Naomi Royde-Smith’s biographer, Jill Benton, and de la Mare’s biographer, Theresa Whistler, don’t agree about the rights and wrongs of the relationship between the two: Whistler’s Royde-Smith is something of a self-involved temptress; Benton’s de la Mare is somewhat selfish and, initially at least, keener on a physical relationship. But the biographers do concur that this was more an affair of the head and the heart than one of the body: de la Mare didn’t want to leave his wife and family, and was less focused on pleasures of the flesh than on encountering Royde-Smith as a ghost and a dream; Royde-Smith, who was coming out of a lesbian relationship, seems to have enjoyed being de la Mare’s muse, and his being something of a male muse to her, more than she was attracted to the idea of being his mistress. If Royde-Smith was a ghost for de la Mare, to her he was a bee. Benton notices how in her memoir of de la Mare and in the thinly veiled portraits of him in her fiction, Royde-Smith repeatedly use bees’ honey-making as a metaphor for the strange transformation of life into art and attributes this notion to him.2
Aspects of ‘The Bees’ Song’ were no doubt meant to be fully intelligible to no one beyond Royde-Smith and de la Mare; nevertheless, I am fairly confident that the Princess of Zee is an outfit for Royde-Smith and that de la Mare is playing the front and back halves underneath the costume of that zebra. I would also note that that Zebra of Zee looks and sounds a little like the Westminster Gazette, for which de la Mare was a regular contributor. The honey of the bees is presumably the poetry de la Mare is writing and sending, which will not show the flowers of his love but its transformed state.
Those thorns must be the perils attendant on grazing among the flowers. This is a poem that is happy with sweet nosings and worried about pricks. The letter zed or zee comes from the Phoenician ‘zayin’, which means sword. That in modern Hebrew slang the word is also used to mean ‘penis’ can’t have been known by de la Mare, but he might have guessed it.3
NOTES
1. See Leonard Clark, Walter de la Mare (London: The Bodley Head, 1960), p. 22.
2. See Jill Benton, Avenging Muse: Naomi Royde-Smith, 1875–1964, pp. 165–6 and p. 193. The figuring of writing as honey turns up in Naomi Royde-Smith’s novel John Fanning’s Legacy (London: Constable, 1927), which was, though he didn’t take credit for it, co-written with de la Mare: ‘People are so silly about the uses of life. Nobody blames the bee because it makes honey from flower-juices instead of buzzing sermons about the fruit’, pp. 175–6. In her late novel Melilot (London: Robert Hale, 1955), it is extolled by von Airth, a character clearly based on de la Mare. Melilot, the heroine, is named after a flower associated with bees and the making of honey.
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zayin.
The Honey Robbers
There were two Fairies, Gimmul and Mel,
Loved Earth Man’s honey passing well;
Oft at the hives of his tame bees
They would their sugary thirst appease.
5
When even began to darken to night,
They would hie along in the fading light,
With elf-locked hair and scarlet lips,
And small stone knives to slit the skeps,
So softly not a bee inside
10
Should hear the woven straw divide.
And then with sly and greedy thumbs
Would rifle the sweet honeycombs.
And drowsily drone to drone would say,
‘A cold, cold wind blows in this way’;
15
And the great Queen would turn her head
From face to face, astonishèd,
And, though her maids with comb and brush
Would comb and soothe and whisper, ‘Hush!’
About the hive would shrilly go
20
A keening – keening, to and fro;
At which those robbers ’neath the trees
Would taunt and mock the honey-bees,
And through their sticky teeth would buzz
Just as an angry hornet does.
25
And when this Gimmul and this Mel
Had munched and sucked and swilled their fill,
Or ever Man’s first cock should crow
Back to their Faërie Mounds they’d go.
Edging across the twilight air,
30
Thieves of a guise remotely fair.
from Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (1913)
Gimmul and Mel are old-time fairies. Not only do they ‘hie’ (l. 6), rather than ‘go quickly’, they raid ‘skeps’ (l. 8), bee hives made of woven straw that fell from favour among beekeepers in the nineteenth century. The two have proper fairy hairstyles too: they are ‘elf-locked’ (l. 7), the traditional reason for children finding their hair tangled: elf-locks turn up in Mercutio’s speech in Act I, Sc. 4 of Romeo and Juliet where Queen Mab, Queen of the Fairies, ‘plaits the manes of horses in the night,/ And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,/ Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes.’ Similarly traditional are the fairies’ cutting instruments: their knives are stone and not metal because fairies may not touch iron. Their homes are ‘Faërie Mounds’, the ancient tumuli or earthworks in which fairies were said to reside – what the Irish call sídhe, the realms of the dead and of the Other World.
Mel is the Latin for ‘honey’, but Gimmul is more mysterious. Gimel is the third letter of the Semitic alphabet, which gave rise to ‘c’ and ‘g’.1 Written on a dreidel, the four-sided spinning top traditionally used on the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, it means gantz (everything); the player whose dreidel lands on the gimel gets to keep all the goodies, which may well include honey.2 ‘Gimmal’ is also an English word current in Shakespeare’s time that denotes a finger ring made so that it could be divided into two or three separate rings; it could also be a term for joints, links and connecting parts. I’m not certain whether Gimmul’s name signifies either one of these or something else, but the former explanation fits the poem well.
Metaphors about poets and honey stretch back a long way. The Greek lyric poet Pindar (c. 518–438 BC) fell asleep and, so the story goes, bees plastered his lips with honey, thus beginning his sweet-voiced poetic career. In Plato’s Ion, Socrates, no great fan of poets, declares that inspired poets are like the bees winging their way from flower to flower and turning them to honey. Yet bee metaphors only fly so far. De la Mare may have liked the idea of poetry being like honey in the way it transformed what was gathered from many a flower. However, when he stopped to think about it, the life of a bee must have had considerably less appeal. Honey-making bees are female; male bees are drones, stingless creatures who eat the honey yet do not toil to make it and who are slaughtered by the workers when their potential for reproductive usefulness has passed. Drones have therefore become synonymous with unproductive idleness among males (in the P. G. Wodehouse stories, the workshy Bertie Wooster’s club is called The Drones). Poets male and female may like to think they are industrious and socially useful, but society is likely to disagree. And how many poets really want to identify with a creature that is entirely chaste, has no individuality, no freedom from the state and which toils itself to death in a matter of weeks? Thought about like that, who wouldn’t prefer to be a robber fairy – or even a moth?
Maurice Maeterlinck’s (1862–1949) writings as a Symbolist playwright and poet make an interesting comparison to the poetry of de la Mare and seem to have been an influence on them. Here, though, it isn’t the Belgian author’s imaginative work but his study The Life of the Bee (which de la Mare refers to in Come Hither) that informs the writing. Maeterlinck describes how:
the great honey thief, the huge sphinx atropos, the sinister butterfly that bears a death’s head on its back, penetrates into the hive, humming its own strange note, which acts as a kind of irresistible incantation; the news spreads quickly from group to group, and from the guards at the threshold to the workers on the furthest combs, the whole population quivers.3
It’s
a potent analogy for the incantatory poet. In ‘The Honey Robbers’ the behaviour of the moth has been taken on by fairies. As stand-ins for poets, we have, rather than those slaving bees, this wonderfully naughty, thieving, imitative and sweet-toothed pair stealing honey from a well-ordered civilisation to feed the Other World, the Land of Faerie that is also the Land of the Dead. Poetry too, that place of shadows, enchantments and of ghosts, may belong there. In ‘The Story of This Book’ in de la Mare’s Come Hither, ‘THEOTHERWORLDE’ is the title that the absent Nahum Taroone has given to his anthology.
While younger readers will identify with the fairies’ love of the sweet stuff, the soft dividing of the woven straw in order to rifle for honey combs and the way they munch, suck and swill ‘their fill’ (l. 26) before cockcrow may well bring to adult minds the pleasures of the bedroom. Not only is ‘The Honey Robbers’ a sexy poem, it’s a sexually confusing one too: which sex are Gimmul and Mel? Are the honey robbers avatars for de la Mare and Royde-Smith? The notion would explain a lot. Yet, unlike ‘The Bees’ Song’, ‘The Honey Robbers’ is one of a number of poems handwritten onto an early typescript of Peacock Pie, a typescript which contains no other poem in which one can puzzle out encoded feelings for Royde-Smith – so, while it remains very possible that this is secretly a poem about Royde-Smith, it would appear to be more or less the first one to be written.
But perhaps this gleeful expression of the poetic id is as much about work as it is about sex. In 1908 Sir Henry Newbolt successfully petitioned the prime minister for a one-off £200 grant for de la Mare, enough money to enable him to quit the arduous desk job at Anglo-American Oil and live in the world of letters – as much by book reviewing and acting as a publisher’s reader as by writing his own books. De la Mare was no longer a slaving bee. Whatever its personal sources, I suspect the poem had its immediate origin in a dream.
NOTES
1. I thank Jane Wright for pointing this out to me.
2. I thank Kyra Larkin for telling me about dreidels. Further details from https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/how-to-play-dreidel/.
3. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee (London: Ballantyne, Hanson & Co., 1901), pp. 45–6.
The Mocking Fairy
‘Won’t you look out of your window, Mrs. Gill?’
Quoth the Fairy, nidding, nodding in the garden;
‘Can’t you look out of your window, Mrs. Gill?’
Quoth the Fairy, laughing softly in the garden;
5
But the air was still, the cherry boughs were still,
And the ivy-tod neath the empty sill,
And never from her window looked out Mrs. Gill
On the Fairy shrilly mocking in the garden.
‘What have they done with you, you poor Mrs. Gill?’
10
Quoth the Fairy brightly glancing in the garden;
‘Where have they hidden you, you poor old Mrs. Gill?’
Quoth the Fairy dancing lightly in the garden;
But night’s faint veil now wrapped the hill,
Stark ’neath the stars stood the dead-still Mill,
15
And out of her cold cottage never answered Mrs. Gill
The Fairy mimbling, mambling in the garden.
from Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (1913)
Why won’t Mrs Gill look out of her window or come out to play? A child reader might assume it’s because Mrs Gill is a dull old grown-up who doesn’t want to see the fairy world that is just beyond her window. But there is a difference between someone who won’t (l. 1) look out of their window and someone who can’t (l. 3). As the first verse continues, everything becomes too breathless and too still, and the mocking fairy too shrill, for the scene to register as delightful. What have they done with Mrs Gill? Where have they hidden her? The suspicion grows that it is not only the Mill that is ‘dead-still’ (l. 14), a suspicion that seems to be confirmed when you bear in mind that one of the historical meanings of ‘stark’ given by the Oxford English Dictionary and used by Shakespeare was ‘rigid’, as in the rigidity of the dead when rigor mortis takes them.
Indeed, looking back over the poem, we can find some likely answers for the fairy’s questions. The reason Mrs Gill won’t look out of the window at first is because she is dying; the reason that she then can’t is because she is now dead. What they have done with her? Embalmed her, probably. Where have they hidden her? In a coffin. Why does the fairy find this so funny? Well, fairies are by reputation either immortal or at least much longer lived than humans and not above mocking the afflicted. Moreover, this is probably a fairy of a particular stripe: a banshee, the fairy who in Cornwall is said to be seen outside the window of someone dying.1
‘The Mocking Fairy’ is given as the second of only two instances of ‘nidding’ (l. 2) in the Oxford English Dictionary. Still, it is a natural enough derivative from ‘nid-nod’, being paired up with ‘nodding’. The two clearly indicate a repeated nodding motion: seeming to fall down then gaily rising again alive as ever, dance moves to poke fun at the dying and the dead. ‘Mimbling’ and ‘mambling’ (l. 16) don’t appear in the OED at all, but their sound suggests they mean something similar to ‘mumbling’ or perhaps ‘nimble’.
That ‘The Mocking Fairy’ wasn’t an ordinary children’s rhyme was twigged even before the poem’s publication. It was one of the poems from Peacock Pie de la Mare sent when asked by John Middleton Murry (1889–1957) to submit poems to the journal Rhythm (shortly to become The Blue Review), where ‘The Mocking Fairy’ was published in March 1913. Of the poems submitted, ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’ was Middleton Murry’s favourite; ‘The Mocking Fairy’, however, was the favourite of the short-story writer Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), who was working beside Murry on the magazine at the time (Mansfield and Murry were romantically involved, and married in 1918).2 The densely allusive ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’ was a natural choice for Murry, the literary highbrow who was soon to be a champion of the modernists. Mansfield’s preference for ‘The Mocking Fairy’ was also in character. Her fiction has its own thread of cruelty, and her poetry not only contains the odd fairy but can be de la Marean to the point of pastiche. Elements of ‘The Mocking Fairy’ turn up in her 1917 poem ‘Out in the Garden’, mixed in with two other poems from Peacock Pie: ‘Some One’ and ‘The Little Green Orchard’.3 De la Mare, Mansfield and Murry met up for lunch and an afternoon of animated discussion.4 It was to be the beginning of the friendship between Mansfield and de la Mare (See ‘To K.M.’).
NOTES
1. See Cassandra Eason, A Complete Guide to Fairies and Magical Beings (San Francisco and Newburyport: Weiser Books, 2001), p. 164.
2. See Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 212.
3. Katherine Mansfield, Poems of Katherine Mansfield (Auckland, Oxford, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 64.
4. See Theresa Whislter, The Life of Walter de la Mare, pp. 213–14.
The Song of the Mad Prince
Who said, ‘Peacock Pie’?
The old King to the sparrow:
Who said, ‘Crops are ripe’?
Rust to the harrow:
5
Who said, ‘Where sleeps she now?
Where rests she now her head,
Bathed in eve’s loveliness’? –
That’s what I said.
Who said, ‘Ay, mum’s the word’?
10
Sexton to willow:
Who said, ‘Green dusk for dreams,
Moss for a pillow’?
Who said, ‘All Time’s delight
Hath she for narrow bed;
15
Life’s troubled bubble broken’? –
That’s what I said.
from Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (1913)
So who did say ‘Peacock Pie’? There are more answers than you might think. De la Mare pointed out:
this title was not in the least intended to suggest a delicacy. Indeed, I had
never so much as tasted a peacock-pie, although I had frequently feasted my eyes on one in the window of Mr Pimm’s restaurant in Cheapside – the bird itself, or rather its lovely but vacant plumes, seated in splendour upon the pastry’s moulded upper crust. No. The book contained a piece called ‘The Mad Prince’; and that begins:
Who said ‘Peacock Pie’:
Hence the spectacular title.1
But de la Mare had in fact said ‘Peacock Pie’ once before. In ‘The Three Beggars’ from Songs of Childhood, a fairy child turns the beggar man’s ‘crust’ to ‘peacock pie’.
Outside of Mr Pimm’s window, peacock pie will, I suppose, look like any other pie. What is special about it – what is brutal about it – is the knowledge of how the bird within it used to appear. The peacock baked in the pie of the Mad Prince has been several things. First of all, he was Cock Robin. In his anthology of Animal Stories, de la Mare repeats the old version of the doleful nursery rhyme. I quote six of its fourteen verses:
Who kill’d Cock Robin?
I, said the sparrow,
With my bow and arrow,
I kill’d Cock Robin.
Who see him die?
I, said the fly
With my little eye,
And I see him die.
Who catch’d his blood?
I, said the fish,
With my little dish,
And I catch’d his blood.
Reading Walter de la Mare Page 9
