Phantoms of the mind: T.S. Eliot's "To Walter de la Mare"

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 1997 by K Narayana Chandran

The children who explored the brook and found A desert island. . .

Recount their exploits at the nursery tea.... (CPl-2, 9)

Now who are these children who meet at the nursery tea? Imaginary or real? They are by allusive logic both, for the details here allude to de la Mare's "Funeral" which describes a group of children's visit to a graveyard. The episode is narrated by a child. "Susan and Tom and me" walk through the fields enjoying the sights and sounds of the countryside-trees, clouds, flowers; the larks and the thrushes. They return home:

Back through the fields we came, Tom and Susan and me, And we sat in the nursery together, And had our tea. (Complete Poems 17-20)

All we need to remark now is that the scene in de la Mare may have long remained in Eliot's memory and that it has landed this poem with all the charm and urgency of an unforgettable private experience. Again, the narrator of "The Funeral" is not Tom, but Tom knows that he is mentioned in the poem, while neither of them seems to be the one, another "Tom," who now recalls this episode in his poem. These niceties sound pretty much like Eliot's own in the argument involving the selves that "see," "suffer" and "report" on a ghostly experience respectively. My point simply is that Eliot's allusion often games with such "phantoms of the mind" ( CP 28) .

"[W]e have in the author of Practical Cats, a virtuoso of make-believe," remarked Marianne Moore (March and Tambimuttu 180). True. We need to believe in that "makebelieve" to be able to appreciate how Eliot's allusions cast "phantoms of the mind" in delectable roles framed so nicely in little theatrical episodes: like the children gathering at the nursery, when the lamps are lit and the curtains drawn. To read allusions this way is to resist the all imperious urge to treat "To Walter de la Mare" as a mini-concordance to The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare. Writing so lovingly of de la Mare, Eliot demonstrates the uses to which he recruits his own memory as a reader. In so doing, he not only shows us how the "make-believe" works in de la Mare but how it works through him as well, how indeed the older poet's "whispered incantation. . . allows / Free passage to the phantoms of the mind" (27-28)-Eliot's and ours. The younger Eliot couldn't "do the Police" half as well or in half as "many voices" as in this poem. In his thirty-three lines for Walter de la Mare Eliot reworks a Georgian poet's oral spell for us. The poem now sounds both: the latter's name and the voice. We couldn't have asked more of an "occasional poem."

WORKS CITED

de la Mare, Walter. The Complete Poems. London: Faber, 1965. Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems: 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1963. . Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy ofF. H. Bradley. London: Faber, 1964.

Moore, Marianne. "A Virtuoso of Make Believe." TS. Eliot: A Symposium. Ed. Richard March and Tambimuttu. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries, 1949.179-182.

Ross, Robert H. The Georgian Revolt: Rise and Fall of A Poetic Ideal:1910--'22. London: Faber, 1967.