Reading Walter de la Mare
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People’s views on the metre of ‘Autumn’ will vary, depending on the way they choose to recite it.4 The ambiguity of metres such as these comes from the way de la Mare is taking a cue not from literary verse but from song, especially folk song and other types of oral verse. That influence of folk song may also help explain how de la Mare’s words can be reminiscent not just of a folksong-influenced composer like Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) but also singer songwriters of the English folk revival of the late 1960s, such as Nick Drake, Richard Thompson or Sandy Denny.
The most noted poet to be combining the literary and folk traditions at the time de la Mare was writing was Thomas Hardy. The American poet Horace Gregory has pointed out a Hardyesque quality to ‘Autumn’.5 Still, the Hardy poems Gregory cites as possible influences, ‘The Garden Seat’ and ‘Transformation’, were both collected some years after the publication of ‘Autumn’: ‘Transformation’ is from Moments of Vision (1917); the very de la Marean ‘The Garden Seat’, with its ghosts and repetitions, comes from Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), by which time the two poets knew each other. So, if there is here a case of the influence of one poet on the other, it is the influence of de la Mare on Hardy and not the other way round.
NOTES
1. Martha Bremser, ‘The Voice of Solitude: the Children’s Verse of Walter de la Mare’, Children’s Literature, vol. 21, 1993, pp. 66–91: p. 77.
2. Thomas Traherne, The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne, edited by Glady I. Wade (London: P. J. & A. E. Dobell, 1932), p. 181.
3. Ibid., p. 183.
4. To my ears, the metre rests on two principal stresses in all its lines. These help the poem enact its rhythm of loss: each time the cadence of the line either rises (‘There is a wind’) or rests on a pitch (‘Sad wind’), where ‘sad’ is a strong secondary stress, stating and underscoring present coldnesses and absences. This is counterbalanced by how the end of the line falls away (‘rose was’, ‘grass was’) underscoring the passing away of what had once been there. But others may choose to count ‘sad’ or ‘was’ as metrebearing stresses.
5. Horace Gregory, ‘The Nocturnal Traveller: Walter de la Mare’, in The Dying Gladiators and Other Essays (New York: Grove Press; London Evergreen Books: 1961), pp. 63–78: p. 73.
The Birthnight: To F.
Dearest, it was a night
That in its darkness rocked Orion’s stars;
A sighing wind ran faintly white
Along the willows, and the cedar boughs
5
Laid their wide hands in stealthy peace across
The starry silence of their antique moss:
No sound save rushing air
Cold, yet all sweet with Spring,
And in thy mother’s arms, couched weeping there,
10
Thou, lovely thing.
from Poems (1906)
The novelist William Golding (1911–93) once said ‘The Birthnight’ had influenced his outlook through ‘its rush of continuity: there is no full stop in it. And the way it articulates itself in a single breath of feeling and exclamation’ and that he had attempted to ‘do the same, in a novel’.1
This is literally and figuratively a poem of breath. The Latin word for breath, but also for life, soul or spirit is ‘anima’. From it we get the word ‘animism’, the belief system that gives souls to non-human things including plants, animals and the weather. Poets often animate the world in their tropes, but they don’t usually mean us to take the idea seriously. De la Mare, on the other hand, imparts an amazed earnestness to his depiction of the life of wind, trees and stars. It was a night which ‘rocked Orion’s stars’ (l. 2) – ‘rocked’ because the universe seemed changed and also because it was a night that rocked the stars to sleep as if they were a newborn babe. ‘A sighing wind ran faintly white’ (l. 3) may simply indicate the appearance of willow leaves turning in the wind or may, as Golding noted, be observing how ‘on a very dark night a light wind […] can give the strange effect of diminishing the darkness’.2 This wind not only sighs but runs, then, while the no-less-alive-but-reverent cedar boughs lay ‘their wide hands in stealthy peace’ (l. 5). At the end, couched tenderly in her last small line, is the baby herself. And, as Eric Ormsby observes, with the description of her as ‘Thou, lovely thing’ (l. 10), the child herself becomes a ‘thing amongst things, and in this, like the stars and the wind, the willows and the mosses.’3
The cause of this great soul-seeing in the wide world was Florence de la Mare, born not in spring but on 21 October 1899.4 Florence was the de la Mares’ first child and was to be followed by Richard in 1901, Jinnie in 1903 and Colin in 1906. De la Mare had been reluctant to wed Elfrida, who was ten years his senior, prior to the pregnancy, but he was to prove a devoted father as well as a very hands-on one – there can’t have been many men born in 1873 who were, as de la Mare was, quite comfortable with changing a nappy.
You wouldn’t guess it from ‘The Birthnight’ any more than you would guess that this was a metaphorical spring (l. 8) rather than a literal one, but Florence was born in a rented villa in the South London suburb of Beckenham. The ‘To F.’ of the title was added, presumably with Florence’s approval, when the poem appeared in Collected Poems 1901–18. Still, the poem always was very much to Florence rather than simply about her. It is an answer to the question, ‘Daddy, what was it like, the night when I was born?’
NOTES
1. John Bayley, ‘No Full Stop: the movement of Golding’s fiction’, from the publication accompanying the British Council exhibition entitled ‘William Golding 1911–93’, 1994. At the time of writing, the article was freely available at: www.walterdelamare.co.uk/25.html.
2. Ibid.
3. Eric Ormsby, Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place, p. 43.
4. All the biographical details here derive from Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare. The diary is quoted on p. 90.
Napoleon
‘What is the world, O soldiers?
It is I:
I, this incessant snow,
This northern sky;
5
Soldiers, this solitude
Through which we go
Is I.’
from Poems (1906)
The poem’s speaker is the Napoleon of the Russian campaign of 1812, a campaign in which, according to the historian Adam Zamoyski, between ‘the end of June 1812 and the end of February 1813, about a million people died, fairly equally divided between two sides’.1 Of these, ‘400,000 French and allied troops’ perished, ‘less than a quarter of them in battle’.2
As the poetry-loving military commander and Viceroy of India, Field Marshal Earl Wavell, writes in his anthology Other Men’s Flowers: ‘De la Mare’s comment on Napoleon’s monstrous egotism … may have been inspired by the well-known conclusion of the letter in which Napoleon recorded the destruction of his army in 1812 –“The Emperor is in excellent health”.’3 This was the 29th Bulletin of the Grande Armée, dated 3 December but dictated on the fifth. Perhaps the final remark was there ‘to reassure his subjects that he was alive and well’, as Philip G. Dwyer and Peter McPhee suggest, but the rest of the letter, in which Napoleon blames everyone and everything for the defeat except himself, is scarcely less egotistical in tone.4 De la Mare may also have in mind Napoleon’s remarks to Prince Klemens von Metternich in Dresden the following year:
I may defy man, but not the elements; the cold has ruined me. In one night I lost thirty thousand horses. I have lost everything, except honour and the consciousness of what I owe to a brave people who, after such enormous misfortunes, have given me fresh proofs of their devotion and their conviction that I alone can rule them.5
Napoleon is also reported to have said on this occasion: ‘a man such as I does not concern himself much about the lives of a million men’ (or words to that effect: Metternich indicates Napoleon’s actual language was too vulgar to be written down).6
A further possible prompt for the ‘It is I’ of
de la Mare’s poem can be found in the notes to his 1923 anthology Come Hither, where he quotes a passage from a letter written by Amelia Opie from Paris to a friend in England in 1802:
Just before the review was expected to begin, we saw several officers in gorgeous uniforms ascend the stairs, one of whom, whose helmet seemed entirely of gold, was, as I was told, [Napoleon’s stepson] Eugène de Beauharnais. A few minutes afterwards there was a rush of officers down the stairs, and amongst them I saw a short, pale man, with his hat in his hand … but, though my friend said in a whisper, “C’est lui,” [‘It is he’] I did not comprehend that I beheld Buonaparte, till I saw him stand alone at the gate. […]
At length the review ended; too soon for me. The Consul sprang from his horse – we threw open our door again, and, as he slowly reascended the stairs, we saw him very near us, and in full face again, while his bright, restless, expressive, and, as we fancied, dark blue eyes, beaming from under long black eyelashes, glowed over us with a scrutinising but complacent look …
I could not speak; I had worked myself up to all my former enthusiasm for Buonaparte; and my frame still shook with the excitement I had undergone.7
De la Mare comments that, ‘as to those “dark blue eyes”’, ‘Amelia Opie was right in using the word “fancied”, as there seems little doubt that Napoleon’s eyes were a light blue grey – “gris bleu”.’8 De la Mare then heads off into a digression on the subject of eyes and eye colour.
The odd way that the ‘I’ of Napoleon seems to be connected in de la Mare’s mind to the eyes of Napoleon surfaces again in his 1930 extended essay-cum-anthology Desert Islands (1930), where he recalls a dream in which he witnessed the exhumation of Napoleon:
The attenuated body – that of the young Napoleon, not the hermit of St Helena – was clothed to the feet in a long dark military coat, stained with damp and mould. I recall no buttons on the breast, or they were too much tarnished to be conspicuous. On the head was a three-cornered hat. The lower part of the ashy face beneath the ivory brows was narrowed and fallen in under the high cheek bones; and the two eyes in that head gazed out at me with a marvellous effulgence. I gazed back – those eyes that in life few men had ever dared to meet – then turned my head and spoke in astonishment to those who stood near me but whom I could not see, and said, ‘Then his eyes were not blue, or grey-blue? They are bright brown.’
Then I turned again and met that intense yet unspeculating gaze once more. ‘No, not brown,’ I added in a low voice, and as if to myself, ‘orange-brown’. But this too was inaccurate; flat, wide, unblinking, intent, they were far more red than orange – a clear lively red. And there passed through my mind as I continued to meet and bandy thoughts with them, vague tumultuous remembrances of this supreme egoist and man of genius, and of the glory that was gone….
In searching afterwards for some germ of this dream, I recalled at once an unusually intelligent black cat, once an admired pet, named Caesar. It died some months ago, miserably shrunken. […] A few hours before it died the colour of its eyes became changed to a curiously bright strange green. And now, as I look back, these eyes too had looked out at me – as I myself looked down in horror at the poor dying creature – like those of the dead Napoleon; as if there were some secret between us, as if in some way I shared the responsibility, the blame for what had passed.9
‘Napoleon’ is only seven lines on a subject that seems suited to the epic, and it could in theory have been even shorter. Joe Griffiths points out that it would be possible to reset the poem as three lines: two pentameter lines and an alexandrine. However, in creating the stanza form we have here, de la Mare is able perfectly to match his subject: lines that trudge through the vastness repeatedly contract back to the man who has willed that trudge, the repeated ‘I’ of Napoleon.10
NOTES
1. Adam Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), p. 536.
2. Ibid.
3. A. P. Wavell, Other Men’s Flowers, memorial edition (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), p. 95.
4. The French Revolution and Napoleon: a Sourcebook, edited by Philip G. Dwyer and Peter McPhee (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 184.
5. Metternich’s Europe: Selected Documents, edited by Mack Walker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1968), p. 27.
6. Ibid., p. 29.
7. Walter de la Mare, Come Hither: a Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages, illustrated by Diana Bloomfield (Harmondsworth: Puffin and Longman, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 422–3.
8. Ibid, p. 423.
9. Walter de la Mare, Desert Islands, with decorations by Rex Whistler (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), pp. 205–6.
10. See Joe Griffiths, ‘The Changing World of Walter de la Mare’s Poetry’, The Walter de la Mare Society Journal, no. 10, January 2007, pp. 38–48: p. 47.
Longlegs
Longlegs – he yelled ‘Coo-ee!’
And all across the combe
Shrill and shrill it rang – rang through
The clear green gloom.
5
Fairies there were a-spinning,
And a white tree-maid
Lifted her eyes, and listened
In her rain-sweet glade.
Bunnie to bunnie stamped; old Wat
10
Chin-deep in bracken sate;
A throstle piped, ‘I’m by, I’m by!’
Clear to his timid mate.
And there was Longlegs straddling,
And hearkening was he,
15
To distant Echo thrilling back
A thin ‘Coo-ee!’
from Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (1913)
Longlegs yells high and loud enough, and listens hard enough, to hear Echo return his call back across the combe, a ‘combe’ (l. 2) being a steep, narrow valley without running water at the bottom. With Longlegs’ voice coming from one side and then the other, it is as if his long legs are ‘straddling’ (l. 13) the gulf.
As it goes from one side to another, the cry makes little echoes on its way: ‘Shrill and shrill’, ‘rang – rang’ (l. 3), ‘Bunnie to bunnie’ (l. 9), ‘I’m by, I’m by!’ (l. 11). Some of these little echoes are also the sounds of one animal to another: the stamping of bunny to bunny is a warning signal; a throstle (a thrush) is calling to his ‘timid mate’. ‘Longlegs’, or to give him his full title ‘Daddy Longlegs’, is the dialect name for a crane-fly. ‘Wat’ is a dialect nickname for a hare. The name appears in a passage from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, which is quoted by de la Mare in Come Hither.1
At the end of the rhyme, Echo’s voice is literally ‘thrilling’ (l. 15): it is piercing or penetrating. It helps to ‘coo-ee’ high as well as loud, if you want your call to carry. Longlegs is male, but assuming the sound coming back is a literal echo, it would now sound more female than male: Longlegs has been transformed into Echo. De la Mare doesn’t make much use of classical mythology, but his capitalisation of Echo inevitably recalls the story of Echo, found in Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Echo is cursed by Juno, her voice henceforth being a fainter repetition of another’s. Following this, Echo then falls in love with Narcissus, who rejects her advances. Venus answers Echo’s prayers by rendering her invisible.
When it appeared again in de la Mare’s 1922 collection of fairy poems, Down-Adown-Derry, ‘Longlegs’ was given the dedication ‘To E.T.’.2 E.T. was Edward Thomas (1878–1917). In the years before the First World War, Thomas was a prolific book reviewer, country writer and general man of letters. Though Helen Thomas, his wife, was to remember ‘pouncing on Poems of Childhood [sic] by de la Mare’ while looking through the many books her husband had to review, Thomas had reviewed Songs of Childhood with little praise.3 When he came to review Poems (1906), he was far more positive about the new poems, but also the old, which he now found the work of a man ‘whose every verse was his own, just as every nightingale’s egg is olive’.4
An acquaintance was struck up after Thomas wro
te to de la Mare asking to anthologise a poem. The two arranged to meet in a Mecca café in St George’s Yard in London. While waiting, de la Mare heard ‘presently out of a neighbouring court echoed that peculiarly leisurely footfall’.5 In this urban setting, the long-limbed, country-dwelling Thomas seemed like Gulliver in Lilliput. He and de la Mare then sat and talked ‘until the tactful waitresses piled chairs on the marble-topped tables around us as a tacit hint that we might outstay our welcome’.6
Not only would de la Mare and Thomas go on to meet most weeks in London, often in the company of other literary friends such as Ralph Hodgson (1871–1962), W. H. Davies (1871–1940), Edward Garnett (1868–1937) and John Freeman (1880–1929), Thomas also began inviting de la Mare to stay with him in Hampshire, and by 1909 the Thomas and de la Mare families were sharing their summer holidays.7 The two writers would regularly comment on one another’s work, and they also promoted one another in print. Thomas’s glowing reviews of The Listeners and Peacock Pie, many of whose poems he had looked at and commented upon over the preceding six years and helped to sort into their respective volumes, undoubtedly helped make de la Mare into a popular writer. But the admiration was genuine. Thomas told Eleanor Farjeon that in all the hundreds of books he had reviewed over the years, Peacock Pie was, along with Robert Frost’s North of Boston, the only pure gold he ever unearthed.8
There are numerous reminiscences of de la Mare’s work in the poems Thomas would produce after the end of 1914, when he turned to writing verse, many of which are documented by Judy Kendall in her book Edward Thomas’s Poets. Kendall also points out that, though Thomas never wrote a poem which explicitly addressed de la Mare, his poem ‘The Sun Used to Shine’, while principally addressing itself to Thomas’s friendship with the American poet Robert Frost (1874–1963), echoes Thomas’s story ‘The Stile’, from Light and Twilight (1911).9 A letter from Helen Thomas to de la Mare declares: ‘Edward loved you more than any man & his loveliest of all his essays “The Stile” enshrines his feeling for you.’10 Helen Thomas had reason to write as she did: her letter, though undated, was clearly composed after she had fallen out with Frost. Nevertheless, ‘The Stile’ depicts not just a strong friendship, but one whose conversation could be of a particular sort. At one point in the story, Thomas writes: