Reading Walter de la Mare

by Walter De la Mare

  The reason for the change in her must be the presence of the soldiers. The ‘sun-tanned’ young men (l. 16) may have taken her from childhood innocence by awakening in her a sexual attraction. But as much as the look of them, it is the noise they make, the ‘clop of hoofs,/ the clang of dangling chain, voices that rang’ (ll. 6–7), that has enchanted her.

  The whole sound world of the poem is unusual. The rhyme scheme is irregular, some rhymes being adjacent; others are a long way apart – notably ‘artillery’ (l. 10) and ‘soldiery’ (l. 16), and ‘thinned’ (l. 18) and ‘skinned’ (l. 26). De la Mare uses internal rhyme and near rhyme – for instance, ‘gun’ (l. 12) with ‘sun’ (l. 13) ‘din’ and ‘thinned’ (l. 18), yet each time ‘ran’ appears as an (uncharacteristic) half-rhyme (l. 8 and l. 22). The overall effect is something between de la Mare’s more usual music of enchantment and the jarring pararhymes found in the war poems of Wilfred Owen.

  NOTES

  1. Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 170.

  2. Ibid., p. 367.

  3. See, for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stubble_burning.

  4. Walter de la Mare, Animal Stories, p. 75.

  5. Quoted in Marianne Taylor, The Way of the Hare (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 32.

  Incantation

  Vervain … basil … orison –

  Whisper their syllablings till all meaning is gone,

  And sound all vestige loses of mere word …

  ’Tis then as if, in some far childhood heard,

  5

  A wild heart languishing at the call of a bird,

  Crying through ruinous windows, high and fair,

  A secret incantation on the air:

  A language lost; which, when its accents cease,

  Breathes, voiceless, of a pre-Edenic peace.

  from Memory and Other Poems (1938)

  De la Mare was interested in the possible consciousness-altering effects of poetic sound. In Come Hither, he writes that there are ‘many ways of reading verse aloud – one of them being with little change of pitch, and resembling a spoken chaunt, or “intoning”. This drowses the waking mind; and the words resemble an incantation.’1 The word ‘incantation’, though indicating words to be spoken or intoned, shares its root with ‘enchantment’, as de la Mare well knew (see notes to ‘A Song of Enchantment’; introducing Shakespeare’s songs, de la Mare writes: ‘the Songs are incantations: they were intended to be sung’).2

  Readers are being directed to repeat the words ‘Vervain … basil … orison’ until ‘all meaning is gone’: that is, these words should be deployed as a mantra and repeated until a state of altered consciousness is reached. But while those who do so may well experience the effects described in the poem, the words de la Mare has chosen do have meanings. In the language of flowers of the nineteenth century, ‘Vervain’ means enchantment. Used in rituals by Ancient Romans and druids alike, it continued to have a place in European popular remedies and folk culture. As Charlotte de la Tour’s influential nineteenth-century study, The Language of Flowers, asserts, ‘vervain is still among us, as it was among the ancients, the herb of incantation’.3 Basil comes from the Greek for king, and is associated with the basilisk.4 In I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden’s The Meaning of Meaning, whose contents de la Mare refers to in one of his lectures, it is recorded that the word ‘Abracadabra’ has been derived from Abraxas, originally the charm of the Basildean Gnostics, so this may be Basildean basil.5 Orison is comparatively straightforward: with an etymology connecting it to speech rather than song, it is a form of prayer, and a reminder that incantations have been a devotional practice associated with all the major world religions – the unceasing repetition of the Jesus Prayer by ascetics would be an example of its place in the Christian tradition. The poem links the mantra-like recitation of words until they lose meaning and the reattainment of a ‘pre-Edenic’ state (l. 9), which is something of a paradox. If you take the Bible story literally, there was no human time before Eden. But then, from the point of view of the poem, in Eden man is already fallen, for it was there that Adam gave names to creation, and by giving it words separated himself from the sort of sounds the birds make.

  Similar connections between mantra, language and birdsong to those de la Mare conjures in ‘Incantation’ are explored by the philosopher Frits Staal in his 1990 study Rules without Meaning. Staal finds much in common between Vedic mantras and birdsong, as well as the speech of babies before they properly acquire language, and he hypothesises that the date of the oldest Vedic chants may predate the origin of language for communication. Staal also maintains:

  Certain sorts of repetitions and refrain-like structures that seem to be common to both mantras and bird songs, are entirely absent from the syntax of ordinary language. In fact, any linguist who is familiar with syntactic structures cannot fail to be struck by the absence in almost all such structures of the typical repetitive features of both mantras and bird songs. There is an area of overlap: the domain of poetry. However, poetry seems in several respects to constitute an intermediary area between mantras and ordinary language.6

  If there is an answer to why particular bird cries should have given de la Mare such a profound intuition of the ruined state humans find themselves in, the state of self and sound he has lost and his poetry’s connection to them, it must be something akin to this.

  ‘Incantation’, its ruinousness and birdsong, is strongly reminiscent of a couple of passages in de la Mare’s prose fiction. In his story ‘The Bird of Travel’ (see notes to ‘The Listeners’):

  And then, while I was slowly returning towards it once more, under the still, reddish, evening sky, suddenly I heard thrice repeated an extraordinary call. It pierced my mind like an arrow. It almost absurdly startled me – like the shrilling of a decoy, as if my own name had been called in a strange or forgotten tongue.

  Of English birds, the blackcap, perhaps, sings with a vestige of that wild and piercing sweetness. Imagine such a voice twenty times more vigorous suddenly breaking in upon that evening silence – falling on from note to note as if some unearthly traveller were summoning from afar his strayed dog on the hill side! […] Here was the deserted house, and still echoing in my heart that cry, the lure, as of some innocent Banshee.7

  From roughly the same period, comes this passage from The Return (1910):

  Hill and wailing cry and barn and water faded out. And he was staring as if in an endless stillness at an open window against which the sun was beating in a bristling torrent of gold, while out of the garden beyond came the voice of some evening bird singing with such an unspeakable ecstasy of grief it seemed it must be perched upon the confines of another world. The light gathered to a radiance almost intolerable, driving back with its raining beams some memory, forlorn, remorseless, remote.8

  Both passages frame an experience that seems beyond words.

  NOTES

  1. Walter de la Mare, Come Hither, vol. 1, p. 318.

  2. The Shakespeare Songs: Being a Complete Collection of the Songs written by or attributed to William Shakespeare, p. xviii.

  3. Charlotte de la Tour, The Language of Flowers (Philadelphia: Saunders and Otley, 1839), p. 34.

  4. John Lingard also investigates the meaning of these words, with slightly different findings, in ‘“The Verge at which They Fail”: Language, Relationship and Journey in the Poetry of Walter de la Mare’, Dalhousie Review, 69 (4), 1989/90, pp. 578–93.

  5. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: a Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolosm, supplementary essays by B. Malinowski and F. G. Crookshank (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1923; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company Inc., 1923), p. 87. De la Mare refers to it in his lecture ‘Meaning in Poetry’, Walter de la Mare Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Box A117.

  6. Frits Staal, Rules without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), p. 282.

&nb
sp; 7. Walter de la Mare, Short Stories 1895–1926, p. 82.

  8. Walter de la Mare, The Return, p. 241.

  Brueghel’s Winter

  Jagg’d mountain peaks and skies ice-green

  Wall in the wild cold scene below.

  Churches, farms, bare copse, the sea

  In freezing quiet of winter show;

  5

  Where ink-black shapes on fields in flood

  Curling, skating, and sliding go.

  To left, a gabled tavern; a blaze;

  Peasants; a watching child; and lo,

  Muffled, mute – beneath naked trees

  10

  In sharp perspective set a-row –

  Trudge huntsmen, sinister spears aslant,

  Dogs snuffling behind them in the snow;

  And arrowlike, lean, athwart the air

  Swoops into space a crow.

  15

  But flame, nor ice, nor piercing rock,

  Nor silence, as of a frozen sea,

  Nor that slant inward infinite line

  Of signboard, bird, and hill, and tree,

  Give more than subtle hint of him

  20

  Who squandered here life’s mystery.

  from Memory and Other Poems (1938)

  The Brueghel of ‘Brueghel’s Winter’ is Pieter Breughel (or Bruegel) the Elder (c.1525-1569). His oil on wood painting of Winter, often referred to as Hunters in the Snow, dates from 1565 and is one of five paintings to survive from a series of pictures he painted on the theme of the seasons. The original painting hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and was almost certainly not seen by de la Mare. He did, however, have a reproduction of the painting upon his wall, probably acquired following a letter sent to him by the painter Sir William Nicholson (1872–1949) on 13 May 1936, in which Nicholson says that if he had to choose one painting he would choose a good reproduction of Brueghel’s Winter.1 Nicholson sketches the painting in his letter, pointing out some of the details.

  De la Mare’s choice of vocabulary in the poem attunes itself to painting: ‘ink-black’ (l. 5) is alert to the use of pigment; ‘perspective’ (l. 10) uses the word in the usual sense but also as a term for a painter’s rendering of three-dimensional space; ‘sinister’ (l. 11) plays on the word’s origin in the Latin for ‘left’: the spears are ominous but they also point left and are on the left side of the painting. The description of the icy scene within the painting and its ‘freezing quiet’ (l. 4) subtly transforms into a description of the soundless and still condition of painting itself and its ‘silence as of a frozen sea’ (l. 16).

  Some of the vocabulary is, in more senses than one, ‘pointed’: ‘Jagg’d mountain peaks’ (l. 1), ‘sharp perspective’ (l. 10) and ‘arrowlike’ (l. 13), the features of the described landscape taking on the characteristics of the spears of the huntsmen. As rhymes such as ‘Tit for Tat’ in Peacock Pie and ‘Hi’ in Poems for Children (1930) attest, de la Mare detested the cruelty of hunting. That he could also connect cruelty to animals with forebodings of war is made clear by the depiction of hare and soldier in ‘Dry August Burned’.

  If one maps out the lines at the end of ‘Brueghel’s Winter’, the ‘infinite line’ (l. 17) shows itself to be a cross formed between ‘signboard, bird, and hill, and tree’ (l. 18); the bird itself (the crow) is also cross-like. This would indicate that the ‘him’ in the poem must be Jesus Christ; the hunters in the snow are his torturers and killers. Other subtle hints of Christ in the picture not explicitly referred to in the poem include a central bramble, which may allude to the crown of thorns, three ‘naked’ (l. 9) trees on the hill, which may allude to the three crosses at Golgotha and, so small that it may not have been easy to detect on de la Mare’s reproduction, a tiny cross between the antlers of the deer on the sign at the front of the inn (in the painting, this must allude to St Hubert, the patron saint of hunters). De la Mare’s Christian faith waxed and waned over the years, and how far ‘Breughel’s Winter’ is or isn’t a Christian poem will be a question of interpretation. Is ‘squandered here’ (l. 20) a reproach for giving up life’s mystery, or a respectful Christian acknowledgement of Christ’s self-sacrifice? In ‘Brueghel’s Winter’ de la Mare is, as he is so often, no friend to definitive interpretation. Not mentioning Christ by name, he has also made it possible for the reader to come up with the less likely, but still plausible, identification of ‘him’ not as being Christ but Brueghel and ‘here’ being not Earth, but the painting itself.

  Within a few years of the publication of ‘Brughel’s Winter’, a number of eminent English and American poets, including Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and William Carlos Williams, wrote poems addressing paintings by Brueghel, including his Winter/Hunters in the Snow. The direct cause of this upsurge of poetic interest in the Renaissance painter was the disquisition on Breughel paintings in W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, but de la Mare’s poem predates, and may well have partly inspired, Auden’s, which was written in December 1938, the year of the appearance of de la Mare’s poem in Memory. The detail of the hunters’ ‘sinister’ spears next to the ‘snuffling dogs’ in ‘Breughel’s Winter’ anticipates the dogs and torturer’s horse in Auden’s poem and may explain how Auden’s poem about the Musée de Beaux Arts in Brussels has on its mind a picture which hangs in Vienna.

  ‘Brueghel’s Winter’ was not the only inspiration de la Mare gave to Auden. De la Mare’s 1923 anthology Come Hither was, according to Auden, the book which ‘more than any book I have read before or since taught me what poetry is’.2 Its good yet catholic taste, its ‘lack of literary class consciousness’ and its knowledge that ‘poetry does not have to be great or even serious to be good’ were the touchstone for Auden’s own anthologising.3 It also ensured that Auden’s poetry was shaped more deeply by Georgian, or at least de la Mare’s, taste than it was by the modernism he imbibed a few years later. The influence of de la Mare’s own poems on Auden’s verse is discernible too: in his strangers, questers and travellers and in his poems asking questions or listening for sounds, including ‘O Where Are You Going?’ and ‘O What Is That Sound?’; it can also be heard in the music of some of his lyrics. Auden’s large debt to de la Mare was repaid, first in appreciative reviews of de la Mare’s books and, after de la Mare’s death, in Auden’s introduction and selection of A Choice of de la Mare’s Verse (1963).

  NOTES

  1. Sir William Nicholson, Letter to Walter de la Mare 13 May 1936, Walter de la Mare Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Box B97.

  2. W. H. Auden, ‘Jacob and the Angel’, review of Behold, This Dreamer! by Walter de la Mare, New Republic, 27 December 1939; The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–48, edited by Edward Mendelson (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 37–9: p. 37.

  3. W. H. Auden, Making Knowing and Judging, An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 11 June 1956 (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1956).

  Swallows Flown

  Whence comes that small continuous silence

  Haunting the livelong day?

  This void, where a sweetness, so seldom heeded,

  Once ravished my heart away?

  5

  As if a loved one, too little valued,

  Had vanished – could not stay?

  from Memory and Other Poems (1938)

  Mournings and ghosts need not be the grand affairs of formal elegies, tombstones or haunted houses; de la Mare is just as good on smaller absences, the traces in which we feel lives and happenings no longer there. In this poem it is the absence of the sound of swallows, which arrive in England in April or May and are gone in September or October and were the background noise between spring and autumn when the de la Mares were living at Taplow. This noise gradually changes. It is originally the chatter of the nesting pair, which swells as their chicks are hatched and grow and diminishes when they are fledged. In listening to the sound of swallows, de la Mare has been listening to the coming in
to being, growing and dispersal of a family. Perhaps this family reminded him of his own: by the 1930s, de la Mare’s offspring had (with the partial exception of his youngest son Colin) flown the nest, but there were now grandchildren to pay visits and to leave again.

  The asides – ‘so seldom heeded’ (l. 3), ‘too little valued’ (l. 5) – and the pause between ‘vanished’ and ‘could not stay’ (l. 6) are finely judged, small notes of inconspicuous regret. Why ‘could not stay’? Because the narrator made the loved one go? Because the loved one died? Or simply because, like the swallows quitting the English autumn, the time had come for the loved one to go.

  The word ‘livelong’ (l. 2), which means ‘entire’, has nothing to do with ‘lifelong’ but comes in origin from the Middle English word ‘lef’, meaning ‘dear’ or ‘beloved’, and so is here manifesting that desire to love every moment, and in particular every moment given to us by the natural world, that we find in a poem such as ‘Fare Well’.

  We do not know what loved one the author has in mind: ‘ravished my heart away’ (l. 4) may imply the disappearance of someone who was once the object of romantic love or merely what it directly states, that the swallows took the poet’s heart away when they travelled south. The fact that ‘Swallows Flown’ is placed next to ‘Sallie’s Musical Box’ (see notes for ‘Sallie’) in the 1942 edition of de la Mare’s Collected Poems might suggest that the poem conceals, as ‘Sallie’s Musical Box’ may conceal, a sigh for the passing of the lyric muse. If so, it would be an odd sentiment to voice, for the music of ‘Swallows Flown’ is, to my mind and ear, every bit as beautiful as that of the early lyrics. The last two lines are reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s poems, particularly on the death of his wife, ‘vanished – could not stay’ (l. 6) being, perhaps, small euphemisms for a greater and more permanent departure, but they are particularly apposite to swallows, which often nest in chimneys, under the eaves of houses or in other suitable corners, fellow residents who must suddenly depart.