Reading Walter de la Mare
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We had been talking easily and warmly together, in such a way that there was no knowing what any one thought, because we were in electrical contact and each leapt to complete the other’s words, just as if some poet had chosen to use the form of an eclogue and had made us the two shepherds who were to utter his mind through our dialogue.11
The echoes and similarities in the work of the two writers can read like a straightforward continuing of their form of conversation.
‘Longlegs’ seems to have been inspired by a stay with the Thomases at their house in Wick Green in the spring of 1910. On 8 May Thomas was signing himself ‘Longlegs’ in a letter to de la Mare, and I would imagine de la Mare wrote the poem either during his stay or in a thank-you letter – it is impossible be sure because Thomas appears to have burned all the letters he still had from de la Mare in a great bonfire of private correspondence made before he went to the Front in 1917.12 Helen Thomas recalls how she and Edward would call ‘coo-ee’ to their children across the combe, in order to cheer them up on their way home from school.13 Invisible through the foliage, and still half an hour from their destination, the children would ‘coo-ee’ back.
Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring recalls an incident cycling over Salisbury Plain:
A motor car overtook me in the village, scattering a group of boys.
‘Look out!’ cried one, and as the thing passed by, turned to the next boy with, ‘There’s a fine motor; worth more than you are; cost a lot of money.’
Is this not the awakening of England? At least, it is truth. One pink foxy boy laughed in my face as if there had been iron bars or a wall of plate glass dividing us; another waited till I had started, to hail me –
‘Longlegs’.14
The nickname suited Thomas: he was a great walker and considerably taller than the more sedentary de la Mare. The poet–critic Angela Leighton points out that, as Wat is short for Walter, Wat the hare may be a jokey self-portrait of the ever-listening de la Mare.15 The inspiration for the white tree-maid is, I assume, Helen Thomas.
NOTES
1. Walter de la Mare, Come Hither, vol. 1, p. 365.
2. Walter de la Mare, Down-Adown-Derry: A Book of Fairy Poems (London: Constable, 1922), p. 112.
3. Helen Thomas, As It Was and World Without End (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 119.
4. Edward Thomas, review of Walter de la Mare, Poems, in the Daily Chronicle, 9 November 1906, in Edward Thomas, A Language Not to be Betrayed: Selected Poems of Edward Thomas, selected, with an introduction by Edna Longley (Manchester: Carcanet, 1981), pp. 97–8: p. 97.
5. Edward Thomas, Collected Poems, with a foreword by Walter de la Mare (London: Selwyn and Blount, 1920), p. xii.
6. Ibid.
7. For a sketch of Thomas and de la Mare’s circle in St George’s Yard, see Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France: the Last Years of Edward Thomas (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), p. 93.
8. Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 36.
9. Edward Thomas’s Poets, edited by Judy Kendall (Manchester, Carcanet, 2007), p. 133.
10. Helen Thomas, undated letter to Walter de la Mare, Walter de la Mare Archive, Bodleian Library, Box 132.
11. Edward Thomas, Light and Twilight (London: Duckworth, 1911), p. 47.
12. On 24 April 1910, Thomas writes of de la Mare coming down that Friday (which would have been 29 April). He signs himself ‘Longlegs’ in a letter postmarked 8 May. Poet to Poet: Edward Thomas’s Letters to Walter de la Mare, edited by Judy Kendall, transcriber’s preface by Piers Pennington (Bridgend: Seren, 2012), pp. 76–8.
13. Helen Thomas, As It Was and World Without End, p. 133.
14. Edward Thomas, In Pursuit of Spring (London, Edinburgh, Dublin and New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1914), pp. 175–6.
15. Angela Leighton, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press, 2018), p. 134.
King David
King David was a sorrowful man:
No cause for his sorrow had he:
And he called for the music of a hundred harps,
To ease his melancholy.
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They played till they all fell silent:
Played – and play sweet did they;
But the sorrow that haunted the heart of King David
They could not charm away.
He rose; and in his garden
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Walked by the moon alone.
A nightingale in a cypress-tree
Jargoned on and on.
King David lifted his sad eyes
Into the dark-boughed tree –
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‘Tell me, thou little bird that singest,
Who taught my grief to thee?’
But the bird in no wise heeded;
And the king in the cool of the moon
Hearkened to the nightingale’s sorrowfulness,
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Till all his own was gone.
from Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (1913)
‘Old King Cole’ has been transformed, and in place of the merry old soul of the nursery rhyme, we have a melancholy one: King David, the psalmist of the Old Testament. David used his harp to heal the mental distress of others. In 1 Samuel 16:23 we learn: ‘And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp and played with his hand; so Saul was refreshed and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.’ But here it is David who is cast down. Jeremy Dibble suggests that this is due to David’s guilt over his adultery with Bathsheba and the death of Uriel and his grief over the death of his son Absalom.1 But while the figure of King David can’t help but bring such sadnesses to mind, the poem explicitly says that the melancholy it describes has no cause.
There is no single passage in the Bible that closely matches the story told in ‘King David’, and, as a matter of fact, there are no nightingales (l. 11) in the Bible. King David, garden and nightingales are all mentioned together in The Conference of the Birds by the medieval Persian poet Farid ud-din Attar, Attar of Nishapur, in which the nightingale sings like David in ‘love’s garden’.2 But the lines where they come together most strongly are omitted from the abridged translation by Edward Fitzgerald, the only English translation readily available to de la Mare at the time of Peacock Pie, so this may be a coincidence. Less likely to be a coincidence are the poem’s resemblances to Hans Christian’s Andersen’s tale ‘The Nightingale’ and to Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.
De la Mare could himself be melancholic, and he strongly valued the transcendent effect of birdsong. Nevertheless, ‘King David’ may have been less inspired by his own experience than that of the nightingale-loving Edward Thomas. When Thomas wrote to de la Mare in June 1909, commenting on a large batch of poems sent him by his friend, ‘King David’ was one of only four Thomas did not like.3 The chief objection may have been stylistic – the archaism of some of the language, though entirely fitted to the poem’s theme, may not have been to Thomas’s taste, but, since Thomas’s ‘melancholy’ was what we would term ‘clinical depression’, and since he experienced the songs of nightingales as profound comfort rather than cure, Thomas may also have felt the experience of King David did not ring quite true.4,5
‘King David’ will be known to many from its 1919 setting by the composer Herbert Howells (1892–1983). Howells, who first met de la Mare when he was seventeen or eighteen, was to set a number of de la Mare poems to music but professed himself ‘prouder to have written King David than almost anything else of mine’. De la Mare, for his part, appears to have thought the setting definitive, telling Howells he did not want anyone else to set the poem.6 De la Mare’s talent for the compressed lyric narrative and for the emotional development within it must also have proved very attractive to Howells, demanding as it does to be matched in the melodic and harmonic development of the setting. In the case of ‘King David’, that journey not only
includes harps and nightingale but the movement from a melancholic E flat minor to a conclusion in E major that is, as the Howells scholar Christopher Palmer points out, the Edenic key of Schubert and Delius. In this, Howells was showing a profound rapport not just with the explicit narrative of the poem but with the connection between Edenic sound and birdsong to be found elsewhere in de la Mare’s work.7 Howells told Christopher Palmer: ‘I always enjoyed talking music to de la Mare; he was one of the few poets I’ve known who really understood music – one always felt he was on one’s wavelength, for instance his concept of “rhythm” was identical with one’s own.’8
De la Mare’s poems, especially those from Peacock Pie, proved to be great favourites with a host of other composers besides Howells, including: Benjamin Britten (1913–76), Arthur Bliss (1891–1975), Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) and Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (1889–1960). Richard Stokes’s statement in the Penguin Book of English Song that there have been more settings of de la Mare poems than any other English poet can’t be far wide of the mark.9 Colin Scott-Sutherland, citing Stephen Banfield’s two-volume work Sensibility and the English Song, finds that, as of 1985, there were 126 settings of de la Mare’s poems, ‘a total only exceeded by settings of Shakespeare (150) and of Housman (162)’.10 But this is a very conservative count. In her bibliography of Solo Song Settings of the Poetry of Walter de la Mare, Adèle L. Paxton discovers nearly 800 solo settings, so the total number of settings will be higher still.11
l. 11. ‘cypress-tree’ is a tree that has long been associated with death; it is famously the coffin wood of ‘Come away, come away, death,/ And in sad cypress let me be laid’ in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Act II, Sc. 4) where it is sung by the melancholic clown, Feste.
l. 12. ‘Jargoned’ is used in its Middle English sense of ‘twittering’ or ‘chattering’.
NOTES
1. Jeremy Dibble, ‘Hidden Artifice: Howells as Songwriter’ in The Music of Herbert Howells, edited by Philip A. Cooke and David Maw (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 62–85: p. 80.
2. Farid ud-din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, translated by Afham Darbandi and Dick Davis (London: Penguin, 1984).
3. Edward Thomas to Walter de la Mare, letter, 8 June 1909, Poet to Poet: Edward Thomas’s Letters to Walter de la Mare, p. 65.
4. That same year Thomas set down his own experience of nightingale song in The South Country (London: J. M. Dent, 1932; originally published 1909), pp. 35–6.
5. It may be in response to Thomas’s objection that in the 1944 edition of Collected Rhymes and Verses, de la Mare altered the word ‘ease’ (l. 4) to ‘solace’, thus sacrificing some of the music of the original (the word makes an internal consonance with ‘cause’ (l. 2) and an internal assonance with the repeated ‘he’ (l. 2 and l. 3) and ‘melancholy’ (l .4)). This change makes its way into the revised (1974) edition of the 1969 Complete Poems, which is the text usually followed by this edition. But since de la Mare sanctioned ‘ease’ for publication in the Edward Ardizonne-illustrated 1945 edition of Peacock Pie, which remains in print, I feel justified in deviating from my usual practice of following the revised Complete Poems and have kept the poem’s original wording.
6. Christopher Palmer, Herbert Howells: A Study (Seven Oaks: Novell, 1978), p. 16.
7. I am following, and in part repeating, the account of the setting by Christopher Palmer, ibid., pp. 41–2.
8. Paul Spicer, ‘Howells’ Use of the Melisma: Word Setting in His Songs and Choral Music’, in The Music of Herbert Howells, edited by Philip A. Cooke and David Maw (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 100–117: p. 102.
9. Richard Stokes, The Penguin Book of English Song: Seven Centuries of Poetry from Chaucer to Auden (London: Penguin Classics, 2016), p. 742, on the authority of Brian N. S. Gooch and David S. Thacker, Musical Settings of Late Victorian and Modern British Literature: A Catalogue (New York: Garland, 1976).
10. Colin Scott-Sutherland, ‘Song of the Water Midden’, Walter de la Mare Society Magazine, Nov. 2010, pp. 33–46: p. 34.
11. Adèle L. Paxton, Solo Song Settings of the Poetry of Walter de la Mare: A Bibliography (London: Walter de la Mare Society, 2011).
An Epitaph
Here lies a most beautiful lady,
Light of step and heart was she;
I think she was the most beautiful lady
That ever was in the West Country.
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But beauty vanishes; beauty passes;
However rare – rare it be;
And when I crumble, who will remember
This lady of the West Country?
from The Listeners and Other Poems (1912)
A choral scholarship gave de la Mare the education his family could not afford, at St Paul’s School in London, where he studied until he had to leave and find work at sixteen. Long hours in the cathedral and its churchyard fostered a fondness for epitaphs. Later, the epitaphs of Robert Herrick (1591–1674) and essays and poems by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) revealed how the epitaph could be a species of literature. This taste for epitaphs was shared with Edward Thomas, who had also attended St Paul’s, and both writers combed churchyards for choice examples, some of which they would place in their anthologies. Indeed, graveyards were a particular bond. When visiting Dunwich Graveyard when it was tumbling into the sea, Thomas procured de la Mare a skull, which de la Mare christened ‘Moses’ and kept in a Viennese cake box.1
Writers of actual epitaphs will occasionally have literary pretensions. Still, what we find in churchyards, church memorials and cemeteries are, in essence, folk rhymes, and de la Mare’s and Thomas’s interest in them, and de la Mare’s interest in the virtues of good ‘doggerel’, is of a piece with their interest in popular art, such as folk song, folk rhymes and folk tales. As W. B. Yeats remarked of ‘An Epitaph’: ‘There is not an original sentence in this poem, yet it will live for centuries.’2
For such a short poem, there is much repetition and near repetition; and yet the poem never says the same thing twice. ‘Here lies a most beautiful lady’ (l. 1) is a polite compliment to the deceased; ‘I think she was the most beautiful lady/That ever was in the West Country’ (ll. 3–4) feels personal and heartfelt. In the case of ‘Beauty vanishes’ and ‘beauty passes’ (l. 5), if, as it seems, this lady died young, her beauty will have vanished for the beholder; had she lived, it would have passed. The repetition of ‘rare’, divided by one of de la Mare’s dashes, is an emotional one, a long moment to dwell on what has passed; it also makes us wonder, at least in the second instance, whether ‘rare’ may be used to mean rarely occurring as well as of rare quality.
Theresa Whistler identifies Naomi Royde-Smith (see ‘“The Hawthorn Hath a Deathly Smell”’) as the ‘beautiful lady’ and, on that basis, Wales as the West Country.3 De la Mare does seem to have indicated to Royde-Smith that she inspired ‘An Epitaph’ when, on 22 January 1912, he sent her a copy of the poem.4 However, since a poem called an ‘An Epitaph’ is praised by Thomas in his letter to de la Mare of 4 November 1908, and since de la Mare was not to meet Royde-Smith until the spring of 1911, it is safer to conclude either that de la Mare had someone else in mind – he was close to Ella Coltman, who at least lived in the right part of the world – or that the lady is as fictitious as her epitaph.
NOTES
1. Edward Thomas, letter to Walter de la Mare, 14 June 1908, Poet to Poet: Edward Thomas’s Letters to Walter de la Mare, p. 44. For the detail about the cake box, see Russell Brain, Tea with Walter de La Mare (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 34.
2. Quoted in Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 210.
3. Ibid., pp. 179–80.
4. See Jill Benton, Avenging Muse: Naomi Royde-Smith, 1875–1964 (Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris, 2015), p. 153.
Nobody Knows
Often I’ve heard the Wind sigh
By the ivied orchard wall,
Over the leaves in the dark night,
Breathe a sighing call,
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And faint away in the silence,
While I, in my bed,
Wondered, ’twixt dreaming and waking,
What it said.
Nobody knows what the Wind is,
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Under the height of the sky,
Where the hosts of the stars keep far away house
And its wave sweeps by –
Just a great wave of the air,
Tossing the leaves in its sea,
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And foaming under the eaves of the roof
That covers me.
And so we live under deep water,
All of us, beasts and men,
And our bodies are buried down under the sand,
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When we go again;
And leave, like the fishes, our shells,
And float on the Wind and away,
To where, o’er the marvellous tides of the air,
Burns day.