In ‘The House’, the capitalisation of Fancy’s initial letter suggests that de la Mare has in mind the definition of the word put forward by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) in his Biographia Literaria. For Coleridge, Fancy is a lesser thing than the mysterious power of the Imagination: more consciously willed, ‘a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space’.2 If that is what de la Mare has in mind, it is tempting to read the Liss as representing Imagination and the Shallow Stour as Fancy.
During the First World War, de la Mare stopped writing poetry for a time, remarking in a letter to Naomi Royde-Smith: ‘it’s impossible to turn out a nursery jingle unless some queer little door’s ajar in one’s mind, somebody’s peeping in the window at me.’3 The uncanny appearance of the face in the window where no face should be has become emblematic of poetic inspiration.
The ‘kingcups’ (l. 6) look like giant buttercups and are also known as ‘marsh marigolds’. English ‘bryony’ (l. 15) is ‘white bryony’, a species of vigorous vine which bears white flowers and red berries. The word ‘tirls’ (l. 16) here means ‘rattles’.
NOTES
1. See Edward Thomas, The South Country, introduction by Helen Thomas, illustrated by Eric Fitch Daglish (London: J. M Dent, 1932), pp. 57–9 and pp. 241–5.
2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), p. 296.
3. Quoted in Jill Benton, Avenging Muse: Naomi Royde-Smith, 1875–1964 (Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris, 2015), p. 153.
Dreamland
Annie has run down to the mill dam,
Annie is down by the weir;
Who was it calling her name, then?
Nobody else to hear?
5
Cold the water, calm and deep,
Honey-sweet goldilocks half-asleep,
Where the green-grey willows weep,
Annie is down by the weir.
from Bells and Grass: A Book of Rhymes (1941)
At first sight, ‘Dreamland’ is a pretty, if pretty conventional, nursery piece: the willows weep as willows will and there is even a delightful little goldilocks. Yet stay with the rhyme a moment and there are aspects of the poem which may puzzle and then trouble. Who or what is calling Annie? Does this voice mean her well? Is it merely in Annie’s imagination? Is she a half-asleep child hearing voices in the falling water? The waters are cold and deep, but are we looking at Annie looking down upon the water or up from it? Are we looking through the reflected eyes of a girl in love with her own reflection or staring into the Other World? And what if these willows are not just weeping for convention’s sake? What if something has caused their weeping? That second ‘Annie is down by the weir’ may mean that Annie has run to be beside the weir. But given that we now have the impression of a girl more in the water than above it, there is a hint that something has happened to the half-asleep child who is hearing voices. Annie may be down in the waters, rather than down beside them.
Annie is reminiscent of Ann, the seven-year-old girl and youngest of the three sisters, who is abducted by the fairies in Crossings: A Fairy Play, which de la Mare wrote with the composer Cecil Armstrong Gibbs and staged in an all-boy school production of 1919: ‘Her hair is parted in the middle, and severely plaited on either side of her smooth round cheeks. It is of the rarest, faintest tines of gold.’1 She also brings to mind the youngest of the three sisters in ‘Reflections’. But it is the fate of another ‘Annie’, the protagonist of ‘Down-Adown-Derry’, a rhyme first in Songs of Childhood and which went on to supply the title of de la Mare’s 1922 book of fairy poems that may provide the biggest clue to the mysterious, elliptical lyric of ‘Dreamland’. In the poem, ‘Sweet Annie Maroon’ is ‘Gathering daisies’ by the Mill, where ‘waters go brawling’, when she sees a fairy who bids her ‘Come to my water-house’ in the sea. Annie appears to answer the call and the poem finishes with her bereft father searching for her:
He may call o’er the water,
Cry – cry through the Mill,
But Annie Maroon, alas!
Answer ne’er will
The child reading or listening may think Annie has gone away with the fairies to wear seaweed and coral in their undersea kingdom; an adult will think she has drowned, her body disappeared only because it has drifted downstream. The suspicion is that the Annie of ‘Dreamland’ and the Annie of ‘Down-Adown-Derry’ are one and the same person.
The poem ‘Dreamland’ first appeared in the children’s collection Bells and Grass (the title of the collection was borrowed from ‘Eve’, a poem by de la Mare’s friend Ralph Hodgson). In its introduction, de la Mare correctly described Bells and Grass as ‘the last’ book ‘of its kind that I shall have the opportunity of making’. That opportunity was a gift from de la Mare’s younger to his elder self:
About a year ago, I was looking through a jackdaw jumble of old papers and old letters – the contents of a packing case, a Tate sugar-box, which had been left undisturbed, I think, since 1924 […] among a few old manuscripts in the box I came across a commonplace book, bound in black leather. It had been mysteriously forgotten; yet at a glimpse, its contents at once came welling up into memory again. About twenty-four pages of it had been crammed, top to bottom, with pencil scribblings, many of them dated 1905, the remainder of a date not later, I fancy, than 1906. Some of these were marked ‘Copied’. And a few afterwards appeared in print. A few are still incompletely readable even by the writer of them!2
The book is still preserved: the poems, and indeed the illegibility of some of the handwriting, are as de la Mare describes them. This confrontation with verses from the beginning of Peacock Pie allowed him to find again the poet he was. This was partly the acknowledged opportunity to have access to his childhood-remembering mind, and to the light, songlike lyricism that accompanied it. Yet many of the best poems in Bells and Grass are not outtakes from earlier volumes but poems written in older age, shadowed by de la Mare’s earlier poems and younger self.
NOTES
1. Walter de la Mare, Crossings: A Fairy Play with Music by C. Armstrong Gibbs (London: W. Collins, 1923), p. 11.
2. Walter de la Mare, Bells and Grass: A Book of Rhymes, p. 7.
Sallie
When Sallie with her pitcher goes
Down the long lane where the hawthorn blows
For water from the spring,
I watch her bobbing sun-bright hair,
5
In the green leaves and blossoms there,
Shining and gleaming primrose-fair;
Till back again, like bird on wing,
Her pitcher, brimmed, she turns to bring –
Oh, what a joy to see!
10
And her clear voice, the birds’ above,
Rings sweet with joy, entranced with love –
Ah! would ’twere love for me!
from Bells and Grass: A Book of Rhymes (1941)
‘Sallie’ is a rhyme and a person that seems as natural and timeless as the blossom. Who is she? On the one hand, it might seem she is ‘the darling of my heart/ And she lives in our alley’, the girl who resides in the poem by Henry Carey (1687–1743). Yet de la Mare’s Sallie is also something less day-to-day: an ideal of young love, Flora, the goddess of the flowers, a spirit of spring, her body at one with green leaves, her voice at one with the birds.
The name ‘Sallie’ crops up elsewhere in de la Mare. In Crossings, Sallie is ‘a slim dark girl of seventeen or nineteen, with a dark mobile face’.1 Sallie spends the play in the company of her younger brother and two younger sisters. After a bequest from an aunt, the children leave London to take charge of a haunted and fairy-visited house in the country. Things run out of control and the fairies abduct her sister Ann, though all ends well.
The hero of Robertson Davies’s 1972 novel The Manticore is ‘enchanted’ by a school production of Crossings and falls helplessly in love with Sallie, whom he describes as being ‘very much a de la Mare girl’, as well as the young woman who pl
ays her. But if some young men can’t help falling in love with the Sallie in Crossings, Sallie has no young man on her mind. In the words of the musicologist Stephen Banfield: ‘as Barrie’s Peter Pan is isolated from the Darling family by his inability to grow up, so Sallie … is isolated from the perfunctory world of adults through her attachment to the Candlestickmaker, the “queer half human creature” who is “Dream, Romance, the other World” … de la Mare explained to Gibbs on sending him the Crossings scenario in December 1918.’2 Whether or not this explains what’s on Sallie’s mind in this poem, the suspicion is that she may be as much de la Mare’s muse as she is an object of romantic reverie. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung would term such a figure an ‘anima’, the feminine inner personality in the male unconscious, which is doubtless the reason she turns up in The Manticore in the memories of a man undergoing Jungian psychoanalysis. De la Mare uses the term ‘Anima’ in Behold, This Dreamer!, where one of the sections is entitled ‘Animus and Anima’ (the animus being the anima’s inverse), but quoting Paul Claudel and Henri Brémond rather than Jung – Brémond’s anima is the feminine embodiment of the poetic imagination.
Memory and Other Poems (1938) has the quatrain:
Sallie’s Musical Box
Once it made music, tiny, frail, yet sweet –
Bead-note of bird where earth and elfland meet.
Now its thin tinkling stirs no more, since she
Whose toy it was, has gone; and taken the key.
The lines are beautiful and suggestive in themselves, but the poem contributes to the impression that Sallie may have an identity as the begetter of the more tinkling verses in Songs of Childhood and Peacock Pie. Unfortunately, it also seems that she has taken her key and won’t come back. Yet in the poems of Bells and Grass, there is Sallie, prettier than ever and not always dealing with childhood things.
What caused Sallie to drop by once more? There was, first of all, the finding of the commonplace book of old verses (see the notes to ‘Dreamland’), but there was a flesh-and-blood stimulus as well. Nathalie Saxton had first met de la Mare in 1936 when she had the job of nursing him and his ailing wife (de la Mare had a bad case of the ’flu, but Elfie had begun the protracted decline from Parkinson’s disease and other illnesses she would suffer in the years before her death in 1943). Saxton and de la Mare kept in contact and would meet in London. A different sort of ‘de la Mare girl’ – along with the large, attractive eyes and high cheekbones, she had weak health and sticking-out teeth – Saxton had little formal education but was sensible and kind, and evidently very fond of de la Mare. The two had an innocent affair: she took him to antique shops; he took her to St Paul’s Churchyard; they laughed and sang songs in the park. Eventually Saxton’s mother decided that such goings on were not quite respectable and made her daughter return the relationship to a friendly but professional footing. Saxton was to nurse de la Mare during his final years.
NOTES
1. Walter de la Mare, Crossings, p. 11.
2. Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20th Century (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 226.
The House
The rusty gate had been chained and padlocked
Against the grass-grown path,
Leading no-whither as I knew well,
In a twilight still as death.
5
Once, one came to an old stone house there,
Wheels crunched in those scarce-seen ruts;
A porch with jasmine, a stone-fringed garden –
Lad’s love, forget-me-nots.
A happy house in that long-gone sunshine;
10
And a face in the glass-bright moon,
And a voice at which even memory falters,
Now that the speaker’s gone.
I watch that image as I look at the pathway –
My once accustomed zest,
15
As the painted gate on its hinges opened,
Now locked against the past!
A true face too, yet scant of the future –
A book that I never read …
Nor shall now, since I soon must be going
20
To another old house instead.
from Inward Companion: Poems (1950)
The title might indicate a rebuild of ‘The House’ from Bells and Grass (itself a poem which looks back to ‘The Old Stone House’), and in some obvious ways it is. Yet here and elsewhere, such old houses prompt a new and increasingly layered picture from the older poet rather than an inferior imitation of his earlier work.
‘The House’ is a poem of past, present and future. Even the later, padlocked view is in the past; the paths lead ‘no-whither’ (to nowhere), ‘as I knew well’ (l. 3) not ‘as I know well’. Since one no longer comes to an ‘old stone house there’ (l. 5), that house must have been destroyed: it is literally, and it seems also symbolically, the house of the past. The seeing of ‘a face in the glass-bright moon’ (l. 10) initially seems to be just the man in the moon, but it connects to ‘a voice at which even memory falters’ (l. 11). The narrator watches his old zestful self heading towards the brightly painted gate and the future. In addition to that imaginary face in the moon, the narrator also recalls a ‘true face … scant of the future’ (l. 17), a face which had little future left to it, so presumably soon to die after the moment of recollection. The ‘book that I never read’ (l. 18) must be the future.
Unusually for de la Mare, the poem not only employs half-rhyme but does so consistently. Following the logic of this, ‘read’ (l. 18) cannot be a full rhyme with ‘instead’ but is in the present tense and rhymes with ‘seed’. And yet, at the end of a poem there can be a pressure to feel the closure of full rhyme, which if yielded to would put ‘read’ into the past. The ambiguity this creates allows the narrator to say both that he never foresaw what was to happen to the possessor of the ‘true face’ but also that he never reads the future now. Why? Because he must soon be going to ‘another old house’ (l. 20). This alludes not to ‘The Old Stone House’ but to another rhyme in Peacock Pie, ‘The Old House’ into which ‘so many people go’, though no one ever comes out.
The flowers of the house and its garden have names that are redolent of youth and times past. ‘Jasmine’ is usually a vine with white, sweet-smelling flowers, and though it can have romantic connotations, in the Victorian language of flowers it indicates ‘amiableness’.1 ‘Lad’s-love’ has feathery green-grey leaves and is a herb of the sunflower family that gets its name from its supposed aphrodisiac properties. But while its words conjure youthful love, they may have other connotations here (see below). I suspect the forget-me-not is mentioned in order to indicate what its name says; nevertheless, in Come Hither, de la Mare writes:
As for the ‘Forget-me-not’, it is only within the last hundred years or so that this name has been applied to the Great Water Scorpion Grass. There is a legend from the German to account for its name. A knight in armour and his Lady were straying beside a deep and rapid river. She espied a pretty pale flower growing in midstream, and entreated the Knight to pluck her a spray of it. He leapt in and perished, having adjured her with his last breath, as he flung the spray toward the bank, ‘Vergiss mein nicht!’ – Forget me not!
But apart from the fact that this is the ‘blue and bright-eyed flower of the brook,’ and flourishes no more in deep water than a sailor does on land; to some tastes, Mouse-ear, which is all that Myosotis means, may seem a better name for it than the sentimental one borrowed from abroad.2
If de la Mare does have a particular voice in mind – and while the ‘voice’ could be interpreted as his past self, such an interpretation doesn’t strike me as likely – there are a number of candidates for its possessor. Elfrida de la Mare had died on 11 July 1943. De la Mare’s early friend and mentor Mary Coleridge (1861–1907) wrote a poem entitled ‘The Deserted House’ and, though it borrows a title from Tennyson, the poem
is a discernible influence on de la Mare’s own deserted houses, particularly ‘The Old Stone House’ in Peacock Pie. As ‘The Deserted House’ is Coleridge’s final completed poem and one which seems to figure death, it has a particular poignancy: from the start, writing about deserted houses may have been de la Mare’s way of remembering her.
‘The House’ also brings to mind Edward Thomas. Not only were both poets lovers of old houses, but Thomas was de la Mare’s teacher on plants. On one occasion Thomas sent de la Mare a box of roots and seeds, including forget-me-nots, for his garden.3 Moreover, Thomas had lad’s love growing in the gardens of his homes at Wick Green and Yew Tree Cottage.4 The poem in which Thomas contemplates the herb is known by its other name, ‘Old Man’, but in it Thomas contemplates both names and their significance. ‘Old Man’ finishes with Thomas, who has been trying to remember its scent, failing to do so:
No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush
Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.5
Whether it is Thomas himself who is remembered or not, de la Mare is at least recalling Thomas’s use of the herb’s name and deploying a similar switching of temporal perspectives between the old man he is and the young man he once was.
Reading Walter de la Mare Page 19
