In his memoir Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves recalls telling de la Mare:
what hours of worry he must have had over the lines:
Ah [sic], no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose.
and how, in the end, he had been dissatisfied.
According to Graves, de la Mare ruefully admitted that he was forced to leave the assonance of roves and rose because no synonym for ‘roves’ seemed strong enough.2 The story of the encounter has been skewed by Graves’s love of point-scoring: Paul Edwards observes that Graves must have known very well that de la Mare chose the word precisely because of the assonance and not despite it; the purpose of the anecdote is Graves’s ‘childish need to demonstrate his own superior poetic taste’.3 The music of the poem does indeed need the assonance: the ‘o’ sounds in ‘Roves back the rose’ answer those in ‘Oh, no man knows’ (l. 6). ‘Roves’ also allows de la Mare to keep up the pattern of alliteration set up in the earlier lines and have ‘r’s and ‘b’ that pick up on but reverse ‘buds that break’ (l. 2) and ‘brier’s boughs’ (l. 3). It was the meaning not the sound – or rather the need to have the right meaning and the right sound – which gave de la Mare trouble. Ella Coltman had objected to the original choice of ‘Roams’.4 De la Mare at first defended the word on the ground that ‘roams meant the wild rose shoots tangling back across time to the primal hip!’5 But, bowing to Coltman’s objection, de la Mare then tried ‘roots’ and ‘climbs’ (the latter of which would make an assonance with ‘wild’), before finally hitting upon ‘roves’.6
NOTES
1. F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950), p. 51.
2. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 256.
3. Paul Edwards, ‘British War Memoirs’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, edited by Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), electronic edition.
4. Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 158.
5. Walter de la Mare to Ella Coltman, 20 May 1909, quoted in Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 158.
6. Typescript and proofs of The Listeners, Walter de la Mare Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Box A55.
‘The Hawthorn Hath a Deathly Smell’
The flowers of the field
Have a sweet smell;
Meadowsweet, tansy, thyme,
And faint-heart pimpernel;
5
But sweeter even than these,
The silver of the may
Wreathed is with incense for
The Judgment Day.
An apple, a child, dust,
10
When falls the evening rain,
Wild briar’s spicèd leaves,
Breathe memories again;
With further memory fraught,
The silver of the may
15
Wreathed is with incense for
The Judgment Day.
Eyes of all loveliness –
Shadow of strange delight,
Even as a flower fades
20
Must thou from sight;
But oh, o’er thy grave’s mound,
Till come the Judgment Day,
Wreathed shall with incense be
Thy sharp-thorned may.
from The Listeners and Other Poems (1912)
Hawthorn blossom, the ‘may’, contains trimethylamine, an ingredient of putrefaction. The stench is much more noticeable in the once more numerous Midland variety than it is in the more fragrant, common hawthorn.1 While the quotation marks around the title presumably denote a piece of proverbial folk wisdom, I suspect the precise formulation of the saying is down to the way the archaic ‘hath’ adds to the pattern of ‘th’ sounds (that ‘th’ is the digraph which replaces the Middle English letter ‘thorn’ is also worth noting, though probably a coincidence). The archaism also calls to mind poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including ‘The Day of Judgement’ by Henry Vaughan (1621–95) in which from ‘each forgotten grave … the dead, like flowers arise’.2
While meadowsweet (l. 3), the Queen of the Meadow, has romantic connotations, according to the Worcestershire folk belief its sweet scent can cause a sleep from which one might not recover.3 Tansy (l. 3) was used to preserve dead bodies from corruption. In Somerset at least, thyme, like may, was thought dangerous to keep indoors because it smelt of death.4 By ‘pimpernel’ (l. 4), I presume de la Mare means what he says – a little red flower betokening a faint heart (the red or scarlet pimpernel is the male of the species).
‘Wreathed’ (l. 7) is in accord with the word’s root sense of ‘wound round’ but naturally also evokes floral wreathes, particularly those at funerals. Religious services are ‘wreathed’ with incense: in a high Anglican service, this would be white, scented smoke from silver censers: the image may draw on de la Mare’s days as a chorister in St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘Judgment Day’ (l. 8) is the day when the dead will be reunited with their bodies, the moment when putrefaction stops. The Bible figures that judgement of the saved and the damned in terms of a tree:
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. (Matthew 7, 16–20)
There is also an English tradition that the crown of thorns worn by Jesus on the cross was made of hawthorn.
‘An apple, a child, dust,’ (l. 9) in evening rain, though in itself evocative, may also recall the apple eaten by Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden and the curse which followed it: ‘Thorns also and thistles shall [the ground] bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’ (Genesis 3, 18–19) As elsewhere in de la Mare, the word ‘child’ implies the lost Eden of childhood. Memories of Eden give way to reminders of mortality, and possible immortality: in remembering the Fall, we remember the death to come.
‘Eyes of all loveliness’ (l. 17) recalls ‘the White-thorn, lovely May,/ Opens her many lovely eyes’ of William Blake’s poem Milton.5 The comparison between ‘Eyes of all loveliness’ (l. 17) and eye-like flowers fading seems to bring in another person and another perspective: an individual ‘thou’ with lovely eyes. When this ‘thou’ dies, a sharp-thorned may shall linger on. The sentiment is reminiscent of the Elizabethan sonneteers promising the loved one immortality in rhyme, as when Shakespeare in Sonnet 18 declares: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.’
The hawthorn doesn’t just smell of death; its smell is also reckoned to be redolent of sex. It is associated with May fertility rites and in medieval literature with human romantic and sexual love. There are also traditions which make the hawthorn a dwelling place for the fairies.6
Theresa Whistler points out that ‘“The Hawthorn Hath a Deathly Smell”’ functions as a covert love poem to Naomi Royde-Smith (1875–1964). Royde Smith worked at the Westminster Gazette, becoming literary editor of the Saturday Westminster Gazette in 1912. At the time when de la Mare encountered her in person, in February 1911, she wrote verse, and in future years, she would become a prolific novelist and biographer. De la Mare fell deeply under her spell. ‘“The Hawthorn Hath a Deathly Smell”’, was written shortly after the two had met before going on to share an apple at Royde-Smith’s house. ‘The Sweetbriar somehow is you’, wrote de la Mare to Royde-Smith on 8 April 1911, in ‘its medley of things I can’t understand.’7
NOTES
1. D. C. Watts, Else
vier’s Dictionary of Plant Lore (Burlington, San Diego and London: Elsevier, 2007), p. 182.
2. Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, vol. 1, edited by E. K. Chambers, introduction by H. C. Beeching (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1896), p. 267.
3. Margaret Baker, Discovering the Folklore of Plants (London: Shire Books, 1992), p. 97.
4. Ibid., pp. 104 and 383.
5. William Blake, Blake’s Poetry and Designs, edited by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1979), p. 289.
6. See Susan S. Eberly, ‘A Thorn among the Lilies: The Hawthorn in Medieval Love Allegory’, Folklore, 1 January 1989, vol. 100 (1), pp. 41–52.
7. Quoted in Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 181.
A Song of Enchantment
A Song of Enchantment I sang me there,
In a green – green wood, by waters fair,
Just as the words came up to me
I sang it under the wild wood tree.
5
Widdershins turned I, singing it low,
Watching the wild birds come and go;
No cloud in the deep dark blue to be seen
Under the thick-thatched branches green.
Twilight came; silence came;
10
The planet of evening’s silver flame;
By darkening paths I wandered through
Thickets trembling with drops of dew.
But the music is lost and the words are gone
Of the song I sang as I sat alone,
15
Ages and ages have fallen on me –
On the wood and the pool and the elder tree.
from Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (1913)
‘Enchantment’ derives from ‘chanter’, the French for ‘to sing’ from the Latin ‘cantare’. At its root then, an enchantment is a magic effected by singing or chanting into something or someone. The narrator of the poem is, knowingly or not, performing a spell. To turn ‘Widdershins’ is to turn counter-clockwise and to move in the direction opposite to that taken by the sun, a potent form of spell-making. In the traditional tale of Childe Rowland, for instance, Burd Ellen accidentally goes Widdershins around a church and as a consequence is imprisoned in the dark tower of the King of Elfland. De la Mare evidently had the superstition in mind when he made Arthur Lawford, the hero of his 1910 novel The Return, become possessed by the spirit of the libertine Nicholas Sabathier in the old churchyard in Widderstone, a place name that sounds far too close to the direction to be a coincidence.
The elder tree (l. 16) is associated with witchcraft and the goddess figure of the Elder Mother, whose traces turn up in English and Northern European superstition. She is also present in the pages of Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Elder Tree Mother’, where she is conjured up by a cup of elder tea. Under its influence, and under her spell, many years seem to have passed, though in fact scarcely any time has elapsed. Chris Howkins, in his book The Elder: The Mother Tree of Folklore notes that in 1776 the prominent doctor William Withering declared ‘The whole plant hath a narcotic smell; it is not well to sleep under its shade.’1 Traditional herbals such as the edition of Nicholas Culpeper’s Complete Herbal in de la Mare’s personal library state that the elder tree is a plant under the sign of Venus, the evening planet.
Along with the supernatural ones, there are natural explanations for the powers of this song of enchantment. Low singing or chanting can induce a trance-like state. Consequently, a child singing to itself may well feel this sense of lost time. The poem has that sense, familiar from other de la Mare poems of childhood, of a past child self being at one with the wild, natural world. During the moment of enchantment, the narrator is singing with that unpremeditated art Keats and Shelley envied in the nightingale and skylark. That moment gives way to loss and the disenchantment of the present. Poems, particularly those in lyric metres such as this, may have similar properties and indeed, as de la Mare knew, have been termed ‘enchantments’.2
Manuscript evidence suggests that this poem was not written before 1911, the year de la Mare met Royde-Smith. De la Mare was still adding to Peacock Pie (1913) after The Listeners (1912) had gone to press, and some of his feelings for Royde-Smith become hidden in rhymes whose ostensive topics seem suitable for children. An obvious case is ‘Bewitched’, whose speaker has been called by a ‘lady of witchcraft’ and who has now become, as de la Mare must have for a while become himself, ‘A stranger to my kin’. If ‘A Song of Enchantment’ also encodes the enchantments of Royde-Smith, the trick of transformation has been performed so thoroughly that it is impossible to be sure. Still, the presence of Venus, the goddess of love and those sensual ‘Thickets trembling with drops of dew’ (l. 12) give some credence to such speculation.
NOTES
1. Chris Howkins, The Elder: The Mother Tree of Folklore (Addlestone, Surrey: C. Howkins, 1996), p. 27.
2. For instance, the dedication to one of de la Mare’s favourite books, Robert Herrick’s Hesperides, contains the lines ‘But when that men have both well drunke, and fed,/ Let my enchantments then be sung’, Robert Herrick, Hesperides or the Works Humane and Divine (London: William Pickering, 1846), p. 4.
The Bees’ Song
Thousandz of thornz there be
On the Rozez where gozez
The Zebra of Zee:
Sleek, striped, and hairy,
5
The steed of the Fairy
Princess of Zee.
Heavy with blossomz be
The Rozez that growzez
In the thickets of Zee.
10
Where grazez the Zebra,
Marked Abracadeeebra,
Of the Princess of Zee.
And he nozez the poziez
Of the Rozez that growzez
15
So luvez’m and free,
With an eye, dark and wary,
In search of a Fairy,
Whose Rozez he knowzez
Were not honeyed for he,
20
But to breathe a sweet incense
To solace the Princess
Of far-away Zzzee.
from Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (1913)
‘The Bees’ Song’ is, first of all, what it sounds like: buzzing zees from buzzing bees that conjure a whimsical, light and summery world. A poem to appeal to children, even very young ones, it sings of a zebra and a fairy princess. As such, it is a charming successor to Anon’s:
If Moses supposes his toeses are roses,
Then Moses supposes erroneously;
For nobody’s toeses are posies or roses,
As Moses supposes his toeses to be.
But it is a richer successor. Not just the ears but all the senses bring us the world of the bees: there is the look of the stripy zebra going amidst the roses and the stripy bees; there is the touch of the rose on the zebra’s nose and the anticipated scratch of the thorns; there are the scents of the flowers and the incense-like honey.
For grown-ups, there is quite a good literary joke. One can find a similar number of zeds, or rather ‘zees’, standing in for esses in the Dorset dialect poems of William Barnes (1801–86); de la Mare may have particularly had in mind his poem ‘Bees A-Zwarmen’. These Dorset bees may also sound a little American: de la Mare employs the standard American version of the alphabet’s last letter and the American pronunciation of ‘zebra’. De la Mare had still to visit the States, and there were as yet no ‘talkies’ to make American accents and usage familiar to the ears of an English reader, so it is fairly safe to say that he regarded zebra and zee as acceptable English variations rather than as principally American. That said, de la Mare did use Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, and it was to this that he referred when defending himself to a nine-year-old schoolboy who had complained of his use of ‘shoon’ for shoes in another Peacock Pie rhyme, ‘Silver’.1
If ‘The Bees’ Song’ is a sweet poem, it is one that barely conceals a threat
. This zebra is getting on fine for the moment: as long as the bees aren’t too fussed about height and colour, they might overlook his sex, size and species and mistake him for a nectar-gathering sister. But this isn’t safe grazing for an interloper: there are thousands of thorns here and this zebra knows well that these flowers are not for him, but to be honeyed in order to make a sweet incense that can travel to the far away Princess, his mistress. And though the fact is never mentioned in the poem, bees also have stings.
One suspects that de la Mare has more on his mind than apiculture. The poem must have something to do with words and letters. ‘Abracadeeebra’ (l. 11) is, more or less, the magical sound of the first five letters of the alphabet, and zee is, of course, the last. If he is black and white and marked ‘Abracadeeebra’ in the coloured world of the bees, this zebra does not just look like an outsized monochromatic bee but also like a printed page. Bees make songs to buzz in the moment. They also make honey. They take nectar and change it into something sweet and incensed that can be stored and transported – here to the Princess of Zee. Zebras have no such skill, but a zebra marked ‘Abracadeeebra’ might magically imitate a bee, in black and white if not in full colour.
The Princess of Zee is a far away and sleepy sort of princess. As the end of the poem catches a few zeds, the land of Zee becomes a kingdom of sleep. Perhaps the only way to get to her is in dreams. And when one stops to think about it, the manufacture of honey is rather like dreaming: the stuff of days gets gathered in from all sorts of places to be mixed and changed into a different and new substance, yet one which retains some savour of its origins. For similar reasons, making honey is also something like the writing of poems. Indeed, since honey is also a preserve and poems can, to an extent, preserve what they describe, it seems the parallel between honey and poems is even better than it is with dreams.
Reading Walter de la Mare Page 8
