Reading Walter de la Mare
Page 15
‘The Feckless Dinner-Party’ is a fireworks display from a poet not usually inclined to be showy. Among the devices employed to capture the voices are sharply used italics and inverted commas: for instance, the incredulous italics of ‘Soup burnt?’ (l. 1) or the inverted commas around “‘Married”’ (l. 6) which manage at once to indicate both the way the word has been picked up from another conversation and the sort of marriage involved. The poem also displays a very acute ear for rising and falling of pitches of conversation and how these may be enhanced by metre. In his unpublished essay ‘Meaning in Poetry’, de la Mare remarks:
A versifier must convey all such inflexions and intonation in his verse, in spite, as it were, of his imposed metre. He must, as far as possible, ensure that his context shall reveal the emphases, the rhythms, the tune of what he is saying.
Take, for example, merely so distinctly matter-of-fact a statement as ‘It’s no use asking her to change her mind.’ At first glance we might not recognise this as verse at all. Yet verse it certainly may be. ‘It’s no use asking her to change her mind’ – an iambic pentameter. By varying its context and therefore its rhythm we can, as it were, escape from its metre and so reveal and emphasise differing shades and degrees of meaning.3
De la Mare then gives examples of how this may be done. ‘The Feckless Dinner-Party’ performs similar metrical feats with a well-disguised ballad metre of four and sometimes three stresses (the narratorial voice of the last verse is in iambic pentameter).
Since ‘The Feckless Dinner-Party’ appeared in a collection of 1933, it might appear to be the beneficiary of two influential works: T. S. Eliot’s modernist long poem The Waste Land (1922), which introduced the public to the poetry of unattributed direct speech by multiple speakers, and The Door, Mary Roberts Rinehart’s murder mystery of 1930, which popularised the idea that ‘the butler did it’. However, an earlier version of de la Mare’s poem, entitled ‘The Dinner Party’, appears in the original typescript for 1921’s The Veil, so neither can have been a formative influence (the modernist who probably did influence the poem was Katherine Mansfield). Indeed, had de la Mare published the poem in 1921, he might now be seen as something of a trailblazer for the modernist poets, particularly since ‘The Dinner-Party’ lacks that unmodernist last stanza of the finished poem. But while modernists and stylistic purists are welcome to place the lines after ‘My God! We’ve lost our way!’ (l. 57) under a rectangle of paper, others may well be grateful for that last verse. Not only does it have the good manners to explain to any readers who are lost what on earth has been going on; after all the hubbub, it has an Alka-Seltzer calm.
The 1921 date for the poem also means that the original inspiration for the poem cannot have been, as Richard Davenport-Hines suggests, the society dinner parties of Lady Desborough which the de la Mares were obliged to attend when they moved to a house by Taplow Court in 1925 and gained Lord Desborough as a landlord.4 There were, however, other dinner parties attended by de la Mare in the years up to 1921 which might have given him the idea for the poem (for someone who would happily consign some dinner party-goers to the infernal pit, de la Mare had a moth-like propensity to hang around their flames). While the characters here are presumably meant to be types rather than identifiable people, ‘Our daring poetess, Delia Seek’ (l. 16) bears a striking similarity to the memorably large-beaked and ‘daring’ aristocratic modernist, Edith Sitwell.
l. 24, ‘pacha’ a variant spelling of ‘pasha’, a high-ranking Turkish official, the title is here used figuratively.
l. 54, ‘Our silks and fine array’ alludes to William Blake’s song ‘My silks and fine array’.
l. 62, ‘only a Trump could rouse’ alludes to the trumpet at the biblical day of judgement, Corinthians 1, 15: 52.
NOTES
1. Typescripts for The Veil, Walter de la Mare Library, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Box A103.
2. See Come Hither, vol. 2, p. 880.
3. ‘Meaning in Poetry’, unpublished typescript of lecture, Walter de la Mare Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Box A1178.
4. Lady Desborough’s dinner parties are identified as the inspiration for ‘The Feckless Dinner-Party’ in Richard Davenport-Hines, Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008), p. 268.
Reflections
Three Sisters – and the youngest
Was yet lovelier to see
Than wild flower palely blooming
Under Ygdrasil Tree,
5
Than this well at the woodside
Whose waters silver show,
Though in womb of the blind earth
Ink-like, ebon, they flow.
Creeps on the belled bindweed;
10
The bee, in hoverings nigh,
Sucks his riches of nectar;
Clouds float in the sky;
And she, O pure vanity,
Newly-wakened, at that brink,
15
Crouches close, smiling dreamlike,
To gaze, not to drink.
She sees not earth’s morning
Darkly framed in that cold deep:
Naught, naught but her beauty
20
Made yet fairer by sleep.
And though glassed in that still flood
She peer long, and long,
As faithful stays that image,
As echo is to song …
25
Anon – in high noontide
Comes her sister, wan with fear,
Lest the love in her bosom
Even the bright birds should hear
Wail divine grieved enchantment.
30
She kneels; and, musing, sighs;
Unendurable strangenesses
Darken the eyes
That meet her swift searchings.
From her breast there falls a flower.
35
Down, down – as she ponders –
The fair petals shower,
Hiding brow, mouth, cheek – all
That reflected there is seen.
And she gone, that Mirror
40
As of old rests serene …
Comes moth-light, faint dusk-shine,
The green woods still and whist;
And their sister, the eldest
To keep her late tryst.
45
Long thought and lone broodings
Have wanned, have withered, lined
A face, without beauty,
Which no dream hath resigned
To love’s impassioned grieving.
50
She stands. The louring air
Breathes cold on her cheekbone,
Stirs thief-like her hair;
And a still quiet challenge
Fills her dark, her flint-grey eyes,
55
As she lifts her bowed head
To survey the cold skies.
Wherein stars, hard and restless,
Burn in station fore-ordained,
As if mocking for ever
60
A courage disdained.
And she stoops wearied shoulders,
Void of scorn, of fear, or ruth,
To confront in that well-spring
The dark gaze of Truth.
from The Fleeting and Other Poems (1933)
Ygdrasil (l. 4) is the great ash tree of Norse mythology, whose limbs represent the universe. Beneath it lies Urth’s Well, to which each day come three maidens, the three Norns, and set in it men’s fates. The three sisters of ‘Reflections’ appear to be, if not the Norns themselves, at least their first cousins. The first is like Urd, the Norn who represents the past; the second is like Verdandi, who represents the present, and the third is akin to Skuld, who represents the future. De la Mare may also be thinking of other equivalent myths: given the grey eyes (l. 54) he may have in mind the Graeae, or ‘Grey Ones’, the Roman fates; he may also be thinking of the
Three Graces.
In ‘Reflections’, the first sister is come straight from slumber. ‘[L]ovelier’ than the natural world about her, the wild flower and the well, she is ‘dreamlike’ (l. 15) with ‘beauty’ (l. 19) made ‘yet fairer by sleep’ (l. 20): vain, perhaps narcissistic, yet ‘faithful’ (l. 23) to her own beauty’s image. The second is full of fearful secret love, ‘divine grieved enchantment’ (l. 29); at first, she sees her eyes darkened in the well by ‘unendurable strangeness’ (l. 31), until the flower petals fallen from her breast obscure her face. The third has been ‘wanned’ and ‘withered’ by ‘Long thought’ and ‘lone broodings’ (ll. 45–6), without beauty and dreams of love. Weary she may be, but it is she who confronts the ‘dark gaze of Truth’ (l. 64).
Given the fact that each sister is differently concerned with her own reflection, this must in part be a poem about self-perception; and given the sisters’ different ages, it is a poem that refers to stages of one’s life. There is a strong hint that we may read this as a poem of ‘reflections’ on writing – however silver they may look in the well, the waters flow ‘Ink-like’ (l. 8) in the womb of the earth – or at least the imagination. For those who want to consider ‘Reflections’ as an allegory of the imagination, the ideas in de la Mare’s essay ‘Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination’ serve as useful background information.1 The essay makes a distinction between the idealised Child and the Boy (de la Mare admits that he isn’t sure as to how far his idealised Boy applies to girls). Children, says de la Mare, make no great distinction between dreams and actuality and are contemplatives, solitaries and visionaries. As the nursery gives way to the school proper (a transition that would have been two or three years later for a child of de la Mare’s time and class than it is for most children now), the Child becomes the Boy and a curious investigator of the facts and thoughts of the outside world. Likewise, the
poetical imagination […] is of two distinct kinds or type: the one divines, while the other discovers. The one is intuitive, inductive; the other logical, deductive. The one is visionary, the other intellectual. The one knows beauty is truth, the other reveals that truth is beauty. And the poet inherits … the one kind from the child in him, the other from the boy in him. Not that any one poet’s imagination is purely and solely of either type. The greatest poets – Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, for instance, are masters of both. There is a borderland in which dwell Wordsworth, Keats, [Coventry] Patmore, Mr T. S. Eliot and many others.2
But examples of the visionaries and dreamers, ‘those whose eyes are set inward’: ‘Plato, Plotinus, the writer of the book of Job, Blake, Vaughan […] W. B. Yeats’ – may be taken as representative of one type and ‘Lucretius, Dryden, Pope, Byron, Meredith and Alice Meynell’ as representatives of the other. The imagination of de la Mare himself, we may gather, is, unlike that of Rupert Brooke, much less that of a boy than it is that of a child.
De la Mare could be dismissive of Sigmund Freud and what de la Mare reckoned to be his over-emphasis on sex. Nevertheless, ‘Reflections’ does strongly bring to mind Freud’s ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, an essay in which he reflects on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and how it is not the gold nor the silver but the lead casket that Portia’s suitor must choose if he is to win her, and relates this to a scene in King Lear, where it is not the flattering Goneril and Regan but the third daughter, the near-silent Cordelia, who is the worthy one. This is a structure that is also found in folk tales. For instance, the put-upon Cinderella is the worthy third daughter but hides herself. In these examples and in other folk tales, Freud traces this virtuous dumbness of the third daughter and third suitor, going on to identify the third’s dumbness with that of death and averring that stories which emphasise the virtue or marriageability of the third daughter conceal this darker identification. Freud then points out that ‘if the third of the sisters is the Goddess of Death, the sisters are known to us. They are the Fates, the Moerae, the Parcae or the Norns, the third of whom is called Atropos, the inexorable.’3 Whether or not de la Mare knew this essay, he certainly knew Freud’s source tales intimately.
NOTES
1. Walter de la Mare, ‘Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination’ in Pleasures and Speculations (London: Faber and Faber, 1940), pp. 172–99.
2. Ibid., pp. 179–80.
3. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12 (1911–13): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works, edited by James Strachey, (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 289–302: 295.
Rose
Three centuries now are gone
Since Thomas Campion
Left men his airs, his verse, his heedful prose.
Few other memories
5
Have we of him, or his,
And, of his sister, none, but that her name was Rose.
Woodruff, far moschatel
May the more fragrant smell
When into brittle dust their blossoming goes.
10
His, too, a garden sweet,
Where rarest beauties meet,
And, as a child, he shared them with this Rose.
Faded, past changing, now,
Cheek, mouth, and childish brow.
15
Where, too, her phantom wanders no man knows.
Yet, when in undertone
That eager lute pines on,
Pleading of things he loves, it sings of Rose.
from The Fleeting and Other Poems (1933)
‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,’ says Juliet to Romeo. Still, Juliet’s view discounts the magic of the particular sound of the word: its similarity to ‘arose’, for instance, and all the many connotations that the word may bring, including ones quite particular to the listener. What if your own sister happened to be called Rose? Wouldn’t just a little of her cling to its every use? And what would that say about a poet who was fond of putting roses in his poems?
De la Mare felt a special admiration for the Elizabethan lyric poet Thomas Campion. In 1910, he wrote: ‘No other poems in the language have quite their bird-like exquisite movement. They vibrate with a frail delicate music that sings, dies away and reawakes, like the voice of a bird in the shadowy moonlight of a wood.’1 As W. H. Auden noticed, de la Mare’s own delicate music – and ‘Rose’ is a beautifully turned example of it – has learned much from Campion’s.2 De la Mare’s note to Thomas Campion’s ‘There Is a Garden in Her Face’ in Come Hither reads:
Thomas Campion was ‘borne upon Ash Weddensday being the twelft day of February. An. Rg. Eliz. nono’ – 1567. He had one sister, Rose. He was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and this was his yearly allowance of clothes: ‘A gowne, a cap, a hat, ii dubletes, ii payres of hose, iiii payres of netherstockes, vi payre of shoes, ii shirts, and two bandes.’ He was allowed also one quire of paper every quarter; and a half a pound of candles every fortnight from Michaelmas to Lady Day. He studied law, may for a time have fought as a soldier in France, and became a physician. He died on March 1, 1620, and was buried the same day at St. Dunstan’s in the West, Fleet Street, the entry in the register under that date being ‘Thomas Campion, doctor of Phisicke, was buried.’
I have taken these particulars from Mr S. P. Vivian’s edition of his poems, because it is pleasant to share even this of the little that is known of a man who was not only a fine and original poet and ‘a most curious metrist’ – though for two centuries a forgotten one – but also because he was one of the chief songwriters in the great age of English Music. Like all good craftsmen, he endeavoured to do his work ‘well, surely, cleanly, workmanly, substantially, curiously, and sufficiently,’ as did the glaziers of King’s College Chapel, which is distant but a kingfisher’s flight over a strip of lovely water from his own serene Peterhouse. It seems a little curious that being himself a lover of music he should have at first detested rhyming in verse. But he lived none the less to
write such delicate rhymed poems as this.
In the preface to his Book of Ayres, he says, ‘I have chiefly aymed to couple my Words and Notes lovingly together, which will be much for him to doe that hath not power over both.’3
De la Mare’s own much-loved younger sister also had a flower name: she was known as ‘Poppy’.
l. 3. ‘heedful’: John Bayley refers to this, with its ‘slight air of gentle mocking mystery’ as ‘the mot juste, but what an evasive and puckish mot juste it is’.4
l. 7. ‘Woodruff’: a sweet-scented white flower with four petals, which flowers in the early spring; ‘moschatel’ is a small green flower known for its musky smell, which flowers in early May; it grows in a great number of countries and climates, thus qualifying for the epithet ‘far’. Both flowers appear to be mentioned for their smell and especially for their enhanced fragrance after they have been wilted or dried (as in potpourri), this being a sort of lingering after death. The rose that is Campion’s sister lingers as a sort of faint scent in her brother’s poems, never exactly mentioned, but often named.
NOTES
1. Walter de la Mare, ‘Thomas Campion’, Saturday Westminster Gazette, 8 January 1910.
2. W. H. Auden cites Campion as a key influence on de la Mare in ‘An Appreciation of the Lyric Verse of Walter de la Mare’, New York Times Book Review, 26 February 1956.
3. Walter de la Mare, Come Hither, pp. 404–5.
4. John Bayley, ‘The Unexpectedness of Walter de la Mare’, The Walter de la Mare Society Magazine, July 2002, pp. 4–6: p. 4.