Reading Walter de la Mare
Page 20
NOTES
1. In, for example, Charlotte de la Tour, The Language of Flowers, p. 136.
2. Come Hither, vol. 1, p. 302.
3. Edward Thomas, Letter to Walter de la Mare, 7 December 1907, Poet to Poet: Edward Thomas’s Letters to Walter de la Mare, p. 31.
4. Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France, p. 192.
5. Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, p. 37.
Winged Chariot
‘Is every subject apt for rambling rhyme? –
Some are intractable and some sublime:
Only Eternity could master Time.
‘As I sat by myself, I talked to myself,
And myself replied to me …’
… Why this absurd concern with clocks, my friend?
Watching Time waste will bring no more to spend,
Nor can retard the inevitable end.
‘I, whom thou seest with horyloge in hande,
Am namèd Tyme, the lord of very howre….’
Yet when, the old wide staircase climbed once more,
5
Your bag in hand, you attain its second floor,
Turn the Yale key in lock, sigh, open the door
And into these familiar rooms you slip –
Where even Silence pauses, finger on lip –
Three emulous metal tongues you wake from sleep.
10
Do they suffice you? No, you pause again.
And (as if mechanisms made by men
The Truth could tell) you search each face. And then,
Though every minute of your life’s your own,
Though here you are ‘master’ and at ease, alone –
15
You ring up TIM; consult the telephone.
The telephone! … Then, these precautions past,
Time made in Greenwich safely yours at last,
You set all three some fifteen minutes fast.
Psychopathist might guess the reason why
20
You indulge your wits in this mendacity.
Think you Man’s ‘enemy’ is thus put by?
Think you so fleet a thing – that madcap hare
You daily waken from its nightlong lair –
Time, would consent such stratagems to share?
25
Or is it that you reassurance seek,
Deeming the Future will appear less bleak
Now that your clocks will ‘go’ a whole long week?
‘… O, it came ore my eare, like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a banke of Violets;
Stealing, and giving odours …’
If Time’s a stream – and we are told it’s so,
Its peace were shattered if you check its flow;
30
What Naiad then ev’n fingertip would show? –
Her imaged other-world in ruins? … No:
Should once there haunt your too-attentive ear
A peevish pendulum, no more you’ll hear
The soundless thunder of the distant weir
35
Which is Eternity … Blest reverie:
When, from the serfdom of this world set free,
The self a moment rapt in peace may be;
Not void; but poised, serene, ’twixt praise and prayer,
Such as the flower-clocked woods and meadows share,
40
Lulled and fed only by day’s light and air.
How punctual they! But to no tic-toc rune.
Theirs is an older code than ‘May’ and ‘June’;
As testifies ‘Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon’;
Airiest of ghosts, he goes to bed at noon!
‘… Jocund day stands tiptoe on the mistie mountaine’s top …’
45
Nimbused in his own song at dawn of day,
From earth’s cold clods the skylark wings his way,
Into the sun-gilt crest of heaven to stray.
Housed in the dark of sleepy farms below,
At their own hour the cocks craned up to crow,
50
Their harems hearkening in obsequious row.
But wheel and barrel, ratchet, pawl, and spring?
Dear heart alive, how dull and dead a thing,
Compared with any creature on the wing,
Wherewith to measure even a glimpse of Spring.
55
Or, ‘splitting seconds’, to attempt to mete
The thrill with which a firefly’s pinions beat.
Yes, or the languor, lingering and sweet,
When, lulled in the embraces of the sun,
The rose exults that her brief course is run
60
And heat-drowsed honey-bee has come; is gone.
Last night, at window idling, what saw I
Against the dusky summer greenery? –
Midges, a myriad, that up and down did fly,
Obedient to the breezes eddying by –
65
Sylphs scarcely of Time but of mere transciency:
An ovoid of intricated winged things, beautiful;
As on some sea-breeze morning, sunned and cool,
One may peer down upon a wavering shoal –
Like eddying weed in ebb-tide’s lap and lull –
70
Of tiniest fish-fry in a rock-bound pool.
[…]
Yet, when, a child, I was content to rove
220
The shingled beach that I was Crusoe of,
All that I learned there was akin to love.
The glass-clear billow toppling on the sand,
Sweet salt-tanged air, birds, rock-drift – eye, ear, hand;
All was a language love could understand.
‘… Those steps of stone …’
225
Yet there was mystery too: those steps of stone –
In the green paddock where I played alone –
Cracked, weed-grown,
Where often allured my hesitant footsteps down
To an old sun-stained key-holed door that stood,
230
The guardian of an inner solitude,
Whereon I longed but dreaded to intrude;
Peering and listening as quietly as I could.
There, as I knew, in brooding darkness lay
The waters of a reservoir. But why –
235
In deadly earnest, though I feigned, in play –
Used I to stone those doors; then run away,
Listening enthralled in the hot sunny day
To echo and rumour; and that distant sigh,
As if some friend profaned had made reply, –
240
When merely a child was I?
[…]
795
Better than that, it were to stay the child
Before ‘time’ tamed you. When you both ran wild
And to heaven’s Angelus were reconciled.
‘… When yet I had not walkt above
A mile or two, from my first love …’
Host of all sun-blest thing by nature his,
His mind imagines all on earth he sees,
His heart a honey comb of far resemblances –
800
Ere falls the shadows, shams, obliquities.
The streams of air that throng his timeless sky
Toss the green tree-tops, and not even sigh
In the slim nid-nod grass that seeds near by,
Or rob by a note the blackbird’s lullaby.
805
And when the day breathes cold, and winds are high,
To watch the autumnal jackdaws storm the sky! –
Meal-dusty polls, glossed plumage, speedwell eye –
Ere cold of winter come; and Spring draw nigh.
And though the beauty both of bird and song
810
May pass unheeded in the press and throng,
In its own small for-ever it lived long.
Not
by mere age, renown, power, place, or pride
The heart makes measurement. Its quickening tide
Found once its egress in a wounded side:
815
Love is its joyful citadel. Its moat
A lake of lilies, though they wither not.
Beyond our plummet’s reach lies where they float.
Yet may we sound that deep as best we can,
820
And, unlike dazed Narcissus, there may scan
Reflections of the inestimable in man:
All that of truth is in its mirror shown;
And, far beneath, the ooze life feeds upon,
Whose rot breeds evil, jealousy and scorn.
825
A nature merciless, a mind forsworn.
from Winged Chariot (1951)
The title of Winged Chariot alludes to Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’: ‘But at my back I always hear/ Time’s wingèd Chariot hurrying near’.1 The allusion would suggest that the word ‘Winged’ should have two syllables, as in the Marvell, but the Walter de la Mare enthusiasts I have talked to pronounce it with one. Whether or not this reflects de la Mare’s own practice, I don’t know.
Winged Chariot was first submitted to the publishers with the subtitle ‘A Rambling Meditation on Time’. There is more structure to the poem than there first seems, but the original subtitle does give a good indication of what sort of poem Winged Chariot is. Unlike de la Mare’s lyrics, and unlike the book-length allegorical narrative The Traveller (1945), Winged Chariot displays the qualities of de la Mare the anthologist and conversationalist, appearing to wander off the point while usually subtly augmenting it with by-the-ways and prompted reflections. It also makes space for the up-to-date and everyday and for proper nouns: this is a poem which mentions such figures as Karl Marx and such events as the discovery of the atom. The poem will modulate into a higher, more poetical register, but it starts in the world of Yale locks, daily routine and the speaking clock.
There is an argument for including the whole of Winged Chariot in this selection, not least as an example of how a poet can reinvent his style in old age. Moreover, as the work is not intended to be read as a chain of lyrics but as something more disquisitional, it is somewhat misleading to reproduce it in snippets. Nevertheless, to include all of a volume-length poem, as Auden did in his A Choice of de la Mare’s Verse, would hugely unbalance this book in favour of one work. I have therefore reproduced the beginning of the poem to give readers its flavour, as well as two lyrical passages which read well as stand-alone poems. Lines are numbered according to where they fall in the complete, 1951 text of the poem.
Winged Chariot is written chiefly in rhymed tercets, though these are sometimes expanded to four or more lines employing same rhyme, and in iambic pentameter. Since the opening epigraph is, apart from the fragmented ending, also in this form of a rhymed tercet, I presume it is written by de la Mare himself.
‘I whom thou seest with horyloge …’, Sir Thomas More. According to William Roper, as a young man More devised ‘in his father’s house in London, a goodly hanging of fyne paynted cloth, with nyne pageauntes’ [pageants]. In the seventh pageant was the image of Time, standing over that of Fame, who was in the pageant before. The verse which accompanied it reads in full:
I whom thou seest with horyloge in hande,
Am named Tyme, the lord of every howre.
I shall in space destroy both see and lande.
O simple Fame, how darest thou man honowre,
Promising of his name, an endlesse flowre
Who may in the world have a name eternall,
When I shall in proces distroy the world and all.2
The quotation is presumably at the top of the poem in order to point out the futility of any authorial pursuit of fame in the face of time. A horyloge [horologue] is a timepiece or clock. Throughout the poem, unidentified quotations are placed in the margins as a sort of commentary on the main text of the poem. Though it obviously has forerunners in marginalia, it is an exceptionally innovative juxtapositioning of poetic text and quotation.
l. 9 ‘Three emulous metal tongues you wake from sleep’. The hour, minute and second hands of a clock.
l. 12 ‘you search each face’. You scan the faces of the clocks.
l. 15 ‘you ring up TIM’. TIM became the nickname of the speaking clock because the numbers used to dial it – 846 – spelled out T, I, M. The much-used service started in 1936. TIM’s voice at this time was that of London telephonist Ethel Jane Cain.3
l. 28 ‘O it came ore my eare …’, Orsino’s speech beginning ‘If music be the food of love …’, William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act I, Sc.1.
ll. 30–31. A ‘Naiad’ (l. 30), the name deriving from the Greek for ‘to flow’, is a water nymph, and here is the inhabitant of the ‘river’ of time. Time is often figured as a river or, in this case, a stream; the temporary stoppage or checking of time is usually figured as a stillness. To stop a river would, when it first happens at least, cause a turbulence, shattering the mirror of its surface, the ‘imaged other-world’ (l. 31) – the naiad here seeming to be a changed reflection of the person above.
ll. 34–5. The sound of the weir, which is so evocative in other poems and writings (see the notes to ‘The Old Summerhouse’ and ‘Dreamland’) and so hard to pin down, here has its meaning fixed, at least in relation to ‘time’s stream’, as ‘Eternity’. The mention of the weir may well also explain the quotation from Twelfth Night, for the line before it is ‘That strain again, it had a dying fall’, the dying fall perhaps being the sound of the weir (another reminder of ‘The Old Summerhouse’).
l. 43. ‘Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon’. A yellow flower which looks a little like a dandelion and a lot like viper’s grass; it only flowers in the morning sunshine and doesn’t usually flower before June. Since Jack was the name de la Mare was known by, this may be a joke at himself.
l. 45. ‘… Jocund day stands tiptoe on the mistie mountaine’s top …’, William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Sc. 5. Romeo is responding to Juliet’s insistence that they have heard a nightingale, making clear that it is a lark proclaiming morning; their night is over.
l. 45. ‘Nimbused’: surrounded by cloudy radiance in the manner of a deity.
l. 51. ‘wheel and barrel, ratchet, pawl, and spring?’ The winding mechanism of a clockwork watch. The spring is the source of energy; its winding mechanism has a ratchet attached with a pawl, which prevents the spring unwinding. The spring is enclosed inside a cylindrical box called the barrel; the mainspring turns the wheels.
l. 220. ‘The shingled beach that I was Crusoe of’. Throughout de la Mare’s life, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was one of his favourite books; his book Desert Islands (1930) is a meditation upon it. As a very small child, while the family had money to do so, de la Mare holidayed on the Isle of Wight at Ventnor and Bonchurch.4 Since Bonchurch beach is shingly, the memory is probably of there.
l. 127 ‘…Those steps of stone …’ De la Mare may also be alluding to somewhere else, but, as Joe Griffiths notes, the tag is similar to a line in ‘John Mouldy’ and is identical to words in the passage of poetry next to it.5
l. 234. ‘The waters of a reservoir’. This boyhood remembrance is, given the theme of the poem, interpretable as de la Mare’s own childhood reaction to time. In addition to depicting time in terms of rivers and weirs, de la Mare would also figure the waters of time in terms of reservoirs. In his story ‘The Vats’, which arose from discussions about time with Edward Thomas, de la Mare describes coming upon the place where time is stored:
I have called them the Vats. Vats they were not; but rather sunken Reservoirs; vast semi-spherical primeval Cisterns, of an area many times that of the bloated and swollen gasometers which float like huge flattened bubbles between earth and heaven under the sunlit clouds of the Thames.6
Having seen them, the narrator and his friend know ‘now and forever that Time-pure is’.
l. 795 ‘… When yet I had not walkt above/ A mile or two from my first love …, from ‘The Retreat’ by the metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan (1621–95). Vaughan is writing of his infancy. His ‘first love’ is God. The passage of Winged Chariot that accompanies this quotation may seem reminiscent of Wordsworth, especially the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, but it is Vaughan de la Mare has flanking his own text and presumably has in mind when he writes. The poem continues:
And looking back – at that short space –
Could see a glimpse of His bright face;
When on some gilded cloud, or flow’r,
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;7
l. 795. ‘Better than that’. De la Mare has just asked the question:
Would you rather your cranium of clockwork were?
Its mainspring cleverness, its parts all ‘spare’;
Its key mere habit, yet each tick, Beware!?
l. 797. ‘Angelus’. The Angelus is a Roman Catholic devotional prayer praising Mary and the Incarnation; it is also used in Anglican worship. The Angelus bell calls the devoted to prayer; de la Mare is contrasting it with the Angelus clock, an alarm clock.
l. 807. ‘Meal-dusty polls’: heads that look as if they were dusty with grain. Jackdaws have eyes of a similar blue to the flower of the ‘speedwell’.