Reading Walter de la Mare
Page 5
from Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (1913)
Any child who can listen to it must know the wind in the leaves may have the sound of the sea. In this poem, this discovery becomes a mystical insight. The whole world turns strange as we sense what it is that nobody knows: the secrets discovered by those who have no body to weigh them down.
In the first verse, the narrator, at home in bed and half-awake, listens to the sound of the wind rustling the ivy by the orchard wall. It speaks a language one could maybe understand if one listened aright, and it makes a ‘call’ (l. 4). Whom it calls or what it signifies we are not told – as with the ‘sighing wind’ of ‘The Birthnight’, the depiction of the sighing, calling wind seems to be more of a literal apprehension of spirit, perhaps the Holy Spirit, but the rest of the rhyme may be taken as the narrator’s best guess.
It is the ‘hosts of the stars’ (l. 11), not ‘the host’: not many stars but stars like distant, lit houses by the seashore, whose hosts await their coming guests. The narrator, though not at home in house or world, knows that beyond the surface of this sea we call the wind and air there might be a true homecoming. In the third verse, the condition of all creatures of the earth has become that of the creatures of the sea. The phrase ‘like the fishes’ (l. 21) doesn’t refer to fishes having shells, but to the bodies of ‘beasts and men’ (l. 18) as being like shells which when shed at the point of death may allow souls to swim through the air in the way that fishes swim through water, the earth of the grave now being like the sand on the sea floor. Since air is now like water, men may swim up to the surface and the true light which lies beyond. The thought that we do not see the real sun and that we only see it as if we were under water is akin to Platonic and Neoplatonic thinking, but also in accord with Christian doctrine: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’, 1 Corinthians, 13:12. The depiction of the wind here also feels biblical, bringing to mind verses including John 3:8: ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’
The verse form of ‘Nobody Knows’ looks and sounds more regular than it is, de la Mare taking advantage of the metrical freedoms he allows himself, particularly in his children’s verse. Hear how the penultimate line of the second verse swells to match the expansiveness of the narrator’s contemplation of the wind as the sea, before covering ‘me’ in that verse’s small, but not quite so small, last line. Then hear how at the very end of the poem the two stresses of ‘Burns day’ (l. 24) break through the surface.
The Bells
Shadow and light both strove to be
The eight bell-ringers’ company,
As with his gliding rope in hand,
Counting his changes, each did stand;
5
While rang and trembled every stone,
To music by the bell-mouths blown:
Till the bright clouds that towered on high
Seemed to re-echo cry with cry.
Still swang the clappers to and fro,
10
When, in the far-spread fields below,
I saw a ploughman with his team
Lift to the bells and fix on them
His distant eyes, as if he would
Drink in the utmost sound he could;
15
While near him sat his children three,
And in the green grass placidly
Played undistracted on: as if
What music earthly bells might give
Could only faintly stir their dream,
20
And stillness make more lovely seem.
Soon night hid horses, children, all,
In sleep deep and ambrosial.
Yet, yet, it seemed, from star to star,
Welling now near, now faint and far,
25
Those echoing bells rang on in dream,
And stillness made even lovelier seem.
from The Listeners and Other Poems (1912)
Most English church bells are rung and not chimed. Each bell-ringer pulls on a rope, which tips the bell and swings the clapper to make the sound. The bell-ringers in this poem are ‘change ringing’: they are ringing the bells in a particular sequence, and because they are ‘method ringers’ who agree in advance on a ‘method’ that will generate the various sequences in which the bells are to be rung rather than listening to them being called out, each is ‘counting his changes’ (l. 4).
The bell-ringers can’t actually see the bells above their heads, only the bell ropes gliding through their hands, and, having a ceiling or two above them cushioning the sound, do not hear them at their loudest. The poem thus takes a true observation – that the sound of the bells will be louder at a certain distance from the bell tower than it is to the bell-ringers within it – and magnifies it hugely. The power of the bells carries on increasing, not just over distance but over time, becoming strongest after their sound has passed into silence, night and dream.
What is described in the poem is akin to what is known as the Romantic ‘after-image’. In ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, for instance, William Wordsworth’s pleasure in the daffodils is not just in the moment he first sees them, but when, later on his couch: ‘They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude’.1 Similarly, after Wordsworth’s ears have ceased to hear the song of the ‘The Solitary Reaper’, he finds that as he mounts up the hill: ‘The music in my heart I bore,/ Long after it was heard no more.’2 As Geoffrey Hartman points out, the Wordsworthian ‘after-image or echo may occur at a distance from the original experience, and still be part of it’, and the passage of time becomes of little consequence.3 ‘After-image’ is a term that de la Mare uses himself. In his story ‘The Green Room’, de la Mare writes of a face remembered from a photograph reappearing to haunt the protagonist ‘as unembodied an object as the after-image of a flower’.4 In ‘The Bells’, the after-image does not merely exist undiminished at a distance – that distance allows it to become ever more potent.
As the poem moves out in space and in distance from the bells, different listeners perceive the sound in their different ways. The ploughman seems to hear them as a call to prayer, or at least as heavenly peals far from soil and toil. His children, more attuned to the less earthly bells their father pines for, play on regardless. Come nightfall, the narrator feels the bells’ echo ring on into silence and a dreaming that is like the refrain of the seeming and dreaming experienced by the children.
It is common to think of shadows and echoes, dreams and mental seemings as diminishments of the real. In Plato’s The Republic, the parable of a firelit cave purports to reveal how most inhabit a world of shadows, and that only the philosopher can escape to truth and light and then report back. It is a conception that has little time for poetry – the art’s status as an imitation of an imitation, a shadow of a shadow, is one of the reasons the poets are thrown out of the Republic. Dreams have been looked on in much the same way, and Shakespeare conjures with such questions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. De la Mare, however, turns the whole Platonic scheme on its head. Each step away from the originating ‘real sound’ is a step towards rich silence and darkness that imagines sights it can no longer see and sound it can no longer hear. The thing itself is less to be valued than the effect it produces, the object is inferior to the shadow and the sound is less than its echo will be.
NOTES
1. William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, edited by Thomas Hutchinson, revised by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 149.
2. Ibid., p. 230.
3. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 269.
4. Walter de la Mare, Out of the Deep (London: British Library, 2017), p. 169.
The Listeners
‘Is there anybody
there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
5
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;
10
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
15
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
20
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;
25
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,
30
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,
35
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
from The Listeners and Other Poems (1912)
The Traveller knocks at a moonlit door to ask, ‘Is there anybody there?’ His horse grazes. They have come to a ‘lone house’ (l. 14), a solitary house but also a lonely one, with a turret from which a bird then flies out (l. 5), presumably disturbed by the knock. The Traveller then knocks at the door again, firmly and loudly (‘smote’ (l. 7)) repeating his question. While ‘no one’ descends to the Traveller and ‘no head’ (l. 10) leans out of the ‘leaf-fringed’ window, this no one and this no head behave as if they are someones: one of them comes down the stairs to the Traveller; the other leans out of the window and looks into the Traveller’s grey eyes. They are, as it were, answering the Traveller’s call. To confirm the haunting, we are told how ‘a host of phantom listeners’ dwelled in the ‘lone house then’ (l. 14). The ‘then’ might indicate either that the listeners used to dwell there and now no longer do or that they only dwelt there for that brief moment, summoned by the Traveller’s knock and cry. These listeners listen ‘in the quiet of the moonlight/ To that voice from the world of men’ (ll. 15–16) and crowd the dark stairs of an empty hall. If the Traveller has come from the world of men, he has arrived at a house that seems to be built beyond that world. Since ‘phantom’ tends to be a synonym for ‘ghost’, the obvious conclusion would be that this is either a haunted house or a place in the afterlife. And yet, since the word ‘phantom’ has traditionally been used to indicate delusions or dream images, it is also possible to think of these listeners as projections from the mind of the Traveller, beings not from the world of men because they are not really there at all. Ghosts or figments, the Traveller’s knock is answered by the Listeners, at least after a fashion: it is ‘their strangeness,/ Their stillness answering his cry’ (ll. 21–2) (my italics).
The horse carries on eating and the Traveller smites the door a third time. Rather than asking his question again, he makes a statement: ‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,/ That I kept my word’ (ll. 27–8). The Traveller needs whomever or whatever he thinks might be listening or capable of answering the door to pass on a message, to tell an unspecified ‘them’ that he came and that he kept his word. From this, we can infer both some promise made before the poem begins and that it is the Traveller’s coming to the house that is the act by which his word is kept. And yet has he kept his word? He certainly does not keep his words: each one of them falls ‘echoing through the shadowiness of the still house’ (l. 31); if they are kept by anyone it is the listeners rather than ‘the one man left awake’ (l. 32) – is this a house of sleep, or is ‘awake’ used euphemistically, making this a house of death? The Traveller, who must be ‘the one man’ (l. 32), then rides off. We are told that the listeners heard him and that a water-like silence ‘surged softly backward’ (l. 35) when the ‘plunging’ (l. 36) (literally ‘thrusting down’, but also figuratively diving down into the silence) ‘hoofs were gone’ (l. 36).
The poem, in my account at least, leaves certain key questions unanswered, or at least uncertain. This quality of indefiniteness is part of the poem’s great allure. In a lecture about how to teach and how not to teach poetry, and in particular ‘The Listeners’, to children, Michael Rosen admits, ‘I have never known who the Traveller and the listeners are, and I suspect I never will’, before going on to say: ‘I also think that its unknowability might be what’s important or interesting about it.’1 Not only is this a poem with the glamour of mystery, it has the power to raise in us greater and more troubling feelings as to our place in the world and our uncertainties.
This does not mean, of course, that there isn’t a part of us that is interested in hearing a definite answer. In his lifetime, many people asked de la Mare to supply one. His preferred response seems to have been that which he gave in his final interview, with Boris Ford: yes, he knew what he meant in the poem, but that the ‘meaning’s in the poem itself, or it’s nowhere. And if it’s not in the poem, then it’s certainly not worth bothering about.’2 The poet’s son Richard de la Mare recalled that in order to deal with the many enquiries about the poem’s meaning, his father ‘made up a particular explanation, but I think he was amused at the necessity for it’.3 This was probably the story given to the critic F. L. Lucas, who writes in his 1948 study The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal: ‘it should be remembered – I have it on the poet’s authority – that the Traveller is himself the ghost’.4 Since the explanation makes the one person in the poem you thought wasn’t a ghost into one, the answer seems almost too good to be true. Still, de la Mare does proffer a similar solution to his correspondent J. G. Syme on 7 February 1944, even if he then more or less takes it away again:
As to ‘The Listeners’ – I have frequently been asked to expound its meaning and in reply have usually suggested that the very kind enquirer should keep to any meaning he may have been able to find in it. As Lewis Carroll once said […] ‘Since words mean more than one means when one uses them, I shall be very pleased to accept whatever meanings you may have discovered’ in mine […] Moreover (quite between ourselves of course!), I am now a little vague concerning what was the intended meaning of those particular lines. Its rudiments, I think, were that the Traveller is a reincarnation revisiting the world beneath the glimpses of the moon, and there asking the same old unanswerable questions of the Listeners – only conceived but never embodied, who forever frequent, it would seem, this earthly existence, but then are even these rudiments definable – from the poem? Every poem, of course, to its last syllable is its meaning; to attempt any paraphrase of the poem is in some degree to change that meaning and its effect on the imagination, and often disastrously. What the poem (or even a letter for that matter) means is inherent in its terms and (however wide their implications may be) that meaning is nothing less and nothing different.5
The idea that the Traveller was envisioned as being a revenant, at some point in the poem’s composition if not necessarily in the final drafting, is given credence by the corrected page proofs of ‘The Listeners’ in which th
e line ‘Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight’ (l. 15) is an alteration of what had been ‘Stood listening awisp in the moonlight’.6 Full-blooded people aren’t usually ‘awisp’.
Hints, most notably that conspicuous capital T given to the Traveller, encourage us to read ‘The Listeners’ as an allegory. And one can offer a fairly convincing allegorical account of the poem: the bird flying from the turret could be interpreted as the departing soul, the horse as, perhaps, the unquestioning appetitive spirit of animal life, and so on. But allegory, or, at least, precise allegory in which all meanings are fixed, is not, I think, what de la Mare was after. Speaking privately of T. S. Eliot, de la Mare declared: ‘What I have against T. S. E. is that in The Waste Land he felt it necessary to give precise meanings and correspondences.’7 To judge by his annotations to his books, de la Mare’s reservations about The Waste Land in fact spread a little wider: he disliked how ‘referential, self-centred and obscure’ the poem was.8 Still, it is telling that it is the ‘precise meanings and correspondences’ that de la Mare most objects to, not least because the nature of the objection indicates an unexpected similarity in reading habits between the two poets. Although the book of The Listeners didn’t appear until 1912, Sir Henry Newbolt praises ‘The Listeners’ in a letter to Ella Coltman of November 1908, so it was presumably written earlier that year.9 On 15 March 1908, the same year as T. S. Eliot purchased the book himself, de la Mare bought his copy of Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Though de la Mare may well have known the book already, it was a significant acquisition, for the de la Mare of The Listeners and Peacock Pie has a lot in common with the Symbolists. He shared their devotion to the work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), whose ‘The Raven’ provides the obvious ancestor to the spectral knocking in ‘The Listeners’ and other ‘knocking’ poems by de la Mare. He was also, like the French Symbolists, exploring dreams and essences, and becoming less interested in the thing itself than in the effect it happens to produce (see my commentary to ‘The Bells’). One way of saying what is going on in ‘The Listeners’ and poems like it is that it is the work of a poet who, like Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) as described by Arthur Symons, seeks to ‘evoke, by some elaborate, instantaneous magic of language, without the formality of an after all impossible description; to be, rather than to express’.10