Flit would the ages
  On soundless wings
  Ere unto Z
  My pen drew nigh;
  Leviathan told,
  And the honey-fly.

He cannot come upon a twittering linnet, a “thing of light,” in a bush without realizing that—­

  All the throbbing world
    Of dew and sun and air
  By this small parcel of life
    Is made more fair.

He bids us in Farewell: 

  Look thy last on all things lovely
    Every hour.  Let no night
  Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
    Till to delight
  Thou have paid thy utmost blessing.

Thus, there is nothing faint-hearted in Mr. de la Mare’s melancholy.  His sorrow is idealist’s sorrow.  He has the heart of a worshipper, a lover.

We find evidence of this not least in his war-verses.  At the outbreak of the war he evidently shared with other lovers and idealists the feeling of elation in the presence of noble sacrifices made for the world.

  Now each man’s mind all Europe is,

he cries, in the first line in Happy England, and, as he remembers the peace of England, “her woods and wilds, her loveliness,” he exclaims: 

  O what a deep contented night
    The sun from out her Eastern seas
  Would bring the dust which in her sight
    Had given its all for these!

So beautiful a spirit as Mr. de la Mare’s, however, could not remain content with idealizing from afar the sacrifices and heroism of dying men.  In the long poem called Motley he turns from the heroism to the madness of war, translating his vision into a fool’s song: 

  Nay, but a dream I had
  Of a world all mad,
  Not simply happy mad like me,
  Who am mad like an empty scene
  Of water and willow-tree,
  Where the wind hath been;
  But that foul Satan-mad,
  Who rots in his own head....

The fool’s vision of men going into battle is not a vision of knights of the Holy Ghost nobly falling in the lists with their country looking on, but of men’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.