s bodies--

Dragging cold cannon through a mire
Of rain and blood and spouting fire,
The new moon glinting hard on eyes
Wide with insanities!

In _The Marionettes_ Mr. de la Mare turns to tragic satire for relief from
the bitterness of a war-maddened world:

Let the foul scene proceed:
There's laughter in the wings;
'Tis sawdust that they bleed,
But a box Death brings.

How rare a skill is theirs
These extreme pangs to show,
How real a frenzy wears
Each feigner of woe!

And the poem goes on in perplexity of anger and anguish:

Strange, such a Piece is free,
While we spectators sit,
Aghast at its agony,
Yet absorbed in it!

Dark is the outer air,
Coldly the night draughts blow,
Mutely we stare, and stare,
At the frenzied Show.

Yet Heaven hath its quiet shroud
Of deep, immutable blue--
We cry, "The end!" We are bowed
By the dread, "'Tis true!"

While the Shape who hoofs applause
Behind our deafened ear,
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,
Capped with a golden helm,
Sate in the ages, in his floating ship,
In a dead calm.

One finds Mr. de la Mare's characteristic, unemphatic music again in the
opening lines of _Mrs. Grundy_:

Step very softly, sweet Quiet-foot,
Stumble not, whisper not, smile not,

where "foot" and "not" are rhymes.

It is the stream of musi