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. 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_: