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Jump to navigationJump to searchPeacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes by Walter de la Mare (view source)
Revision as of 12:20, 19 December 2014
, 12:20, 19 December 2014no edit summary
|summary=A wide-ranging spread of titles in this poetry anthology, that still sells the modern reader unfortunately short.
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It was a surprise for me to read online that Walter de la Mare spent so much of his life in and around London – born at least in what is now the borough of Greenwich, passing away in Twickenham. The reason I say this is that out of the copious poems collected here, it's as if cities don't liveexist. Hardly anything of the subjects is manmade. The concentration is fully on the idyllic and pastoral, and in following on so closely in the footsteps of his debut collection, ''Songs of Childhood'' from 1902, still very, very much Victorian.
And that's one of the problems this book will have these days. I know his ethos is an estimable one, that of engaging with the youthful imagination through portraying their wonder at the natural world and interaction with it, but I can't see it travelling to many in this day and age. What's more there's his style – a bluntly regular rhyming scheme that he forces on to the page at the expense of meter more than once.
