Reading Walter de la Mare
Page 6
In October 1908, de la Mare published one of his most suggestive tales, ‘The Bird of Travel’. As Giles de la Mare11 and, more recently, Angela Leighton, have pointed out, there are suggestive similarities between the short story and the poem.12 In the tale, the boy narrator comes to a deserted house – a house to which he shall, much later, return. He finds a door on the latch: ‘I tapped and listened; tapped and listened again; and, as if it were Echo herself, some hidden thrush’s rapping of a snail’s shell … was my only answer’.13 When the Bird of Travel is then heard, it is ‘as if some unearthly traveller were summoning from afar his strayed dog on the hillside!’14 We hear too how two previous visitors have listened to the Bird of Travel and drunk in ‘its forbidden song … And now, Hamilton lies far away, unburied amid the Andes, and Paul drowned in the Straits of Magellan.’15
Giles de la Mare also notes the resemblances between ‘The Listeners’ and ‘The Story of This Book’, the allegorical tale used to preface the anthology Come Hither. Comparison between it and ‘The Listeners’ lends credibility to the explanation for ‘The Listeners’ de la Mare gave Laurence Whistler in the 1950s: that it was ‘about a man encountering a universe’ (a man and a universe not ‘man and the universe’, lovers of exact correspondences should note).16 Of Nahum Taroone, whose name is a rough anagram of Human Nature, Miss Taroone, whose relationship to Nahum is unclear, says:
He has his two worlds. Take your time. Some day you too, I dare say, will go off on your travels. Remember that, like Nahum, you are as old as the hills which neither spend nor waste time, but dwell in it for ages, as if it were light or sunshine. Some day perhaps Nahum will shake himself free of Thrae [Earth] altogether. I don’t know, myself, Simon. This house is enough for me, and what I remember of Sure Vine [Universe], compared with which Thrae is but the smallest of bubbles in a large glass.17
Later in the story, as the narrator comes to say goodbye and this time spend the night in Mr Taroone’s room, he is informed that ‘Mr Nahum may at this very moment be riding home. Have a candle alight.’ That night he finds ‘there were two minds in me as midnight drew on, almost two selves, the one busy with pen and ink, the other stealthily listening to every faintest sound […] Steadily burned my candles; no sound of hoofs, no owl-cry, no knocking disturbed my peace.’18
Robert Frost, who hugely admired the poem, wrote that he ‘once asked de la Mare if he had noticed anything queer about the verse in his own “The Listeners” and he answered that he hadnt [sic] noticed anything at all about the verse in it queer or unqueer’.19 What had caught Frost’s attention is the poem’s curious double metre. Depending on how one performs them, it is possible to scan almost all its lines either with three stresses or with four. The difference isn’t merely a matter of taste. Peter Howarth notes that if you don’t stress that opening ‘Is’, the Traveller is giving us ‘an honest question’; do so and you have a query that suspects the answer already.20 Howarth goes on to note that the ‘three-stress lines are also the ones that describe the positive absence of the listeners, felt in what doesn’t happen’ (the examples he gives are lines 9, 21 and 29).21 On the other hand, the additional stresses in some lines are likewise appropriate – whether it be to the thronging on the dark stair, or the echoing through the shadowiness. However one could stress the poem, most reciters seem to begin by confidently giving the lines three stresses. It is only later – perhaps on line 3 and, more probably, line 7 – that a fourth stress tends to creep in. Because of this, Derek Attridge disregards the metrical ambiguity noticed by Frost and Howarth, claiming that the poem is based on a stress pattern of ‘3-3-4-3 quatrains’, although Attridge does concede that ‘as the poem proceeds the patterns of beats become less easy to perceive’.22
De la Mare’s own recorded performance of the poem does roughly follow the 3-3-4-3 pattern suggested by Attridge.23 Still, that’s just one way of reciting it; de la Mare’s own writings on metre are very alive to metrical ambiguity. For example, a note to Come Hither finds de la Mare demonstrating how Michael Drayton’s ‘Fair stood the wind for France’ can be stressed in ‘at least four ways’.24 In that same note, de la Mare writes:
all poetry, unless its charm is to be wasted, should be heard, with the inward ear at least, if not with the outer; and the intonation, like the rhythm, is part and parcel of its meaning. Unless it be in accord with the thought and the feeling intended, it falsifies the poem. This is curiously true even of single words – that once were double. Stress lightly and raise the voice a little on the second or third syllable in each of the following words, and a meaning that may hitherto have been half-hidden slips up like a cuckoo out of a clock: gateway, locksmith, highwayman, hardbake, drawback, skinflint, dreamland, cupboard, seaworthy, shoehorn.25
Sure enough, when de la Mare recites ‘The Listeners’, he stresses the second part of ‘moonbeams’ (l. 17) and ‘moonlight’ (l. 15), with very effective results. De la Mare concludes this note in Come Hither by pointing out how metrical discussion can ‘add to one’s knowledge, but not much to one’s delight in the reading of poetry, and still less, I imagine, to the writing of it. In general, if you read a poem quietly over, first, to your head, then to your heart, most technical difficulties vanish like morning mist.’26
NOTES
1. Michael Rosen, ‘What is a Bong Tree?’ Lecture for Centre for Literacy in Primary Education official event, September 2007, https://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/writings-on-poetry/.
2. Boris Ford, ‘The Rest was Silence’, Encounter, 36, September 1956, pp. 38–46.
3. Anne Bentinck, ‘Personal Interview with Mr Richard de la Mare at Much Hadham Hall, 25 July 1979’, Walter de la Mare Society Magazine, November 2001.
4. F. L. Lucas, The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), p. 22.
5. Walter de la Mare, letter to J. G. Syme, 7 February 1944, as quoted in Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 203.
6. Walter de la Mare Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Box A55.
7. The remark was made to Laurence Whistler in 1951 and is quoted by Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 401.
8. Walter de la Mare, handwritten annotation to T. R. Henn, The Apple and the Spectroscope, foreword by Lawrence Bragg (London: Methuen, 1951), p. 42. Walter de la Mare Library, Senate House, University College, London.
9. Quoted in Theresa Whistler, unedited typescript of The Life of Walter de la Mare, Walter de la Mare archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
10. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Constable, 1911), p. 135.
11. Giles de la Mare, ‘Exploring the World of Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”’, Walter de la Mare Society Magazine, 13 June 2010, pp. 9–17.
12. Angela Leighton, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2018), p. 140.
13. Short Stories 1895–1926, edited by Giles de la Mare (London: Giles de la Mare Publishers, 1996), p. 81.
14. Ibid., p. 82.
15. Ibid., p. 83.
16. Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 303.
17. Walter de la Mare, Come Hither, vol. 1, p. 12.
18. Ibid., p. 22.
19. Letter to C. L. Young, 7 December 1917, quoted in Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–38 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 118.
20. Peter Howarth, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 127.
21. Ibid.
22. Derek Attridge, ‘In Defence of the Dolnik: Twentieth-Century British Verse in Free Four-Beat Metre’, Études Britanniques Contemporaines, 39, 2010, pp. 5–18.
23. Walter de la Mare reciting ‘The Listeners’, British Library audio file, 1CDR0003832.BD18.mp3.
24. Walter de la Mare, Come Hither, vol. 1, p. 318.
25. Ibid., pp. 318–19.
26. Ibid., p. 320.
The Scarecrow
All w
inter through I bow my head
Beneath the driving rain;
The North Wind powders me with snow
And blows me black again;
5
At midnight in a maze of stars
I flame with glittering rime,
And stand, above the stubble, stiff
As mail at morning-prime.
But when that child, called Spring, and all
10
His host of children, come,
Scattering their buds and dew upon
These acres of my home,
Some rapture in my rags awakes;
I lift void eyes and scan
15
The skies for crows, those ravening foes,
Of my strange master, Man.
I watch him striding lank behind
His clashing team, and know
Soon will the wheat swish body high
20
Where once lay sterile snow;
Soon shall I gaze across a sea
Of sun-begotten grain,
Which my unflinching watch hath sealed
For harvest once again.
from The Listeners and Other Poems (1912)
A scarecrow is, of course, merely a couple of sticks dressed in some old clothes with maybe a hat on its head, made to look like a man in order to safeguard the crops. It is also one of those things of fascination for de la Mare, a decoy. Scarecrows are uncanny objects too, inanimate yet human-looking. They fit strangeness: the scarecrow in de la Mare’s children’s story of that name has been the haunt of fairies. In this poem, the scarecrow gets to speak. His tale is of what he knows from his life outside: the seasons in the fields, winter through to spring, summer through to harvest.
In the opening eight lines we move from rain to snow to frost. The ‘maze of stars’ (l. 5) is not so much the night sky as its reflection in the ‘glittering rime’ (l. 6), the frost upon the scarecrow. The scarecrow is presumably stiff as chain mail rather than the morning post, chain mail having the same qualities of glittering reflectiveness at dawn or ‘morning-prime’ (l. 8). Though ‘The Scarecrow’ is a poem which gives voice to the lifeless, there is a straightforward explanation to the change in him as the year goes on: the weather is altering his rags and giving him his purpose, protecting budding crops from the ‘ravening’ (l. 15) – hungry, but also raven-like – crows. In a world where personifications seem real gods and spirits, where Spring is a child leading his children, the sun is father to the grain: it is ‘begotten’ (l. 22) of him. When Man himself arrives upon the scene, there is a marriage of sound and image. We move from the ‘clashing’ team of plough horses, with an implied swish of the whip from the ploughman to the ‘swish’ of the ‘body high’ (l. 19) corn, whose waves convert the snow to ‘sea’ (l. 21).
De la Mare liked to reuse themes and titles, and in so doing revisit his earlier poems. The Burning-Glass (1945) contains another poem entitled ‘The Scarecrow’. This one, which evidently captures the feelings of the dark days of the Second World War, allegorises its effigy much more explicitly. It is set in winter, and its scarecrow in an abandoned orchard is clearly an image of fallen man abandoned by his God. Even if the Symbolist style makes it much harder to interpret than the scarecrow in The Burning-Glass, the scarecrow in this poem seems an altogether more positive presence. Despite its having no definite indicators, the poem is open to being read as something like an allegory of Christ. Though not a man, or at least not in the usual sense, he appears to be one. Like Christ, the scarecrow is dead upon a cross, yet he rises again with the crops in the springtime. In the Bible and elsewhere, Christ is associated with parables of sowing and harvest, and the harvest is a traditional metaphor for the harvest of souls.
If ‘The Scarecrow’ is to be interpreted thus, that may not mean it is a wholly Christian poem. The scarecrow is both man-made and made in man’s image and it is here presented as something more like a fertility god than the Christ of Christian doctrine. Moreover, it would be hard to maintain such an interpretation as definitive; there are other ways of reading the poem. For instance, the scarecrow could be an allegory of the poem itself, a lifeless thing made in man’s image, which with its void eyes nonetheless looks over and responds to the world of humankind. That is one alternative, and I’m sure there are others.
Miss Loo
When thin-strewn memory I look through,
I see most clearly poor Miss Loo;
Her tabby cat, her cage of birds,
Her nose, her hair, her muffled words,
5
And how she’d open her green eyes,
As if in some immense surprise,
Whenever as we sat at tea
She made some small remark to me.
It’s always drowsy summer when
10
From out the past she comes again;
The westering sunshine in a pool
Floats in her parlour still and cool;
While the slim bird its lean wires shakes,
As into piercing song it breaks;
15
Till Peter’s pale-green eyes ajar
Dream, wake; wake, dream, in one brief bar.
And I am sitting, dull and shy,
And she with gaze of vacancy,
And large hands folded on the tray,
20
Musing the afternoon away;
Her satin bosom heaving slow
With sighs that softly ebb and flow,
And her plain face in such dismay,
It seems unkind to look her way:
25
Until all cheerful back will come
Her gentle gleaming spirit home:
And one would think that poor Miss Loo
Asked nothing else, if she had you.
from The Listeners and Other Poems (1912)
One might expect memory to be ‘thick-strewn’ rather than ‘thin’ (l. 1), given the way time amasses reminiscences. Thin-strewn memory is, however, easier to ‘look through’, and this is the case with the memory of Miss Loo.
Why is she ‘poor’ Miss Loo’ (l. 2 and l. 27)? Is it because she is short of money? Or because the term is used in the habitual formulation of the adult world telling the boy how he must be company for ‘poor Miss Loo’ who never married, has had a difficult life and is all by herself – and at her age. Or is it because of something that troubles her when one sees ‘her plain face in such dismay’ (l. 23); is she ‘poor’ because of what will happen to her in her future and the narrator’s past, something she foresees?
Miss Loo’s ‘green eyes’ (l. 5) are disconcertingly close to the ‘pale-green eyes ajar’ (l. 15) (another unexpected yet perfect word choice) of the dreaming and waiting cat Peter, who seems the avatar of his mistress with her slow heaving satin bosom (for a curiously similar parallel between human and cat’s eyes, see my note to ‘Napoleon’). The ‘dull and shy’ (l. 17) boy trapped in her parlour is a little too like one of Miss Loo’s slim, caged birds. Not only do the poem’s last two lines imply that she does usually ask for quite a lot else besides, their wanting of ‘you’ may not be so much a humble ask as an all-enveloping demand.
Despite her being ‘poor Miss Loo’, the presentation of her isn’t so very far from that of the eponymous dark presence in de la Mare’s chilling story ‘Seaton’s Aunt’, and yet she is ‘poor Miss Loo’. She exists in a strange eternity of ‘westering’ (l. 11), that is nearing the west and sunset – an age-old analogy for death. The ‘slim bird’ (l. 13) shaking the wires of the cage with its song is almost like her soul. The ‘ebb and flow’ (l. 22) of sighs seems also to be the ebb and flow of her life, her dismay as it leaves and her cheerfulness as her spirit returns home (ll. 25–6). We assume ‘Peter’ is the cat, but he might be the apostle, the key-holder of the gates of heaven, briefly waking then dreaming as if about to notice her and let her in. Her ‘gaze of vacancy’ (l. 18) looks like the look in the eyes of the departed.
In a poem that enacts a curious suspension o
f time, the very language is curiously suspended. One might expect that ‘The westering sunshine in a pool’ (l. 11) would refer simply to a pool of light, yet it floats ‘still and cool’ as if it were floating in a pond of air. Miss Loo exists in her own little eternity: ‘It’s always drowsy summer when/ From out the past she comes again’ (ll. 9–10). Furthermore, there is a parallel between her ebb and flow between life and death and her disappearance from and return to memory.
De la Mare’s iambic tetrameter couplets are a whole world away from, say, their witty employment by Andrew Marvell; instead, their effect is lingering and hypnotic. The rhymes act as if they might also be part of a larger structure that echoes, ponders and recalls rather than quickly moving on. The rhyme at the poem’s end reprises that of its opening. The rhyme of lines 19–20 quickly returns in lines 23–4, in the lingered moment of watching the rising and falling satin bosom of Miss Loo ‘musing the afternoon away’.
Winter Dusk
Dark frost was in the air without,
The dusk was still with cold and gloom,
When less than even a shadow came
And stood within the room.
5
But of the three around the fire,
None turned a questioning head to look,
Still read a clear voice, on and on,
Still stooped they o’er their book.
The children watched their mother’s eyes