Reading Walter de la Mare
Page 11
The poem’s title is not ‘Farewell’, but ‘Fare Well’; rather than merely offering a ‘goodbye’, it also wishes others to ‘proceed’ or ‘survive’ well, to ‘travel well’ through life (the older meaning of ‘to fare’ being ‘to travel’). Countless poems have imaged death as a place of darkness. Here, though, we have a state where ‘shades of darkness/ Shall no more assail [i.e. assault] mine eyes’ (ll. 1–2), for the shades of darkness we witness in life will no more be seen. After death, others may sigh and lament awhile; nature herself may even seem to do so too in wind and rain. For the deceased, however, sounds of sighing and lamentation, whether human or natural, will no longer be heard.
Having set down how he himself may fare in this state of non-being, de la Mare begins to think of the world in his absence, a world ‘whose wonder’ (l. 5) has been the true ‘proof’, not merely ‘the confirmation’ but also ‘the test’ of his own existence. John Bayley interprets lines 7–8 to mean that as the memory of things fades it greatly cheers de la Mare ‘to think of them being enjoyed by others – especially children’.9 This seems the primary meaning. But, given the sentiments of the preceding lines, it is also possible to interpret the ‘Memory’ (l. 7) as belonging to those who will remain after the speaker has gone. The question, ‘must the remembered/ Perishing be?’ (ll. 7–8), would then be carefully unspecific over the identity of ‘the remembered’: to judge from the poem thus far, one would assume it to be the speaker when he is dead; from the content to come, it would become the things of the world of which he is mindful.
The word ‘dust’ (l. 9) indicates the body which, on dying, surrenders itself to literal dust, as in Genesis 3:19: ‘for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’. ‘Hand, foot, lip, to dust’ (l. 10) recalls ‘Of hand, of foot, of lip’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106, ‘When in the Chronicle of Wasted Time’.10 Those ‘loved and loving faces’ (l. 11) are the faces of loved ones, though given what follows in the stanza, the phrase may also include the ‘faces’ of the loved things of the natural world. The harvest hedgerow is ‘rusting’ rather than the more-expected ‘rustling’ (l. 13), that is, it is turning red and brown, a sign of nature’s own passing away. ‘Traveller’s Joy’ (l. 14) or clematis is a fragrant white-flowered climbing plant common to English hedgerows and still in flower after harvest time, its name signifying the joy it gives to wayfarers, a plant that helps them ‘fare well’. Its hairy appearance after flowering gives the plant its other name, old man’s beard. Here it blooms ‘as happy children’ (l. 15) gather flowers – at the same time as the dying and rusting of the leaves of the hedgerow – though it is also making children as happy as the speaker once was. While the primary sense of ‘posies’ (l. 16) is bunches of flowers, ‘posy’ can also mean a line of verse. The word is also similar to ‘poesy’, an old word for poetry. There is an ancient tradition that connects the gathering of poetry with the gathering of flowers, which is the literal meaning of the word ‘anthology’, hence the title of Lord Wavell’s collection Other Men’s Flowers.
At the start of the last stanza, the poem exhorts speaker and audience to relish the world as if always about to leave it. The words are ‘Let no night’ (l. 18) rather than ‘let not night’, so it is not a straightforward euphemism for death that is being referred to but other, metaphorical nights (whether bringing death or merely like death) that might seal the sense in slumber and prevent appreciation of the loveliness of the world before one has given delight in it ‘utmost blessing’ (l. 21). When asked by the Public Orator at Oxford University, who was translating these words into Latin, de la Mare confirmed ‘Beauty’ as being the object and not the subject of the last two lines.11 If so, their meaning is that ‘those who once loved all the things that you would praise now took beauty from those things in other days’. Nevertheless, this is an occasion where de la Mare’s use of inversion creates a satisfying ambiguity. If we read ‘Beauty’ as the subject, a personified Beauty took away these things from others who loved them in other days and the poem would equate beauty with transience, which is, after all, one of the poem’s themes. The poem’s last two lines once more echo Sonnet 106, this time its closing couplet: ‘For we, which now behold these present days/ Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise’. And indeed, the praise of past and, above all, present wonder in ‘Fare Well’ as a whole can be read as an eloquent response to Shakespeare’s own reflections on their relationship to beauty and transience.
‘Fare Well’ is arranged in seemingly regular, near identical stanza shapes – the fourth and eighth lines of a stanza, are, for example, always four syllables long, yet there is a subtle pattern of metrical variation and substitution throughout. One finely judged pattern is the gradual changing of the poem’s apparent metre. You could begin the opening line by stressing ‘When’, but few people would, and most would instead start with two unstressed syllables and could quite easily continue stressing the opening of each of the stanza’s long and short lines in the same manner until reaching its last two lines, which require one to begin with a stressed syllable: (‘Memory (l. 7) and ‘Perishing (l. 8)). In the second stanza, the stressing of that first syllable is subtly promoted: even if one doesn’t stress ‘Oh’ (l. 9) – though, I think, most would – one certainly has to stress ‘Hand’ (l. 10), the effect of which is to make the reader bring an affirmative stress to ‘May’ (l. 11). By the time we reach the third stanza, few readers would not give ‘Look’ (l. 17) a resolute stress, and all would stress the ‘Ev’ in ‘Every’ (l. 18) as well as ‘Seal’ (l. 19). The metre has moved from pondering to resolve.
The poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman (1859–1936) first came across ‘Fare Well’ when its second stanza was reproduced in a newspaper book review. Line 13 was written as ‘May the rustling harvest hedgerow’. Housman reported that he guessed at once that the poet of the rest of the stanza could not have written a word as predictable as ‘rustling’ and that it must have been a misprint. He then, he states, quickly worked out the right word (‘rusting’). Housman subsequently used the example to justify his interventionist style of editing classical texts.12 His own poem ‘Tell Me Not Here, It Needs Not Saying’ not only strongly echoes ‘Fare Well’, but, as John Bayley points out, also appears to be offering de la Mare’s poem a less happy ‘answer’.13
NOTES
1. Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 284.
2. Walter de la Mare, ‘Thoughts by England Given’, anonymous review of New Numbers, vol. 4, Times Literary Supplement, 11 March 1915.
3. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, p. 148.
4. See William Wootten, ‘A Richer Dust – Afterlives of Rupert Brooke’, Times Literary Supplement, 24 April 2015, pp. 13–15.
5. Quoted by Sean Street, The Dymock Poets (Bridgend: Seren, 1994), p. 133.
6. See Naomi Royde-Smith, Avenging Muse, p. 174.
7. Derek Walcott interviewed by Sue Lawley, Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio, first broadcast 15 November 1992, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0093z3h.
8. Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 446.
9. John Bayley, Housman’s Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 175.
10. The relationship between Sonnet 106 and ‘Fare Well’ was pointed out to me by Giles de la Mare.
11. Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 324.
12. Marcus Manilius Astronomicon (London: Richards Grant, 1930), pp. xxv–xxxvi.
13. John Bayley, Housman’s Poems, pp. 172–5.
The Scribe
What lovely things
Thy hand hath made:
The smooth-plumed bird
In its emerald shade,
5
The seed of the grass,
The speck of stone
Which the wayfaring ant
Stirs – and hastes on!
Though I should sit
10
By some tarn in thy hills,
Using its ink
As the spir
it wills
To write of Earth’s wonders,
Its live, willed things,
15
Flit would the ages
On soundless wings
Ere unto Z
My pen drew nigh;
Leviathan told,
20
And the honey-fly:
And still would remain
My wit to try –
My worn reeds broken,
The dark tarn dry,
25
All words forgotten –
Thou, Lord, and I.
from Motley and Other Poems (1918)
In another poem of thanksgiving written against the backdrop of the war, the scribe’s faith in how the world outstrips human representation may have something of Plato’s distrust of the imitative arts, but also reflects how the war had made words, the counters of de la Mare’s craft, seem both unreliable and not very useful. Yet, unlike ‘For All the Grief’, that limitation of art and language has here become something to rejoice in. This is a religious poem, but one not written in propria persona: the scribe must be a medieval copyist, probably a monk addressing the greater scribe, who, ultimately, is the Creator Himself.
The images of the first stanza are like the illuminations in a manuscript: the contrast between the first and second stanzas is between the primary creation ‘Thy hand hath made’ (l. 2) and the secondary creation of writing down ‘Earth’s wonders’ (l. 13). The ‘emerald shade’ (l. 4) must refer to the shade of leaves. The seed of grass and the stone stirred by the ant (ll. 5–8) is somewhat reminiscent of William Blake’s desire in his ‘Auguries of Innocence’ to ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower’, but de la Mare had a peculiar affinity for the contemplation of tiny things.1 ‘The Fly’ in Songs of Childhood reflects:
How large unto the tiny fly
Must little things appear! –
A rosebud like a feather bed,
Its prickle like a spear;
A dewdrop like a looking-glass,
A hair like golden wire …
In his 1921 novel Memoirs of a Midget, de la Mare’s appreciation of things small would be writ large.
A ‘tarn’ (l. 10) is a small, glacier-formed lake or pond in the hills or mountains, and ‘its ink’ (l. 11) is its dark water. John Lingard glosses this with reference to the title poem of de la Mare’s Memory (1938): here, memory has ‘tarn-dark eyes’, a fact that leads Lingard to equate the tarn with memory or inspiration.2 But I wonder if de la Mare’s point isn’t more easily guessable. Tarn water, though it appears ink-dark and huge in quantity, won’t serve to write anything legible. Isn’t this a more straightforward image of the delights and ultimate futility of authorship in the face of creation?
The imagery also calls to mind that of Romantic poets. In the ‘Introduction’ to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a child on a cloud asks the narrator to:
… sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read –
So he vanish’d from my sight.
And I pluck’d a hollow reed.
And I made a rural pen,
And I stain’d the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.3
On Keats’s tombstone are the words: ‘Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.’ The ‘honey-fly’ (l. 20) is an old name for the honey bee.
NOTES
1. William Blake, Blake’s Poetry and Designs, p. 209.
2. Lingard, John, “‘The Verge at Which They Fail”: Language, Relationship, and Journey in the Poetry of Walter de la Mare’, Dalhousie Review, 69 (4), 1989/90, 57893, p. 582.
3. William Blake, Blake’s Poetry and Designs, p. 19.
To E.T.: 1917
You sleep too well – too far away,
For sorrowing word to soothe or wound;
Your very quiet seems to say
How longed-for a peace you have found.
5
Else, had not death so lured you on,
You would have grieved – ’twixt joy and fear –
To know how my small loving son
Had wept for you, my dear.
From Motley and Other Poems (1918)
Edward Thomas died at the Battle of Arras on 9 April 1917. News reached de la Mare within a week, and ‘To E.T.: 1917’, which first appeared in the slim 1917 volume The Sunken Garden, must have been written shortly afterwards.
For all sorts of little reasons – and for bigger ones, such as de la Mare’s preoccupation with Naomi Royde-Smith and Thomas’s friendship with Robert Frost – the relationship between Thomas and de la Mare cooled a little in its later years. Nevertheless, the friendship was a long way from being broken, and my impression is that by the time Thomas left for France, the two were closer than they had been for a while. Their correspondence continued to the end, and ‘To E.T.: 1917’ is almost a last letter to the man who signed off letters with ‘E.T.’. Yet when de la Mare wrote letters, he wrote ‘My dear Thomas’ rather than ‘To E.T.’, signing his own name ‘WJdlM’.1 In this poem, the standard formula ‘My dear’ becomes a sincere endearment, and is placed at the end of the address. Nor is this the only aspect of the poem in which the shape of de la Mare’s grief alters expected formulae. ‘You sleep too well’ recalls the familiar wish of the epitaph writer that the dead should ‘rest in peace’ or the fond falsehood that declares how the body in the grave is not dead but only sleeping (de la Mare may also be recalling John Skelton’s ‘With lullay, lullay lyke a childe/ Though slepyst too long; thou art begylde’, a poem more clearly alluded to in ‘Sotto Voce’). But the wish for Thomas to rest in peace here comes only from Thomas; there is no such wish from de la Mare.
De la Mare’s review of An Annual of New Poetry, which appeared in the Saturday Westminster Gazette on 28 April 1917, was both de la Mare’s first public elegy for Thomas and the first place where he publicly discussed Thomas’s verse. The article contains two quotations referring to sleep, one from Thomas’s ‘Roads’:
They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only.2
And one from Thomas’s last poem, ‘Lights Out’:
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way
The review also refers to Thomas’s ‘Beauty’, a poem de la Mare introduces by noting how to a melancholy nature such as Thomas’s, ‘Earthly existence may seem nothing but a cage’. De la Mare’s withholding of sleep runs contrary to the sentiments of his own ‘Happy England’ and its more positive portrayal of the ‘sleep of death’. Nowhere in ‘To E.T.: 1917’ is there any indication that Thomas has died fighting for his country and the cause that de la Mare had so strongly advocated. It seems no coincidence that Robert Frost’s own later elegy to Thomas, ‘To E.T.’ should borrow and trim de la Mare’s title and make a point of honouring Thomas as a soldier-poet.
De la Mare’s use of ‘wound’ (l. 2) is informed by the belief that Thomas died woundless from the concussive blast of an exploding shell (Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s recent biography of Thomas makes a strong case that he was, in fact, hit by a shell and that the story of his woundless death was invented as a comfort for his widow, Helen).3 The phrases ‘longed-for a peace’ (l. 4) and ‘death so lured you on’ (l. 5) indicate not the self-sacrifice of a patriotic warrior, but something closer to suicide. De la Mare knew Thomas’s depressions and his strong thoughts of taking his own life well; indeed, he had talked Thomas out of killing himself.4 Not only was Thomas over the age of conscription; his decision to accept a commission in the Royal Garrison Artillery, with inevitable frontline service and likely death, could be seen to have suicidal as well as selfless and patriotic motivations.
In his foreword to Thomas’s Collected Poems (1920), de la Mare writes:
To read �
�The Trumpet’, ‘Tears’, or ‘This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong’ is to realise the brave spirit that compelled him to fling away the safety which without the least loss of honour he might have accepted, and to go back to his men, and his guns, and death. These poems show, too, that he was doubly homesick, for this and for another world, no less clearly than they show how intense a happiness was the fruition of his livelong hope and desire to prove himself a poet.5
‘To E.T.: 1917’ is an angry and unreconciled poem: ‘you would have grieved’ (l. 6), postulates another, less death-lured Thomas, who would grieve for the grief his own death caused. And while de la Mare doesn’t go so far as to mention Thomas’s widow and children, whom de la Mare was to help, not least by being instrumental in securing a Civil List pension for Helen Thomas, he does mention his own son – either the older Richard, who would have known Thomas better, or Colin, Thomas’s godson. De la Mare’s own loss is alluded to only in ‘my dear’ (l. 8). But those two words betray a huge sense of loss. De la Mare would later write of Thomas: ‘Nobody like him was in this world that I have ever had the happiness to meet … So when he died, a ghost of one’s self went away with him.’6