Reading Walter de la Mare
Page 21
l. 817. ‘Beyond our plummet’s lead’. A plummet is a plumb line, a line with a lead weight at its bottom used to measure height or depth.
l. 819. ‘Narcissus’. According to Greek mythology, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection and, after taking his own life or simply withering away, was transformed into a flower.
l. 823. ‘Whose rot breeds evil, jealousy and scorn’. De la Mare may well have in mind Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, with its closing line, ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’, but both Shakespeare and de la Mare are indicating a natural phenomenon: rotting lilies are foul-smelling.
NOTES
1. Andrew Marvell, Poems of Andrew Marvell, edited by James Reeves and Martin Seymour-Smith (London: Heinemann, 1969), p. 33.
2. William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, edited by S. W. Singer (London: C. Whittingham, 1822), p. 189.
3. https://www.speaking-clock.com.
4. See Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 13.
5. Joe Griffiths, ‘The Marginal Quotations in Winged Chariot’, Walter de la Mare Society Magazine, no. 6, February 2003, pp. 33–47: 38.
6. Walter de la Mare, Short Stories 1895–1926, edited by Giles de la Mare (London: Giles de la Mare Publishers, 1996), pp. 164 and 166.
7. Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, p. 59.
De Profundis
The metallic weight of iron;
The glaze of glass;
The inflammability of wood …
You will not be cold there;
5
You will not wish to see your face in a mirror;
There will be no heaviness,
Since you will not be able to lift a finger.
There will be company, but they will not heed you;
Yours will be a journey only of two paces
10
Into view of the stars again; but you will not make it.
There will be no recognition;
No one, who should see you, will say –
Throughout the uncountable hours –
‘Why … the last time we met, I brought you some flowers!’
from O Lovely England and Other Poems (1953)
The title of ‘De Profundis’ derives from the Latin of Psalm 130: ‘De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine’. In the King James Version, it reads: ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord’. The sonnet is not a cry to God, but an address to the reader, and perhaps to the poet himself, from ‘two paces’ (l. 9) below the ground, the depth at which a body is usually buried.
The poem’s opening is deliberately disorientating, and the topic of the poem is at first a slight puzzle. Once the theme of mortality has been grasped, the items described in the first three lines may appear to refer to the constituents of a coffin – perhaps a glass-windowed casket with iron, as opposed to brass, handles – as it goes into the furnace of a crematorium. However, it seems more likely they are governed by the ‘you’ of the second stanza and refer to the condition of a corpse: corpses are a ‘dead weight’; at death the eyes glaze (l. 2) over, a sight that haunts de la Mare’s poems (see ‘Good-Bye’ and ‘Dry August Burned’); they are also combustible.
The second stanza delineates the ‘comforts’ of the grave: its lack of cold (l. 4) and lack of need for vanity (l. 5) or feeling of ‘heaviness’ (l. 6). It is nearly that state of luxury in which, by convention, one does not have ‘to lift a finger’ (l. 7), but it is a state in which one is not able to lift a finger, or indeed to move at all. The ‘company’ which ‘will not heed you’ (l. 8) is the company of others buried in the graveyard. The journey of ‘two paces’ (l. 9) is not the burial but the journey out which ‘you will not make’ (l. 10).
The word ‘recognition’ (l. 11) is used both in the usual sense – you won’t be able to recognise anything; you will also be unrecognisable – and in the sense that there will be no re-cognition: you will not be able to think again.
The last line is a half-joke and bears a strong similarity to a bon mot de la Mare made nearly a quarter of a century before, as recorded by John Bailey on 3 April 1928:
Bruce Richmond has just told me a lovely story about Walter de la Mare. He is at last getting well fast after his very long illness, but he was for three weeks at the very gates of death. On one of these days his younger daughter said to him as she left him, ‘Is there nothing I could get for you, fruit or flowers?’ On which in a weak voice he could just – so characteristically – answer: ‘No, no, my dear, too late for fruit, too soon for flowers!’1
Though de la Mare was evidently much preoccupied by death, there is little fear of it in his work. ‘De Profundis’ may be bleak in some ways, but it is quite prepared to look death in the face.
The moment Walter de la Mare so often wrote of and wondered about so much did not happen until 1956. Fittingly for a poet who loved the lengthening of the year’s sunlight hours and the flowers of spring and who so captured the melancholy of their shortening, he died in the early hours of 22 June, the end of midsummer night.
NOTES
1. John Bailey 1864–1931 Letters and Diaries, edited by Sarah Bailey (London: John Murray, 1935), p. 294. This is noted by Joe Griffiths in ‘The Changing World of Walter de la Mare’s Poetry’, The Walter de la Mare Society Magazine, no. 10, January 2007, pp. 38–48: p. 47.
Index of Titles and First Lines
(Titles are set in italic, first lines in roman.)
A garish room – oil-lamped; a stove’s warm blaze; 1
A lane at the end of Old Pilgrim Street 1
A song of Enchantment I sang me there, 1
All That’s Past 1
All winter through I bow my head 1
Annie has run down to the mill dam, 1
Autumn 1
Away 1
Bees’ Song, The 1
Bells, The 1
Birthnight: To F., The 1
Brueghel’s Winter 1
Dark frost was in the air without, 1
De Profundis 1
Dearest, it was a night 1
Dreamland 1
Dry August Burned 1
Dry August burned. A harvest hare 1
Epitaph, An 1
Fare Well 1
Feckless Dinner-Party, The 1
For All the Grief 1
For all the grief I have given with words 1
From here through tunnelled gloom the track 1
Funeral, The 1
Good-Bye 1
Hare, The 1
‘Hawthorn Hath a Deathly Smell, The’ 1
Here lies a most beautiful lady, 1
Honey Robbers, The 1
House, The (‘A lane at the end of Old Pilgrim Street’) 1
House, The (‘The rusty gate had been chained and padlocked’) 1
If you would happy company win, 1
Incantation 1
I spied John Mouldy in his cellar, 1
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, 1
Jagg’d mountain peaks and skies ice-green 1
John Mouldy 1
Keys of Morning, The 1
King David 1
King David was a sorrowful man 1
Listeners, The 1
Longlegs 1
Longlegs – he yelled ‘Coo-ee!’ 1
Mingled the moonlight with daylight – the last in the narrowing west; 1
Miss Loo 1
Mocking Fairy, The 1
Napoleon 1
Nobody Knows 1
‘Of a Son’ 1
Often I’ve heard the Wind sigh 1
Old Summerhouse, The 1
Once it made music, tiny, frail, yet sweet – 1
Pigs and the Charcoal-Burner, The 1
Railway Junction, The 1
Reflections 1
Rose 1
Sallie 1
Scarecrow, The 1
Scribe, The 1
Shadow and light both strove to be 1
Song of Enchantment, A 1
Song of The Mad Princ
e, The 1
Sotto Voce 1
Swallows Flown 1
The flowers of the field 1
The haze of noon wanned silver-grey, 1
The last of last words spoken is, Good-bye – 1
The metallic weight of iron; 1
The old Pig said to the little pigs, 1
The rusty gate had been chained and padlocked 1
There is a wind where the rose was; 1
There is no sorrow 1
There were two Fairies, Gimmul and Mel, 1
They dressed us up in black, 1
This blue-washed, old, thatched summerhouse – 1
Thomas Hardy 1
Thousandz of thornz there be 1
Titmouse 1
Three centuries now are gone 1
Three Sisters – and the youngest 1
To E.T.: 1917 1
To K.M. 1
Vervain … basil … orison – 1
Very old are the woods; 1
We sat and talked. It was June, and the summer light 1
What is the world, O soldiers? 1
What lovely things 1
When I lie where shades of darkness 1
When Sallie with her pitcher goes 1
When thin-strewn memory I look through, 1
Whence comes that small continuous silence 1
While at her bedroom window once, 1
‘Who are we waiting for?’ ‘Soup burnt?’ ‘… Eight–’ 1
Who said, ‘Peacock Pie’? 1
… Why this absurd concern with clocks my friend? 1
Winged Chariot 1
Winter Dusk 1
‘Won’t you look out of your window, Mrs. Gill?’ 1
You sleep too well – too far away, 1
About the Author
Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was born in Charlton, Kent. From 1890 to 1908, he worked for Anglo-American Oil. For most of the rest of his life, he was a full-time writer. De la Mare’s first collection of poetry, Songs of Childhood, was published under pseudonym in 1902. With the publication of The Listeners (1912) and the children’s volume Peacock Pie (1913), he established himself as one of the leading poets of the time. In addition to publishing more than a thousand poems, de la Mare published novels, including Memoirs of a Midget (1921), short stories, drama, stories for children and literary criticism. He also edited celebrated anthologies, including Come Hither (1923) and Behold This Dreamer (1939). Walter de la Mare received the Order of Merit in 1953. He died in 1956 and is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, London.
William Wootten is a poet, critic and journalist. His publications include the critical study The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter (2015) and the poetry collection You Have a Visitor (2016). He lectures at the University of Bristol.
By Walter de la Mare
poetry
Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes
Collected Poems
Complete Poems
Selected Poems (edited by Matthew Sweeney)
fiction
The Return
Memoirs of a Midget
Told Again
Short Stories 1895–1926 (edited by Giles de la Mare)
Short Stories 1927–56 (edited by Giles de la Mare)
Short Stories for Children (edited by Giles de la Mare)
Out of the Deep and Other Supernatural Tales
as editor
Come Hither
Copyright
First published in 2021
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
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London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2021
All rights reserved
© The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare, 2021
Introduction, selection and annotations © William Wootten, 2021
Cover design by Faber
Cover photograph © Mark Gerson
The right of Walter de la Mare to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–34714–8