Reading Walter de la Mare
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John Mouldy
I spied John Mouldy in his cellar,
Deep down twenty steps of stone;
In the dusk he sat a-smiling,
Smiling there alone.
5
He read no book, he snuffed no candle;
The rats ran in, the rats ran out;
And far and near, the drip of water
Went whisp’ring about.
The dusk was still, with dew a-falling,
10
I saw the Dog-star bleak and grim,
I saw a slim brown rat of Norway
Creep over him.
I spied John Mouldy in his cellar,
Deep down twenty steps of stone;
15
In the dusk he sat a-smiling,
Smiling there alone.
from Songs of Childhood (1902)
Songs of Childhood appeared in 1902 under the name Walter Ramal. The book is a successor to Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). Its poems bring to mind a number of nineteenth-century poets, notably Christina Rossetti, but there were some surprises too – including the shock of ‘John Mouldy’.
Walter Ramal was the pen name of Walter J. de la Mare (1873–1956), who had started life with the surname Delamare and who was known to friends and family as ‘Jack’. De la Mare made his living as a poorly paid clerk for the London office of J. D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and wrote his poetry and prose in his spare time, usually after work. De la Mare had married his long-term sweetheart Elfrida Ingpen in August 1899. The couple now had two infant children, and were soon to have two more. It was, however, de la Mare’s nieces and nephews who had been the first audience for the verses of Songs of Childhood.1 The publishers thought that the book would be over the heads of most children, but de la Mare’s rhymes expand what children’s verse can be: not sentimental, as it so often was for the Victorians, nor light verse, as it is in the case of, say, the children’s poems of Hilaire Belloc or T. S. Eliot, but a place where one may confront what is important, mysterious or troubling in childhood and the world outside.
In ‘John Mouldy’, Walter Ramal has become the poet we know as Walter de la Mare. It is a song of childhood. It employs the song-like oral metre we associate with verse written for children; it has a child’s perspective. But that metre is supple and dextrous; that perspective on a child’s fear of the dark has become one to disturb listeners of any age.
De la Mare writes in the introduction to Animal Stories (1939):
Many young and imaginative children are afraid of being alone in the dark – a cupboard ajar, a creaking staircase, an owl or a bat at the window, hobgoblins, nightmares. A small boy with tears rolling down his cheeks sat up on his pillow confessed to me once that he couldn’t sleep for terror because there was a bear under his bed. To console him I assured him on my honour that there wasn’t a real bear and certainly not an uncaged bear for miles and miles around. ‘But you see, Daddie,’ he replied, ‘this isn’t a “real” bear!’2
The child was his own son, Richard.3 But the truth is more general. Moreover, not every childhood horror is imagined. In Early One Morning in the Spring (1935), de la Mare notes that while children can speak and regard death with what, to an adult, looks like surprising blitheness,
Nevertheless, within is a self that may confront the spectre of Death in his horror as unexpectedly as a strange dog may be met at a turn of the street. And then it is as if the light of life itself had gone out. […] I remember – in the company of a few other boys about ten or eleven years of age – seeing the body of a woman who, poor hapless soul, had been drowned in the Thames. We hung over the granite parapet of the Embankment, the morning light reflected from the water beating up into our faces, and stared. The body had been secured to the stern of a police boat, and the bloated head and shoulder lolled gently in the clucking tide as the boat edged gently to and fro.4
But while de la Mare’s prose shows a fine understanding of true and imagined childhood horror, ‘John Mouldy’ inhabits a realm somewhere in between the two.
Who is John Mouldy? A trick of the eye? A shape in the mould? A personification, the Jack Frost of cellar damp? An insane derelict down among the rats? Or is his smile the fixed grin of a corpse? There’s no single right answer and, certainly, no answer that’s a comfort. Even the conclusion that John Mouldy is but a trick of the eye is the material for a double take and a judder. Four years after Songs of Childhood, German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch designated those moments when one senses something alive where no thing alive should be unheimlich. This is usually translated as ‘uncanny’, but it literally translates as ‘unhomely’. According to Jentsch, the
effect of the uncanny can easily be achieved when one undertakes to reinterpret some kind of lifeless thing as part of an organic creature. […] In the dark, a rafter covered with nails thus becomes the jaw of a fabulous animal, a lonely lake becomes the gigantic eye of a monster and the outline of a cloud or shadow becomes a threatening satanic face. Fantasy, which is indeed always a poet, is able now and then to conjure up the most detailed terrifying vision out of the most harmless and indifferent phenomena.5
In 1919 Sigmund Freud would follow Jentsch with his own explanations for such experiences, but however you wish to explain them, de la Mare is, as Peter Howarth has pointed out, the most uncanny of writers, a poet who can make us feel un-at-home in the world.6 ‘John Mouldy’ doesn’t just see the uncanny – it hears it too. Though ‘whis’pring about’ (l. 8) might mean the drips are ‘whisp’ring about’, as in ‘running about’, it could also be that they are whispering about someone or something (John Mouldy? The narrator?).
‘Creep over him’ (l. 12) has the same number of stresses but fewer syllables than equivalent lines elsewhere. Because of this, the line, like the rat, passes across the reader with unexpected quickness and closeness.
A ‘brown rat of Norway’ (l. 11) can weigh up to twice as much as a black rat. Originating, not from Norway, as was once popularly believed, but probably from China, the brown rat is believed to have arrived in England in the eighteenth century (so, long after the first arrival of the bubonic plague).7 Its natural preference for damp habitats makes it well suited to a city’s sewers, or, as here, its dripping cellars. ‘The ‘Dog-star’ (l. 10) is Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky and a star which has since Ancient Greece been associated with the dog days of summer and hence with heat and drought. But, while this may be a summer night, the Dog-star here is ‘bleak and grim’.
NOTES
1. The biographical facts in this paragraph are derived from Theresa Whistler’s The Life of Walter de la Mare: Imagination of the Heart (London: Duckworth, 1993).
2. Animal Stories: Chosen, Arranged and in Some Part Rewritten by Walter de la Mare (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), pp. xxi–xxii.
3. See Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 132.
4. Walter de la Mare, Early One Morning in the Spring (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), pp. 290–1.
5. ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1906): Ernst Jentsch, translated by Roy Sellars in Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, edited by Jo Collins and John Jervis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 216–28: p. 224.
6. See Peter Howarth, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 122–8.
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_rat.
The Funeral
They dressed us up in black,
Susan and Tom and me;
And, walking through the fields
All beautiful to see,
5
With branches high in the air
And daisy and buttercup,
We heard the lark in the clouds, –
In black dressed up.
They took us to the graves,
10
Susan and Tom and me,
Where the long grasses grow
And the funeral tree:
Came softly out of the sky
15
And blew in Susan’s hair,
As I stood close by.
Back through the fields we came,
Tom and Susan and me,
And we sat in the nursery together,
20
And had our tea.
And, looking out of the window,
I heard the thrushes sing;
But Tom fell asleep in his chair.
He was so tired, poor thing.
added to the 1916 edition of Songs of Childhood (1902)
If ‘John Mouldy’ is the most potent poem in Songs of Childhood, ‘The Funeral’ is the most sophisticated. The reason for this sophistication isn’t hard to explain. Songs of Childhood was repeatedly revised and altered by de la Mare, and ‘The Funeral’ was only added to the volume in 1916, to be a reply poem to the original’s ‘The Christening’. By 1916, de la Mare had published two novels, Henry Broken (1904) and The Return (1910), as well as a number of short stories, and had become an adept at introducing the techniques of the fiction writer into his verse. So, though the style of ‘The Funeral’ maintains the simplicity of the poems in the original collection, its content is informed as much by the novels of Henry James as it is by the rhymes of A Child’s Garden of Verses.
The poem reads like a psychological short story and plays like a movie. Point of view matters, and this point of view is used to let those descriptions of events reveal the child narrator’s perceptions and emotions. Particulars that would be found in a conventional description of a funeral are omitted. We are never told who it is who is looking after these children, what the service was like or who else is in the congregation. We don’t know if the children have parents. We don’t even know the identity of the deceased. Yet details which would matter to the child are attended to very carefully indeed.
In the first stanza, the three children look up to branches and clouds and birds and look about to daisy and buttercup. The fields are ‘All beautiful to see’ (l. 4); so too are ‘Susan and Tom and me’ (l. 2) in their unaccustomed clothes (this may be a clue to the sex of the narrator, who, if quite a bit older than Tom, must be passing the stage where a boy would regularly be called beautiful). The children are now ‘In black dressed up’ (l. 8), but a brown lark seen (and heard) high up and dark against the clouds looks as if it has donned funeral clothes of its own.
In the second stanza, the children are presumably supposed to be looking downwards and watching the coffin being lowered into the earth when their eyes fix on the long grasses and the funeral tree (the yew, which partly because of its great toxicity is the most common tree in English graveyards). But if all the children’s eyes wander to grass and tree as if they were still in the fields, not all the children can see the wind blowing in Susan’s hair like the spirit of the departed ‘as I stood close by’ (l. 16) – close by Susan, but also close by the unmentioned grave.
In the third stanza, the ordering of the children’s names, ‘Susan and Tom and me’, which we had in the first two stanzas, is changed to ‘Tom and Susan and me’(l. 18). What at first seemed a mere formula now appears to recall the actual sequence in which the children were dressed up and the order in which they walked. But in this last stanza, Susan is walking more slowly, the narrator slower still, weighed down by the day’s events and unvoiced grief. While the ‘We’ who in black heard the solitary lark in the clouds were all as one, at the end of the poem it is not ‘We’ who hear the thrushes sing and look out of the window, but ‘I’. Tom cannot hear them because he is asleep. Whether Susan does or does not we do not know, for she and the narrator are now lost to each other.
Tom is described as a ‘poor thing’ (l. 24), presumably because he is the youngest child and is tired after the day’s outing, though the phrase also seems to be picking up how an adult’s voice will be commiserating with the recently bereaved young boy. By falling asleep, Tom may also look like a dead child. At the start of the twentieth century, the infant mortality rate was still extremely high. Perhaps the funeral the children attend is that of another child, most likely a sibling. This might help explain why Susan and Tom and I are repeatedly joined by a fourth figure: the lark in black, the wind that comes out of the sky as if it were a soul coming down from heaven. They are, as it were, four children until the interment has laid that fourth child to rest.
Walter de la Mare’s own early childhood was likewise shadowed by death. A sister, Ethel Lucy, died shortly before he was born. An uncle, who was effectively part of de la Mare’s immediate family, died when he was three. Most significantly of all, de la Mare’s father, James Delamare, died when Walter was four. Of his father’s death de la Mare would write:
Somewhere in memory – in that densely packed yet impenetrable darkness – must lie concealed the record of my own experience when my father died in my fifth year. I can recall two sharp and meaningful glimpses of him, one of them perhaps that of bidding him goodbye; but of his death and of what immediately followed it there remains recallable not a shadow. On the other hand a sorrow was not less real because it has been forgotten; and to an observer a child may seem indifferent only because his one desire is to hide his true feelings.1
In de la Mare’s life, as in his poetry, his father’s death must have been a strong psychological prompt for all those graves and revenants, yet it is never straightforwardly recalled and expressed.
His first ten years were regarded by de la Mare as the fullest of his life, a time when his imagination and perception were more acute and alive than they could be again. While he had six siblings, including Ethel Lucy, his chief companions were the two closest to him in age: James Herbert (Bert), who was two years older than him, and Ada Mary Frances (Poppy), two years his junior. De la Mare also had a very loving relationships with his mother, a much older sister Florence (Flo) and with the family servant Martha (Pattie). On the death of de la Mare’s father, the de la Mare family moved from a house in Charlton to a terraced house in the London suburb of Forest Hill. This was technically an urban address, but suburbia had not yet swallowed the countryside around London, and living on the edge of the city gave the de la Mare children access to open fields. If the pastoral is the countryside as experienced from the perspective of the city, de la Mare’s was very definitely a pastoral childhood. ‘The Funeral’ may be pure fiction, yet in key respects the story is not far from de la Mare’s own.2
NOTES
1. Walter de la Mare, Early One Morning in the Spring, pp. 293–4.
2. These facts are derived from Theresa Whistler’s The Life of Walter de la Mare.
Autumn
There is a wind where the rose was;
Cold rain where sweet grass was;
And clouds like sheep
Stream o’er the steep
5
Grey skies where the lark was.
Nought gold where your hair was;
Nought warm where your hand was;
But phantom, forlorn,
Beneath the thorn,
10
Your ghost where your face was.
Sad winds where your voice was;
Tears, tears where my heart was;
And ever with me,
Child, ever with me,
15
Silence where hope was.
from Poems (1906)
‘Autumn’ reads like a lament for a dead child and may indeed recall a friend from de la Mare’s childhood, about which there is plenty we don’t know. Still, the poem may be as much an elegy to childhood itself as to any particular childhood companion. In Poems (1906), ‘Autumn’ is placed after ‘Myself’, a poem which reads like a companion piece and which describes a ‘garden, grey/With mists of autumntide’ wherein silently plays ‘A little child like me’. ‘Myself’ finishes with the narrator ‘alone’ in the garden, ‘Myself with me’. De la Mare would repeatedly return to this sense of having a double or ghost-self. For instance, t
he lovely children’s rhyme ‘The Double’, from the 1922 collection Down-Adown-Derry, finds a young girl narrator spinning round until her dizziness creates a ‘ghost’ of herself that is ‘a fairy child’. Martha Bremser comments that the ‘de la Marean child is able not only to step out of the self and to observe his double but to step out of time, almost as though seeing the ghost of the child that will remain further on in time’.1
‘Autumn’, which originally had the title ‘The Lost Playmate’, dates from 1903, the year of the first publication of the long-lost works of the metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne (1636–74). Traherne, whose feelings for the transcendent and departed intensities of childhood were similar to de la Mare’s, was a writer de la Mare much treasured. In Traherne’s ‘Shadows in the Water’, the narrator recalls standing next to water in infancy:
I fancy’d other Feet
Came mine to touch or meet;
As by som[e] Puddle I did play
Another World within it lay.2
The poem explores this glimpsed other world and how ‘Our second Selv[e]s these shadows be’. The last stanza reads:
Of all the Play-mates which I knew
That here I do the Image view
In other Selv[e]s; what can it mean?
But that below the purling Stream
Som[e] unknown Joys there be
Laid up in Store for me;
To which I shall, when that thin Skin
Is broken, be admitted in.3
Such a sense of another world accessible to childhood and its connection both to the life before birth and the existence that may follow death, along with the attendant notion of a ghostly twin self, chimed with de la Mare’s own deep sense of things. Is this the lost playmate the poem has in mind?