Reading
Walter de la Mare
Poems Selected and Annotated
by William Wootten
Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Note on the Text
Table of Dates
John Mouldy
The Funeral
Autumn
The Birthnight: To F.
Napoleon
Longlegs
King David
An Epitaph
Nobody Knows
The Bells
The Listeners
The Scarecrow
Miss Loo
Winter Dusk
The Keys of Morning
The Pigs and the Charcoal-Burner
All That’s Past
‘The Hawthorn Hath a Deathly Smell’
A Song of Enchantment
The Bees’ Song
The Honey Robbers
The Mocking Fairy
The Song of the Mad Prince
For All the Grief
Fare Well
The Scribe
To E.T.: 1917
Sotto Voce
Titmouse
Good-Bye
The Railway Junction
To K.M.
The Feckless Dinner-Party
Reflections
Rose
Away
Thomas Hardy
Dry August Burned
Incantation
Brueghel’s Winter
Swallows Flown
The Old Summerhouse
‘Of a Son’
The House (‘A lane at the end of Old Pilgrim Street’)
Dreamland
Sallie
The House (‘The rusty gate had been chained and padlocked’)
Winged Chariot
De Profundis
Index of Titles and First Lines
About the Author
by Walter de la Mare
Copyright
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Matthew Hollis, Lavinia Singer, Kate Burton and all at Faber; Giles de la Mare and the Walter de la Mare Society; Sarah Baxter and the Society of Authors; the University of Bristol for granting me a semester of research leave; and the staff of the Senate House Library, London, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the British Library, the Imperial War Museum, the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Harry Ransom Center, Texas.
Angela Leighton, Yui Kajita and Giles de la Mare were all kind enough to share their research with me. Stephen Cheeke, Elv Moody and David Punter gave helpful feedback on some draft commentaries. Anne Harvey and Ralph Pite enlightened me in conversation; Jane Wright and Kyra Larkin helped me with Gimmul in ‘The Honey Robbers’. My intellectual debts should be clear from my endnotes, but I should also like also to note here how much I owe to Theresa Whistler’s invaluable biography of Walter de la Mare, in both its published and untruncated form.
I am grateful to Paul and Nastasha Rutman for having me to stay in Oxford. Lastly, and most importantly, I should like to thank Elisabeth Wootten for being wonderful and Lucy Wootten for being really jolly. This book is for them.
Introduction
Walter de la Mare was a magician of poetic sound. The possessor of one of the most musical ears in the history of English poetry, he had the power to write ‘incantations’ allowing ‘Free passage to the phantoms of the mind’, as T. S. Eliot puts it in his tribute ‘To Walter de la Mare’. This music and magic ensured that de la Mare became one of the best-loved poets of the twentieth century and won him the admiration of W. H. Auden, Edward Thomas and Robert Frost among others.
It also won him the distrust of academic critics. For I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis in the 1920s and 1930s, the sound of de la Mare’s verse was a pernicious ‘opiate’, an ‘enchantment’, a danger to the rational reader.1 Fifty years later, Richards apologised and hymned the ‘perfection’ of de la Mare’s volumes The Listeners (1912) and Peacock Pie (1913).2 This time Richards noted that their rhythms were ‘haunting – not would-be, but as living presences embodying what the poems are doing’.3 But this time was too late. Page-bound study and the academy hadn’t been able to find a place for de la Mare, and having attacked and dismissed his work, soon more or less forgot about it: de la Mare’s verse was for ‘old-fashioned lovers of poetry’ and maybe the under-twelves.
Being forgotten by the academy has its upsides, but it also has its disadvantages. In de la Mare’s case, it has meant that many who understand and enjoy modern poetry either know nothing about him or have difficulty in appreciating his work. As the poet and scholar Eric Ormsby puts it in a recent essay: ‘If [de la Mare’s] poems sound stilted or quaintly vague, that may be because we no longer know how to read him.’4 The easiest way to overcome such a resistance is to hear the poems read aloud. During the Second World War, Eliot, hitherto something of a de la Mare sceptic himself, was taking part in a large charitable poetry reading. He discovered, to his surprise, that it was de la Mare who ‘put into his reading a more conversational tone’ than did any other of the esteemed readers who were present.5 Listen to other twentieth-century poets, especially the modernists, and Eliot’s point is proved. Their style of recitation – and I guess the way they heard their poetry in their heads – now comes across as incredibly mannered. De la Mare, though his accent belongs to a bygone era, sounds like he’s sitting in the room with you; he is reading in a way that is, as Eliot puts it, like he is ‘talking to a few friends, but talking poetry’.6 To really get de la Mare, you shouldn’t be hearing his lines as an intoned singsong but in a normal prose-speaking voice, a voice which take its time and pauses at the punctuation – particularly those thoughtful, qualifying dashes. If you think his poetry sounds too artificial, you aren’t reading it right.
De la Mare’s poetry sounds wonderful, but it also means something, and sometimes many things at once. That old saw about poetry being understood on many levels happens to be true in his case. Moreover, because de la Mare usually prefers to hide away difficult or troubling material rather than flaunting it, there are meanings in his poems that aren’t at all obvious unless they are pointed out.
De la Mare didn’t object to notating poems; indeed, he was a superb writer of notes himself. Turn to his great anthologies and you’ll find that not only may a note draw attention to a particular quality of sound or image or explain something of a poem’s sense, it may wander off into details of folklore, history and natural history or find time to point out all manner of loosely related bits and bobs. If you want to know more not just about a poem, but what other related poem you might also like, the names of the angels, why there are no foxgloves in Shakespeare or to learn a recipe, a de la Mare note is the place to go. I’m not Walter de la Mare, but I have allowed my notes to take off into the wider world of his life and interests and included illuminating facts and by-the-ways. I have also tried to be cautious around those poems that seem to me to be crafted in a way that resists too definite an explanation and have left readers space to weigh up different accounts and find meanings of their own. The notes can be looked at as and when they might prove helpful. The poems can stand on their own, as might a straightforward Selected. Nevertheless, I’ve aimed for a book that can be read cover to cover.
The choice of poems is intended to be a showcase of what is best and most distinctive in the more than a thousand poems de la Mare published in his lifetime. Quite a number of these were first published as rhymes for children. De la Mare didn’t draw a particularly firm line between his poems for adults and those he wrote for children – some of the former go down very well with younger readers, while some of the latter conceal adult themes and re
ferences – and neither do I. Indeed, when it comes to The Listeners and Peacock Pie, volumes composed over the same period, I have chosen to highlight de la Mare’s developing life and art by mixing the two and setting their poems in roughly chronological order.
Literary historians find it convenient to tuck de la Mare away before the First World War and the subsequent ascendancy of the modernists. But, as this book makes clear, he has a place in both the history of First World War poetry and the history of modernism. Furthermore, while his output was very uneven, he was capable of brilliant poems from the beginning of his long writing life to the end.
It is true, however, that he had golden patches. Rather than seeking to represent all parts of his career equally, I have leant towards The Listeners and Peacock Pie, but also to Memory (1938), and, though it was too long to include in its entirety, I have made sure the late long poem Winged Chariot (1951) is properly represented. There are, if you look through the Complete Poems, examples of satiric and social realist verse, poems addressing slums, drug addicts or the nuclear bomb; there is also some entertaining light verse. Still, de la Mare is at his strongest when he is most like de la Mare, and it is when addressing those de la Marean subjects – those deserted houses, birds, fields, flowers, children, fairies, travellers, ghosts and graves – that he makes us feel the world in a way that no other poet quite does. What’s more, his poems are rarely comfort reads. They are odd and unsettling. They leave the material world and the reassuring beliefs we have about it shadowier and less certain than they found them.
De la Mare, we are always told, is a minor poet. And it is true that the word ‘major’ doesn’t suit someone so devoted to the delicate, the unassuming and the small-scale. But he punches far above his perceived weight. Very few poets have his ability to write desert island poems. ‘Autumn’, ‘Napoleon’, ‘All That’s Past’, ‘The Listeners’, ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’, ‘Fare Well’, ‘The Railway Junction’ and more are named by many readers as all-time favourites, but there are other, less known poems in this selection that deserve to be similarly cherished. Read de la Mare with sympathy and you may find his poems become something more important to you than words like ‘major’ or ‘minor’ can capture. They may seem indispensable.
NOTES
1. See I. A. Richards, Poetries and Sciences: A Reissue of Science and Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1926, 1935 and 1970), pp. 69–70 and F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950), pp. 50–1.
2. I. A. Richards ‘Reconsideration: Walter de la Mare’, The New Republic, vol. 174, No. 5, 31 Jan 1976, pp. 31–3: 33.
3. Ibid., p. 32.
4. Eric Linn Ormsby, Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (Erin, Ontario: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2011), p. 42.
5. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 6: 1932–3, edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2016), p. 57.
6. Ibid.
Note on the Text
Walter de la Mare carefully saw to press the poetry volumes he published during his long life. In making the selection for this edition, I have almost exclusively followed the text of The Complete Poems (1969, corrections 1975), which was prepared by the Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare. The Complete Poems was a major editorial undertaking: those working on it included Richard de la Mare, Giles de Mare, Leonard Clark and Dorothy Marshall. It reproduces the Collected Poems (1942) and Collected Rhymes and Verses (1944), which de la Mare approved for publication, with corrections for some minor corruptions in them. The Complete Poems also incorporates the volumes de la Mare published in the period between those two Collecteds and his death, as well as numerous uncollected and unpublished poems, all of which were considered for possible inclusion in this edition, though none was in the end selected.
I have corrected one mistake in The Complete Poems – ‘The Funeral’ was, in fact, absent from the 1902 edition of Songs of Childhood and first included in the 1916 edition – and made two small deviations. In the case of Winged Chariot, I have sought to reproduce as far as possible the arrangement of text and marginalia of the 1951 edition rather than the more cramped arrangement in The Complete Poems, an arrangement I take to be a consequence of the dimensions of the latter volume rather than any change in authorial intention. The text of ‘King David’ reproduced here, for reasons I explain in an endnote to my commentary, follows that of the 1913 edition of Peacock Pie.
Table of Dates
1873 Apr. b. Walter John (‘Jack’) Delamare, Charlton, London
1877 family moves to 5 Bovill Terrace, Forest Hill, London
Oct. d. James Delamare (father)
1883–1990 attends St Paul’s Cathedral School, London
1890 starts work at Anglo-American Oil Company
1893 meets Elfrida (Elfie) Ingpen
1895 starts to publish short stories in magazines
1899 Aug. m. Elfrida Ingpen
Mackenzie Road, Beckenham, London
1899 Oct. b. Florence de la Mare (daughter)
1901 June b. Richard de la Mare (son)
1902 Songs of Childhood (Longmans) as Walter Ramal
Feb. meets Henry Newbolt
1903 meets Mary Coleridge
Aug. b. Lucy (‘Jinnie’) de la Mare (daughter)
1904 Henry Brocken (Collins) (novel) as Walter J. de la Mare
1906 Poems (John Murray) as Walter de la Mare
Jan. b. Colin de la Mare (son)
Samos Road, Anerley, London
1907 Mar. meets Edward Thomas
Worbeck Road, Anerley, London
Aug. d. Mary Coleridge
1908 July receives one-off grant of £200; leaves Anglo-American Oil to write and review
1910 The Return (Edward Arnold) (novel)
The Three Mulla-Mulgars (Duckworth)
(children’s novel)
1911 becomes a reader for William Heinemann and works on D. H. Lawrence’s manuscripts 14 Thornsett Road, Penge, London
Feb. meets Naomi Royde-Smith
1912 The Listeners and Other Poems (Constable) beginning of friendship with Forrest Reid
Sep. meets Rupert Brooke
Dec. poems included in Georgian Poetry 1911–12 (The Poetry Bookshop)
1913 Feb. meets Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry
Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (Constable)
1914 Aug. Britain declares war on Germany
Nov. appendectomy at Guy’s Hospital
Nov. Brooke visits de la Mare in hospital
1915 Mar. de la Mare granted a Civil List pension of £100 a year
becomes Royal Society of Literature Chair of Fiction
praises Brooke’s war sonnets in Times Literary Supplement
Apr. d. Rupert Brooke, Skyros
1916 Oct. goes to America to lecture and collect post-humous award for Brooke
1917 begins war work for the Ministry of Food
Apr. d. Edward Thomas at Battle of Arras
1918 Motley and Other Poems (Constable)
1919 June first performance of Crossings, with music by Cecil Armstrong Gibbs at the Wick School, Brighton
1920 June tea, and last meeting, with Katherine Mansfield, Hampstead, London
1921 June first stay with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate Memoirs of a Midget (Collins) (novel)
The Veil and Other Poems
1922 Down-Adown-Derry: A Book of Fairy Poems (Constable)
1923 Jan. d. Katherine Mansfield
The Riddle and Other Stories (Selwyn and Blount)
Come Hither (Constable) (anthology)
1924 Jan. declines knighthood for first time Ding Dong Bell (stories)
Dec. Hill House, Taplow, Buckinghamshire
1925 Broomsticks and Other Tales (Constable) (stories for children)
1926 The Connoisseur and Other Stories (Collins)
1927 Stuff and Nonsense and So On (Constable)
Told Again: Traditional Tales (Bas
il Blackwell) seriously ill most of year
1928 Jan. d. Thomas Hardy
1929 Stories from the Bible (Faber)
1930 Desert Islands (Faber) (anthology)
The Wind Blows Over (Faber) (stories)
1933 The Fleeting and Other Poems (Constable)
The Lord Fish (Faber) (stories for children)
1935 Early One Morning in the Spring (Macmillan) (anthology)
1936 Jan. meets Nathalie Saxton
The Nap and Other Stories (1936) (Nelson)
1938 Memory and Other Poems (Constable)
1939 Behold, This Dreamer! (Faber) (anthology)
Animal Stories (Faber) (anthology)
1940 Pleasures and Speculations (Faber) (essays)
South End House, Twickenham
Elfrida de la Mare diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease
1941 Bells and Grass: A Book of Rhymes (Faber) begins friendship with physicist, Martin Johnson
1942 The Old Lion and Other Stories (Faber) (for children)
1943 Love (Faber) (anthology)
The Magic Jacket and Other Stories (Faber) (for children)
July d. Elfrida de la Mare
1945 The Burning Glass and Other Poems (Faber)
The Scarecrow and Other Stories (Faber) (for children)
1946 The Traveller (Faber) (long poem)
1946 The Dutch Cheese (Faber) (stories for children)
1947 Jan. d. Forrest Reid
Oct. severe coronary thrombosis
1948 Tribute to Walter de la Mare on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday (Faber)
1950 Oct. Inward Companion and Other Poems (Faber)
1951 Feb. honorary degree from Oxford
Winged Chariot (Faber) (long poem)
1952 June Order of Merit
1953 Private View (Faber) (literary criticism)
O Lovely England and Other Poems (Faber)
1955 Sep. recording of de la Mare reading poems and in conversation (‘Isn’t It a Lovely Day’) A Beginning and Other Stories (Faber)
1956 June d. South End House, Twickenham
Reading Walter de la Mare Page 1
