Philip Larkin’s poem for Charles Causley’s 65th birthday included the kind of heartfelt tribute that did not come readily to his pen:

Ah, CHARLES, be reassured! For you
Make lasting friends with all you do,
And all you write; your truth and sense
We count on as a sure defence
Against the trendy and the mad
The feeble and the downright bad.

Ever alert for the pretentious and repelled by the obscure, Larkin was one of many who admired Causley’s straightforward narratives and strongly rhythmic ballads. He must also have admired his poem Ten Types of Hospital Visitor, with its sprightly comedy and grimness:

Slowly he passes the patient
A bag of bullet-proof
Home-made biscuits.

Charles Stanley Causley was, as he wrote, “born and brought up in the rainy, slate-hung frontier town of Launceston, where the iron-nosed Normans built a stout castle and — in a sense — never went home”. When he was seven, his father died (from the effects of gassing in the trenches), after which his mother had to do menial work to support them; but there were books in the house and he never felt any sense of deprivation.

He left school at 15 to work in a builder’s office and then for an electrical company, reading all the while. His particular admirations were for Hardy and for D. H. Lawrence, who had also begun life in the working class.

In the 1930s he felt an affinity with the artists and writers opposing the rise of Fascism, and in 1939 — not wanting to follow his father into the poor bloody infantry — he joined the Navy. Unfortunately, he recalled of his service on the lower deck in Scapa Flow and the Mediterranean that he was very seasick, the sea being bigger and more menacing than the U-boats.

Naval service made a deep impression, however, and many of his later poems retell tales of comradeship, adversity and loss. He also wrote a book of sea stories, Hands to Dance and Skylark, named after an old naval order to ratings to work off their high spirits.

He began writing poems about his experiences in 1943, partly as a way of withdrawing from the queasiness and fear. His first book of poems, Farewell, Aggie Weston, was published in 1951 by Erica Marx’s Hand and Flower Press, as was Survivor’s Leave (1953).

By this time, Causley had been trained as a teacher in Peterborough, and returned to live with his mother in Launceston, where he remained for almost all his life. For three years in the mid-1950s he was literary editor of two BBC magazines, Apollo in the West and Signature, and from 1962 to 1966 he was a member of the Arts Council’s poetry panel.

Locally, however, he was known for much of his career not as a writer but as a primary school teacher (and deputy head). From this professional discipline the poet learnt how to put ideas into plain words, and often into traditional, even nursery-rhyme forms. Yet while every word may be clear, the content is sometimes inexplicably mysterious: perhaps an encounter with death, or a magic spell. As he said: “The mere fact of a poem appearing simple in language and construction bears no relation whatsoever to the profundity of the ideas it may contain.”

His breezy ballads have the qualities of folk-tales or humorous tall stories, and he specialised in comic turns and far-fetched metaphors:

Timothy Winters comes to school
With eyes as wide as a football pool
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

Like many classic children’s rhymes, Causley’s were also cautionary verses: haunting ditties with threatening repercussions. In his slightly archaic but still resonant way he would write, for instance:

Many a day has faltered
Into many a year
Since the dead awoke and spoke
And we could not hear.

Causley was reluctant to classify “children’s verse” separately from other poetry, and although in 1974 he compiled The Puffin Book of Magic Verse for children, it was with the proviso that all poetry is magic. He liked children, but spoke of them warily as a secret society from which each of us graduates, never to return.

“I wouldn’t be a child again. I don’t know where the image of happy, laughing childhood comes from. They are a grim lot. You walk among them at your peril.”

Causley had a flinty sense of history and of myth, especially when it was nautical or rooted in his native Cornwall (a place he explored extensively in Underneath the Water, 1968). He also wrote on Christian themes, showing a fascination with the biblical story as one of the great archetypes. In these poems, as John Fuller once wrote of him, he often conflated “the exalted and the mundane”.

He was a master of traditional forms — and much admired for this by Roy Campbell — but his strong rhythms could be monotonous, especially to the reader of a whole collection. Sometimes, indeed, he lapsed “into metronomic numbness”, as a reviewer once complained from the then anonymous fastness of The Times Literary Supplement.

Never without a collection, a translation, an anthology or a collaboration under way, Causley produced some 40 books in nearly half a century of publishing. In 1978, a particularly productive year, he wrote two books of children’s stories, edited The Puffin Book of Salt-Sea Verse, published the verse play The Gift of a Lamb and (with limited success) adapted the 13th-century Ballad of Aucassin and Nicolette for the theatre.

His first Collected Poems appeared in 1975, along with a record of him reading his work; another Collected Poems appeared in 1992, and a third for his 80th birthday in 1997, when D. M. Thomas described his work as “often profound, without being difficult”. As he wrote on the death of C. Day-Lewis:

A man must speak when he has words to say.
The poet wrote until his dying day.

Causley won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1967, and was appointed CBE in 1986. He did not marry.

Charles Causley, CBE, poet, was born on August 24, 1917. He died on November 4, 2003, aged 86.