WALTER DE LA MARE (1873 � 1956)
Walter John de la Mare was born on Hughenot stock in Kent in 1873 and educated at St Paul's Cathedral Choir School. He spent eighteen years in business before devoting himself entirely to literature. His first book, Songs of Childhood (1902), was published under a pseudonym, and his first prose work, Henry Brocken, under his own name in 1904. His Memoirs of a Midget (1921) was awarded the James Tait Black Prize. He was an anthologist of genius, see, for example, Early One Morning (1935), which exploits absorbingly his preoccupation with childhood, and Love (1943), and a short-story writer whose powers of creating an atmosphere, particularly the atmosphere of the uncanny, were exceptional.
Graham Greene wrote illuminatingly on the short stories in A Tribute (mentioned below). His best-known tales of the supernatural are probably "All Hallows" and "Seaton's Aunt", both of which are excellent. Among his publications of poetry may be mentioned Collected Poems (1942), Collected Rhymes and Verses (1944), The Burning Glass (1945), The Traveller (1946), Rhymes and Verses, Collected Poems for Young People (1947), Winged Chariot (1951), and O Lovely England (1953). He died in 1956. There is a study of his world by Forrest Reid published in 1922, and in 1948 a volume entitled A Tribute to Walter de la Mare on his 75th Birthday was brought out. T. S. Eliot's following verses characterize the poetry of Walter de la Mare with great precision:By whom, and by what means, was this designed?
The whispered incantation which allows
Free passage to the phantoms of the mind.
By you; by those deceptive cadences
Wherewith the common measure is refined;
By conscious art practiced with natural ease.
The British Council "Writers and Their Work" series included an essay on the poet by Kenneth Hopkins in 1953. Tea with Walter de la Mare (1957) by Russell Brain is also worth consulting.
The poems given here on this post are from Collected Poems with the exception of "A Portrait" from The Burning Glass.
THE CHILDREN OF STARE
Winter is fallen early
On the house of Stare;
Birds in reverberating flocks
Haunt its ancestral box;
Bright are the plenteous berries
In clusters in the air.
Still is the fountain's music,
The dark pool icy still,
Whereupon a small and sanguine sun
Floats in a mirror on,
Into a West of crimson,
From a South of daffodil.
'Tis strange to see young children
In such a wintry house;
Like rabbits' on the frozen snow
Their tell-tale footprints go;
Their laughter rings like timbrels
'Neath evening ominous:
Their small and heightened faces
Like wine-red winter buds;
Their frolic bodies gentle as
Flakes in the air that pass,
Frail as the twirling petal
From the briar of the woods.
Above them silence pours,
Still as an arctic sea;
Light fails; night falls; the wintry moon
Glitters; the crocus soon
Will open grey and distracted
On earth's austerity:
Thick mystery, wild peril,
Law like an iron rod:�
Yet sport they on in Spring's attire,
Each with his tiny fire
Blown to a core of ardour
By the awful breath of God.
THE LISTENERS
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest�s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller�s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
�Is there anybody there?� he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller�s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
�Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:
��Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,� he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
A PORTRAIT
Old: yet unchanged; �still pottering in his thoughts;
Still eagerly enslaved by books and print;
Less plagued, perhaps, by rigid musts and oughts,
But no less frantic in vain argument;
Still happy as a child, with its small toys,
Over his ink pot and his bits and pieces,�
Life's arduous, fragile and ingenuous joys,
Whose charm failed never� nay, it even increases!
Ev'n happier in watch of bird or flower,
Rainbow in heaven, or bud on thorny spray,
A star-strewn nightfall, and that heart-break hour
Of sleep-drowsed senses between dawn and day;
Loving the light �laved eyes in those wild hues!�
And dryad twilight, and the thronging dark;
A Crusoe ravished by mere solitude�
And silence �edged with music's fainted Hark!
And any chance-seen face whose loveliness
Hovers, a mystery, between dream and real;
Things usual yet miraculous that bless
And oversell a heart that still can feel;
Haunted by questions no man answered yet;
Pining to leap from A clean on to Z;
Absorbed by problems which the wise forget;
Avid for fantasy� yet how staid a head!
Senses at daggers with his intellect;
Quick, stupid; vain, retiring; arden, cold;
Faithful and fickle; rash and circumspect;
And never yet at rest in any fold;
Punctual at meals; a spendthrift, close as Scot;
Rebellious, tractable, childish �long gone grey!
Impatient, volatile, tongue wearying not�
Loose, too; which, yet, thank heaven, was taught to pray;
'Childish' indeed! �a waif on shingle shelf
Fronting the rippled sands, the sun, the sea;
And nought but his marooned precarious self
For questing consciousness and ill-to-be;
A feeble venturer �in a world so wide!
So rich in action, daring, cunning, strife!
You'd think, poor soul, he had taken Sloth for bride,�
Unless the imagined is the breath of life;
Unless to speculate bring virgin gold,
And Let's-pretend can range the seven seas,
And dreams are not mere tales by idiot told,
And tongueless truth may hide in fantasies;
Unless the alone may their own company find,
And churchyards harbor phantoms 'mid their bones,
And even a daisy may suffice a mind
Whose bindweed can redeem a heap of stones;
Too frail a basket for so many eggs�
Loose-woven: Gosling? cygnet? Laugh or weep?
Or is the cup at richest in its dregs?
The actual realest on the verge of sleep?
One yet how often the prey of doubt and fear,
Of bleak despondence, stark anxiety;
Ardent for what is neither now nor here,
And Orpheus fainting for Eurydice;
Not yet inert, but with a tortured breast
At hint of that bleak gulp � his last farewell;
Pining for peace, assurance, pause and rest,
Yet slave to what he loves past words to tell;
A foolish, fond old man, his bed-time nigh,
Who still at western window stays to win
A transient respite from the latening sky,
And scarce can bear it when the Sun goes in.
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Bibliography:
Brain, Russell 1957: Tea with Walter de la Mare. London: Faber & Faber.
De la Mare, Walter 1979 (1942): The Collected Poems of Walter de la Mare. London: Faber & Faber.
��������1984 (1944): Collected Rhymes and Verses. London: Faber & Faber.
�������� 1945: The Burning Glass. London: The Viking Press.
��������1951: Winged Chariot. London: The Viking Press.
��������1953: O Lovely England. London: Faber & Faber.
��������2002 (1947): Rhymes and Verses, Collected Poems for Young People. London: Henry Holt.
Duffin, Charles 1949: Walter de la Mare: A Study of his Poetry. New York: Haskell House.
Hopkins, Kenneth 1953: Walter de la Mare. London: Longmans.
