just been listening to radio 4's poetry hour and they're focussing on de la mare today. made me remember how much i used to love it when my mother read him aloud. he's brilliant - so yummy and loving and bleak as fuck, when he wants to be.

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breast peep
Of doves in silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and a silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.


anyone else love de la mare? time to root the anthology out of the attic, i think.

Yeah. He's one phat bitch for a 'minor poet'.

do you have 'the old lion and other stories'? i've not read his prose.

Na, just the poems, as far as this G is aware.