Reading Walter de la Mare

by Walter De la Mare

  The Old Summerhouse

  This blue-washed, old, thatched summerhouse –

  Paint scaling, and fading from its walls –

  How often from its hingeless door

  I have watched – dead leaf, like the ghost of a mouse,

  5

  Rasping the worn brick floor –

  The snows of the weir descending below,

  And their thunderous waterfall.

  Fall – fall: dark, garrulous rumour,

  Until I could listen no more.

  10

  Could listen no more – for beauty with sorrow

  Is a burden hard to be borne:

  The evening light on the foam, and the swans, there;

  That music, remote, forlorn.

  from Memory and Other Poems (1938)

  ‘The Old Summerhouse’ is a place where de la Mare’s long-established preoccupations with old buildings, small sounds, hauntedness and natural enchantments all meet. A summerhouse is a sort of garden hut designed to enable one to sit out on hot days. But while this is, I presume, a poem of summer, a sense of summers gone washes over summer present, with that dead leaf and the fading paint.

  The sound and sense are almost still at first. Clusters of naturally stressed syllables around those bearing the metre slow the line. Small, very particular visual details detain the eye. ‘Scaling’, ‘fading’ (l. 2), the motion of a leaf over a floor whose brick has already been worn by other things, other leaves, other people who have come to sit here, other visits by the poem’s narrator: everything in the summerhouse is being slowly washed away.

  Then comes the break and the rush. The division between the stanzas mimics the falling of water over the weir, a thunderous sound that falls away into a more distant ‘garrulous rumour’ (l. 8) through further echoes and finally into ‘That music remote, forlorn’ (l. 13). This marked change between stanzas is reminiscent of the traditional turn, or volta, that comes when one reaches the last six lines of a sonnet.

  The hypnotic effect of the sound of water descending down weirs exerted a great force over de la Mare and his imagination. In his 1910 novel The Return, the hero looks out on a river:

  So absorbed he became as he stood leaning over the wooden sill above the falling water, that eye and ear became enslaved by the roar and stillness. And in the faint atmosphere of age that seemed like a veil to hang about the odd old house and these prodigious branches, he fell into a kind of waking dream.1

  De la Mare reports something similar when writing to Naomi Royde-Smith of a time he spent in March 1913 by the Frome with Edward Thomas, feeling his wits ‘slipping away in the enormous roar of the falling water. I didn’t want to be anything but that.’2

  The poet Peter Scupham has commented that ‘Orsino might have written “The Old Summerhouse”, or Feste sung the second stanza to him.’3 There is something of the melancholy Duke and the sad, singing fool of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night here, and I think Orsino’s opening speech on music can be distantly heard behind de la Mare’s lines:

  That strain again! – it had a dying fall:

  O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound

  That breathes upon a bank of violets

  Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:

  ’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

  Along with Orsino listening to music, one can just make out Keats listening to his nightingale, envisioning:

  Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam

  Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

  Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

  To toll me back from thee to my sole self!4

  Whether to call these influences or deliberate allusions is hard to say, and probably beside the point; they function as both. Echoes of such well-loved lines may sound through de la Mare’s words almost automatically, yet they are also a part of his understanding of the world. They allow the view and sounds of the old summerhouse to open not just onto the weir downstream but onto the lands of Illyria and Faerie. Orsino appears to be melancholy for music alone, as does the speaker of ‘The Old Summerhousec. Yet in Twelfth Night, his speech on music foreshadows Viola’s mourning for her drowned brother, Sebastian. The beauty and sorrow of ‘The Old Summerhouse’ never mentions death and nor does it detail times past or the people who have lived and visited this place, but its sense of time passing like vast waters over the weir brings both to mind.

  NOTES

  1. Walter de la Mare, The Return, p. 125.

  2. Walter de la Mare, Letter to Naomi Royde-Smith, 1 April 1913, as quoted by Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 214.

  3. Peter Scupham, ‘Walter de la Mare’, PN Review, 25 (6), July 1999, pp. 44–6: p. 44.

  4. John Keats, The Poetical Works of John Keats, edited by Francis T. Palgrave (London: Macmillan, 1928), p. 215.

  ‘Of a Son’

  A garish room – oil-lamped; a stove’s warm blaze;

  Gilt chairs drawn up to candles, and green baize:

  The doctor hastened in – a moment stayed,

  Watching the cards upon the table played –

  5

  Club, and sharp diamond, and heart, and spade.

  And – still elated – he exclaimed, ‘Parbleu,

  A thousand pardons, friends, for keeping you;

  I feared I’d never see the lady through.

  A boy, too! Magnifique the fight she made!

  10

  Ah, well, she’s happy now!’ Said one, ‘“She”? – who?’

  ‘A woman called Landru.’

  Gentle as flutter of dove’s wing, the cards

  Face downwards fell again; and fever-quick,

  Topped by old Time and scythe, a small brass clock

  15

  In the brief hush of tongues resumed its tick.

  from Memory and Other Poems (1938)

  A doctor is late to a card game. He pauses a moment to watch the other players at the ‘green baize’ (l. 2) that covers the card table to prevent the underside of the cards from being reflected or from sliding when dealt. The doctor, who is presumably a Frenchman (one may be tempted to give the French words an English pronunciation, but presumably ‘Parbleu’ (l. 6), a euphemism for ‘Par Dieu’ or ‘By God’, is intended to rhyme with ‘Landru’ (l. 11) rather than ‘you’ (l. 7)) excuses himself by saying that he has been detained by a lady and a boy and that the lady put up a fight that was ‘Magnifique’ (l. 9). On being asked by one of the card players who this lady is, the doctor says she is called ‘Landru’ (l. 11). The clock, which seemed to have stopped ticking, starts again, and there is a new deal of cards.

  More appears to be going on than first meets the eye. Why does the poem have such a curious title, and why is it in quotation marks? What manner of fight has the lady has been making? Who is the boy? And why, in a poem by a writer who usually reserves surnames for epitaphs, are we pointedly given this lady’s surname?

  There is also the question of the card game. A gilt-chaired social setting and four cards played in succession suggest this is a game of contract bridge. When it comes to the impenetrability of its rules for the uninitiated, bridge is up there with cricket and the Japanese tea ceremony, but I shall try to make clear what is going on.

  Bridge is conventionally played by four players divided into two teams of two. There is an initial bidding process between all four players to decide which suit will be ‘trumps’; the highest-bidding pair will also declare how many ‘tricks’ they believe they will make. After the bidding process is concluded, one player drops out, leaving their partner to play their hand, which becomes what is termed ‘the dummy’. There is also a variant of the game with a ‘revolving dummy’, which I suspect is what is being played when the doctor arrives. As the hand is played, one card from each player’s hand put down in turn constitutes ‘a trick’. Players must follow suit if they can and if they cannot, players put down a card of a different suit. Since the game is played with ‘trumps’, if this
card is in the suit which happens to have been nominated as trumps, that player will win the trick regardless of whatever the nominal suit of that trick is, assuming that no trump card of higher value is subsequently put down. In the poem, the cards are about to be dealt again, so the succession of four cards we see in line 5 is the last trick of this particular deal, making the fact that all play cards of different suits perfectly likely. If that is the case, the value of any particular card will make no difference to the result of this trick. What the winning card is will depend on which trump was successfully bid for at the opening of the hand, or whether the winning bid was, in fact, ‘no trump’.

  All this gives us five possible solutions to this particular trick. Not coincidentally, I can also find five possible solutions to the mystery of this poem’s plot, and, as at least two of them seem linked to the possible ‘bids’ determining the outcome of the hand, I’ll arrange them accordingly:

  1. Clubs.

  After a magnificent fight for life, a lady has died ‘of a son’ in childbirth. The doctor’s phrase ‘she’s happy now’ (l. 10), implies that, after the struggle, the lady is now in heaven. Her son survives her. One person dies.

  2. Diamonds

  This is ‘sharp’ (l. 5) diamonds. De la Mare was addicted to the details of grisly murder cases and used this knowledge to explore similar territory in some of his writing, which included a never-to-be-performed dark melodrama of the 1920s, alternatively titled Dr Fleet and The Lady Killer. The lady’s name is ‘Landru’, the surname of the notorious French serial killer, the ‘real-life Bluebeard’, Henri Désiré Landru (1869–1922). Landru seduced affluent widows who answered his adverts in lonely hearts columns. He would then gain control of their wealth before murdering and dismembering them, burning their corpses. In 1921, Landru stood trial on eleven counts of murder committed between 1914 and 1919. Landru’s first victim was thirty-nine-year-old Jeanne Cuchet, who had a sixteen-year-old son.1

  The plot of this reading of ‘“Of a Son”’ leads to us to conclude that a lady and a boy have been killed by the doctor, perhaps for her diamonds: despite the fight, he has seen her ‘through’ (l. 8). It is the bodies of a lady and ‘Of a Son’ which have been left. Two people die.

  3. Hearts

  The attentive doctor has seen a lady through a difficult labour: she has been successfully delivered ‘Of a son’ (l. 9), leaving us with a happy mother and a heart-warming ending. No one dies, and there is one more person in the world.

  4. Spades.

  An unsuccessful labour has led to the death of a mother and ‘A boy too!’ (see ‘1. Clubs’). Two people die.

  5. No Trump

  All the above ‘trumps’ are plausible, but in bridge, a fifth possible option is available: that of bidding for and having ‘no trump’. (In a real game of bridge, this would mean that the player putting down the club would be the winner). The least satisfactory part of ‘2. Diamonds’ is that it is the lady who is called Landru. Landru may have partnered his victims, but he did so under aliases, so why is the lady named Landru, unless to imply that it is she rather than the doctor who is a killer?

  We may have missed some further clues. The room is ‘garish’ (l. 1) and there is a blazing stove. The doctor is ‘still elated’ (l. 6) when he joins the company. When the cards are dealt again, they fall ‘fever-quick,/ Topped by old Time and scythe’ (l. 13–14). The lady has not been in labour at all and nor has the doctor killed her; rather he has been nursing her through a perilous fever. Fortunately, the lady has put up a tremendous fight and he has ‘seen her through’, and ‘a boy too’, but in doing so the doctor has caught the fever himself. Both boy and lady live. Time and its scythe are waiting for the card players. It seems likely that the death toll will in fact be four.

  NOTES

  1. These facts derive from https: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Désiré_Landru, and ‘Henri Landru: The Real-Life Bluebeard Murderer of France’, http://www.medicalbag.com/grey-matter/henri-landru-the-real-life-bluebeard-murderer-of-france/article/472777/.

  The House

  A lane at the end of Old Pilgrim Street

  Leads on to a sheep-track over the moor,

  Till you come at length to where two streams meet,

  The brook called Liss, and the shallow Stour.

  5

  Their waters mingle and sing all day –

  Rushes and kingcups, rock and stone;

  And aloof in the valley, forlorn and gray,

  Is a house whence even the birds have flown.

  Its ramshackle gate swings crazily; but

  10

  No sickle covets its seeding grass;

  There’s a cobbled path to a door close-shut;

  But no face shows at the window-glass.

  No smoke wreathes up in the empty air

  From the chimney over its weed-green thatch;

  15

  Briar and bryony ramble there;

  And no thumb tirls at the broken latch.

  Even the warbling water seems

  To make lone music for none to hear;

  Else is a quiet found only in dreams,

  20

  And in dreams this foreboding, though not of fear.

  Yes, often at dusk-fall when nearing home –

  The hour of the crescent and evening star –

  Again to the bridge and the streams I come,

  Where the sedge and the rushes and kingcups are:

  25

  And I stand, and listen, and sigh – in vain;

  Since only of Fancy’s the face I see;

  Yet its eyes in the twilight on mine remain,

  And it seems to be craving for company.

  from Bells and Grass: A Book of Rhymes (1941)

  I have been unable to find the place where a brook called the Liss crosses the River Stour near an ‘Old Pilgrim Street’. If such a location does exist, I would expect to find it close to the village of Chilham near Canterbury in Kent, where the ancient track known as the Pilgrim’s Way runs by the Stour. There is also a River Stour in Dorset, which appears in poems by Thomas Hardy including ‘Overlooking the River Stour’, but the reference to Old Pilgrim Street would suggest that that is not the Stour referred to here.

  The Pilgrim’s Way took on great significance for writers of de la Mare’s generation. Running from Winchester to Canterbury and providing a picturesque alternative to the built-up and busy route from London to Canterbury taken by Chaucer’s pilgrims, the Pilgrim’s Way is hymned and mythologised in Hilaire Belloc’s The Old Road (1904); it and other ancient walkways were to be walked and written about by Edward Thomas. Interest in the Pilgrim’s Way would reach an even larger public three years after this poem’s publication, with the release of the Powell and Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale in 1944.

  The name of the brook may owe more to autobiographical resonance than to geographical exactitude. The village of Liss is near to West Harting, where de la Mare and his family spent summers during his writing of The Listeners and Peacock Pie, as well as to Steep, the East Hampshire village where Thomas lived for a number of years. Liss also happens to be near the beginning of the Pilgrim’s Way, if not the River Stour. Those chasing up a connection with Thomas will also find slight similarities to his story ‘The Pilgrim’, although its Pilgrim’s Way is the one from London to St Davids in Wales and its brook is the Alan, and to descriptions of old houses, one of them beside the Pilgrim’s Way, to be found in Thomas’s The South Country (1909).1

  Though it has a style and feel akin to poems in the later adult volumes, ‘The House’ was included in de la Mare’s 1941 children’s volume Bells and Grass and brings to mind a rhyme from Peacock Pie:

  The Old Stone House

  Nothing on the grey roof, nothing on the brown,

  Only a little greening where the rain drops down;

  Nobody at the window, nobody at the door,

  Only a little hollow which a foot once wore;

  5

  But
still I tread on tiptoe, still tiptoe on I go,

  Past nettles, porch, and weedy well, for oh, I know

  A friendless face is peering, and a clear still eye

  Peeps closely through the casement as my step goes by.

  ‘The Old Stone House’, with its trepidatious zest, vivid details and ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ rhythm tiptoes around a house the later poem views sedately from afar. The everyday ‘ghost’, the ‘little hollow which a foot once wore’, becomes – in imagination? in actuality? – that ghost-like face at the window, with its ‘clear still eye’ (l. 7).

  In the later poem, it may not just be the house but the pilgrim de la Mare that is now old. The garden, through lack of a scythe, seems to be missing the tidying of the gardener, death. Even if there is ‘Nobody at the window’ (l. 3) of ‘The Old Stone House’, the narrator of the earlier rhyme completely believed in the face there; the narrator of ‘The House’ can only sigh that ‘only of Fancy’s the face I see’ (l. 26).