or in collections such as Private View (1953) and Pleasures and Speculations (1940, reprinted 1969). It is this last mentioned collection which I wish to call special attention to in the remainder of this article, particularly to the longish poem by de la Mare entitled “Books,” used as a preface to Pleasures and Speculations.

“Books” apparently did not appear in any of the collections of poetry published by de la Mare after he used the poem to preface his collection of essays in 1940. As might be expected the poem was included in The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare, published by Faber and Faber in 1969.  A note in this first complete collection of de la Mare’s poems indicates that after its initial appearance in 1940, “ ‘Books’ [had] not been reprinted elsewhere.” Other than in the two sources mentioned (both not always readily available to readers) de la Mare’s poem “Books” remains elusive, if not impossible to find. (As far as I can tell, it appears nowhere on the Internet.) This being so, I have reprinted it here for all to enjoy, and for Bibliobuffet to be the first online source to make the poem readily available to a wider reading audience through the Internet!

Walter de la Mare’s “Books” in my view (in my “BibliOpinion,” so to say) is a poem which should be read at least three times on first encounter by all book lovers, and then periodically ever after. Readers of Bibliobuffet will, I can’t but think, empathize with this “opinion,” for the poem says it all about the “sweet witchery” of books.

Books

Books!—
            for the heart to brood on; books for peace;
From the dull droning of the world release;
A music snared, a spring distilled of Spring;
At one spare board to feast on Everything!—
Plain, wholesome, racy, various and rare;
And yet—like Bird of Paradise—on air.

Books!—whose sweet witchery retrieves again
All that the heart of childhood may retain;
Its wonder, ecstasy; grief, terror, woes—
Salved by the leechcraft age alone bestows;
All youthful braveries, too, Time plucked away,
When Hope’s clear taper could out-dazzle day.
Books—to intoxicate, to storm, to press
The soul insatiate to unearthliness;
To summon heaven where an attic high
Gleams in communion with a starless sky;
To entice pure Eros from his realm above,
To kneel, palm arched o’er lute, and sing of love;
To make men smell of laurel, and to be
Of wild romance the rue and rosemary;
And, with a truth by art alone divined,
To bare the close-kept secrets of the mind.

Books—laced with humour, and shot through with wit,
Pungent in irony, by wisdom lit,
Life to reveal, and purge, and quicken it,
Probe and explore, dissect and scrutinize,
Mirror its real, unmask its sophistries,
And leave it, fearless, where seraphic Death
Sits with his sickle, and none answereth.

Thought, fleet as errant fancy, comes and goes
As transient as the light upon a rose;
The visioned eye for but a moment sees
All heart hath craved for, in life’s long unease;
Imagination, on its earth-bound quest,
Seeks in the infinite its finite rest;
Wrapt close in dark cocoon the Ego weaves
What of philosophy the mind conceives;
And night-long slumber, deep as Lethe’s stream,
Rears evanescently the walls of dream:
And—like a dial by the sun forsook—
Their one enduring refuge is a book.

Eden the radiant, Crete, Athens, Rome
Shared have with Babylon the self-same doom,
All have to little more than paper come.
The age-long story of how men plan, act, think—
To be at last dependent upon ink!
Monarch and conqueror, Caesar, Napoleon—
Stilled are their trumpets; here they echo on:
Ay, Tyrant! ink alone, thy spectre gone,
Will blacken thy infamy—else, oblivion.
What, though long years the peaceful poet dote,
How thin a trickle keeps his name afloat!—
One line, of myriads—for Dull to quote.
Still, one—when most men from life’s wheat-tare crop
Win no more record than a mute full-stop.

Stones fall, brass cankers, mummy thins to dust,
The voiceless grave stills frenzy, pride and lust;
The very gods that mete out shame and fame,
Save for the written word, were but a name.
All the bright blood by fevered passion spilt
Finds reflex only in unfading gilt;
And noble selfless friendship—nought again
But the pure vellum which that gold doth stain.
Helen’s long centuries of peerless praise
Else had the wonder been of nine brief days;
An empty rumour, Sappho, Socrates,
Wind-spoil of nights foregone—O leafless trees!
Shakespeare a crumbling clot of wisdom left
In old men’s cranies, of all else bereft.
The Star, Gethsemane, the stock of wood,
The garbled rune of an immortal good;
Saints, martyrs, mystics—Oh, what dust would lie
On their lean bones, sole-shrined in memory!
Nay, earth’s strange Universe—that hive of suns—
Books gone, the enigma were of brute and dunce;
And Man—scarce witting of his grace and power,
Gone like a sunbeam in a winter hour;
Since mind unaided, though it knowledge breeds,
And blooms in splendour, yet can leave few seeds;
And memory, like wasting waterbrooks,
Needs reservoirs to rest in. These are books.

Abiding joy is theirs; rich solitude,
Where mortal cares a while no more intrude;
Here, by the day’s sweet light, or candle-beam,
The waking sense finds solace in a dream;
And self flits out, like wild bird from a cage,
To preen its wings in a lost hermitage—
Gardens of bliss, whose well-springs never stay,
Where founts Elysian leap and fall and play;
And lo, a nimbus, from a further sun
Colours them with enchantments not their own.
Yet every word is void of life and light
Until the soul within transfigures it—
Then sighs, for rapture, wildly pines to see
Who wakes this music, under what strange tree—
And pines in vain; for it is Poetry.

Frank’s extensive career in teaching and librarianship began when he taught English in the U.S. From 1961 to 1963, as part of a Columbia University program called “Teachers for East Africa,” he taught English and American Literature in East Africa. There he met his wife, Dorothy. They returned to the U.S. where he simultaneously taught and finished two Masters’ degrees, in Education and in Librarianship. In 1968 they returned to England where Frank taught Library Studies, and adopted Hodge, a cat who later traveled around the world with them. In 1972, Frank was “seconded” for two years to teach at Makerere University in Uganda, East Africa, but left reluctantly after one year when the tyranny of Idi Amin became intolerable. From there it was back to England, then Australia and finally  to America in 1979, to Buffalo where Frank earned his doctorate. Later they moved to Colorado, where he was Professor of Library Studies at the University of Northern Colorado until retiring in 1997. Frank published James A. Michener: A Checklist of his Work with a Selected Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood Press) in 1995. He has written on bookmarks, specifically on medieval bookmarks, his special area of interest. A poet by avocation, he writes eclectically but traditionally. Contact Frank.