We, Too, Have Been Beguiled

“Many of his poems are at best rococo vases of an eighteenth century artificiality, insisted on in our strenuous age though thrones go toppling down.” Such was Harriet Monroe’s verdict on the British writer Walter de la Mare in a review she wrote for Poetry in 1919. Her appraisal echoed several persistent criticisms of de la Mare’s poems: the frequent use of inversion, the decorated lexicon, the never-fashionable attempt to paint a sort of Elfland, and the clinging to the primacy of childhood.

That said, from the time when de la Mare first came to widespread public attention, via his collections The Listeners (1912) and Peacock Pie (1913) and the hugely popular Georgian Poetry anthologies, of which he was a staple, he grew into a lauded—if always defiantly eccentric—figure. He was celebrated by some of the leading (and most skeptical) poets and critics of his era, such as Edward Thomas and Robert Frost. De la Mare’s visionary, musical, romantic approach to poetry was matched by an equally characterful catalog of prose: ghostly and unheimlich stories that delighted adults and children, as well as allegorical novels flavored by Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James. He was also a heralded anthologist, especially as the editor of Come Hither (1923), a grab-bag of traditional and folk poetry that Auden cited as a formative influence. De la Mare turned down a proffered knighthood on more than one occasion but by his death in 1956 had defied many shifting versions of modishness, followed his nose, and won a devoted readership. He is now best remembered, when remembered at all, as the poet behind the much anthologized “The Listeners” and for a smattering of ghost stories. The contemporary academy has dismissed his poetry as quaint, old-fashioned, a sort of period chamber music revered by “old-fashioned lovers of poetry and maybe the under-twelves.” That is the situation William Wootten describes in his introduction to Reading Walter de la Mare (Faber, 2021), a new annotated selection of the poet’s verse. But if modern readers are allergic to de la Mare’s charms, Wootten notes, “that may be because we no longer know how to read him.”

Born in 1873 in the Charlton area of London, de la Mare grew up in the suburbs, neither entirely happy nor comfortable, especially following his father’s death in 1877. This period was formative for his poetry and for the ways in which he later channeled his remembered infancy into literature. As his biographer Theresa Whistler noted, the south London of de la Mare’s childhood was far less urban than today. There was countryside “to be found four miles from London Bridge: partridges in the fields, trout in the watercress beds, roach in the little drinking-ponds for cattle, each with its pair of moorhens.” She argued that de la Mare’s writing about the natural world had a “marked lack of the true countryman’s or naturalist’s informed detail,” unlike similar work by Thomas Hardy, one of his foremost influences. De la Mare’s writing possessed instead a “jewelled, hallucinatory intensity.”

If his childhood offered the allure of nature, it also inculcated a love of fairy tales, mostly from his mother, as well as the Bible, itself a storehouse of verse and allegory. As Whistler pointed out, the upshot from these Bible lessons was less an emerging orthodox faith than a habit of thinking in paradigms, a view in which Earth itself “was a parable.” “[S]ensing life to be haunted, it was simple [for de la Mare] to accept guardian angels and demons as the haunters,” Whistler wrote. After earning a choral scholarship to St. Paul’s School, de la Mare settled into a far less enchanted phase of his life: 18 deadening years of working for the Anglo-American Oil Company. He had no real prospect of advancement and no chance of a full-time literary career with a family to support. Still, during this period de la Mare started publishing, initially under the pseudonym Walter Ramal. From the beginning, he wrote poems for both children and adults and experimented with longer-form prose, a pattern that persisted throughout his writing life. He also cultivated friendships with other writers and editors, notably the poet and novelist Henry Newbolt, a crucial champion and reader. Through Newbolt’s connections, in 1908 de la Mare was awarded a £200 grant from the Prime Minister that enabled him to finally leave the oil business and enter one of the most prolific and fruitful stretches of his career.

Wootten’s compilation attests to 1912 and 1913 as being something of a high-water mark. In those two years, de la Mare published both The Listeners and Peacock Pie, for adults and children respectively (but never so delineated as all that), and was included in Georgian Poetry 1911–12, a bestselling anthology edited by Edward Marsh. This was a transformative moment, but even at its inception, it would be hard to claim de la Mare as a “Georgian” or as a member of any school or group, then or afterward. Included in that anthology alongside such poets as Rupert Brooke (who became de la Mare’s friend and, posthumously, his benefactor), William H. Davies, John Masefield, and D.H. Lawrence, de la Mare was always an outlier stylistically, thanks to his emphasis on the singing line and the ghosts, sprites, fairies, and other mystical entities that populated his work. There was also the matter of his deeply non-colloquial diction, exemplified by his constant use of thee and thou. Nor did the poetic innovations of the following decades have much impact on his singular aesthetic; the nearest concession he made to the lessons of Modernism might be boiled down to a single poem, “The Feckless Dinner-Party,” from The Fleeting and other poems (1933), built on the competing, overheard voices of its guests:

'Now, Dr Mallus – would you please? –  
   Our daring poetess, Delia Seek?’
‘The lady with the bony knees?’
    And - entre nous - less song than beak.’
‘Sharing her past with Simple Si-’
   ‘Bare facts! He’ll blush!’ ‘Oh fie!’

In his introduction, Wootten calls de la Mare a “magician of poetic sound,” and the critic is right to emphasize the sonic aspect of the poems; their incantatory music is chief among their attractions. T.S. Eliot, who both admired and almost witchily distrusted de la Mare’s poems, remarked on their ability to allow “[f]ree passage to the phantoms of the mind.” Consider this euphonic stanza from “A Song of Enchantment,” included in Peacock Pie:

Twilight came; silence came;
The planet of evening’s silver flame;
By darkening paths I wandered through
Thickets trembling with drops of dew.

Or another, more playful example from “The Bees’ Song”:

And he nozez the poziez
Of the Rozez that growzez
So luvez’m and free,
With an eye, dark and wary,
In search of a Fairy,
Whose Rozez he knowzez
Were not honeyed for he

The poems’ songlike qualities aren’t accidental; de la Mare was an autodidact who trained his ear and made, per his own admission, “a tabulated analysis in the form of a statistical breakdown of the use of vowel sounds, consonants, parts of speech etc…in the works of Chaucer, Keats, Swinburne, Tennyson and others.” If that seems like mechanical drudgery, the resulting poems were anything but, and for all his toil, de la Mare retained a belief in magic, of various kinds, when it came to his poems. Some expressly traffic in enchantment, making use of a lyric poem’s capacity to create a dream or trancelike state. In his gloss on “A Song of Enchantment,” Wootten perceptively links this effect to notions of childhood singing, the loss of time engendered by communing with nature. De la Mare’s relationship to childhood was pivotal, if idiosyncratic, at once “unconventionally grave,” in the view of an early publisher, and enduringly reverent. 

De la Mare’s view of poetry was romantic—or at least romantically inspired. The closest he ever came to outlining it in more than elliptical gestures was via some of the lectures he delivered at universities in the United Kingdom and the United States as his star began to rise. One talk, on magic in poetry and love’s capacity to transform, occurred during a period when his marriage and equilibrium were at risk because of an infatuation, most likely unconsummated, with fellow writer Naomi Royde-Smith. “All experience is a conflict between realities,” he said, adding that children “will learn that beauty need never perish in the mind, that self counts for nothing, compared with self’s dream, that even Helen herself (or Susan) is a ghost, an embodiment of divinity.” It’s a complicated, seemingly earnest, grasping at the heart of his matter. The growing child was pivotal in his thoughts elsewhere too. In another lecture, on Rupert Brooke, he set forth his notion that one could divide poets into the childlike and the boy-like (he somewhat resignedly confessed to not being certain if girl-like had an easy equivalence), with the former being divining and visionary and the latter being analytical and intelligent. De la Mare’s desire not to shun the pleasures and freedoms of one’s earliest years, to see growing up as diminishment rather than fulfillment, reminds one a little of Charles Lamb—at least the Lamb who wrote in defense of London’s artificial fountains: “Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead?”

***

Wootten is an exceptional guide, graceful and perceptive but unfussy, open to other interpretations, seemingly delighting at once in de la Mare’s skill and his mischief. A fine poet himself, and a richly musical one, Wootten can deftly sketch a poem’s inner workings. Of “Nobody Knows” he writes, “Hear how the penultimate line of the second verse swells to match the expansiveness of the narrator’s contemplation of the wind as sea” and, on returning to the line in question—“And foaming under the eaves of the roof”—one realizes it has broken its metrical pattern, quietly, without being noticed. Here’s another example: “Winter Dusk,” a ghostly poem about children listening to their mother read aloud in the company of a mysterious interloper, contains the line “When less than even a shadow came,” which Wootten points out has “an extra unstressed syllable—not enough of a change for one to notice it has happened, but just enough to register some tiny extra presence”; like the room, the poem hosts a small intruder. See also the end of the first stanza of “The Keys of Morning”:

She slanted her small bead-brown eyes
  Across the empty street,
And saw Death softly watching her
  In the sunshine pale and sweet.

“This slowing down of the lines then carries on to stretch out the open vowel sounds of ‘pale’ and ‘sweet’, making sure that they are accorded a longer quantity,” Wootten writes. “We too have been beguiled.”

For all de la Mare’s apparent spirit of the nursery and his seeming ease at trafficking in ghosts and fairies, his poems exhibit a great deal of complexity, not only in the syllabic or metrical underpinning but also in their regular use of inversion. The inversions can be ornate or even willful; they also sacrifice naturalism and any possible Frostian speech rhythms. Their use does, however, allow for a sophisticated doubling, or at least deepening, of meaning. A poem such as “Fare Well,” written during the Great War and in something of a dialogue with Rupert Brooke’s reputation-making sonnets, has a “satisfying ambiguity” because of this method, as Wootten notes of its final lines: “Since that all things thou wouldst praise / Beauty took from those who loved them / In other days.” Per Wootten: “If we read ‘Beauty’ as the subject, a personified Beauty took away these things from others who loved them in other days and the poem would equate with transience.” However, as de la Mare clarified to the Oxford don who translated the poem into Latin, beauty is in fact the object, meaning “those who once loved all the things that you would praise now took beauty from those things in other days.”

In addition to his glosses, Wootten also excels at choosing exemplary poems from a vast back catalog of more than 20 volumes; one emerges with a sense of the scale of de la Mare’s gifts but also his preoccupations. Certain themes recur, chief among them echoes, a somewhat Platonic idea of things as ghosts of themselves, a concept hinted at in de la Mare’s discourse on love and the “self’s dream.” Even aside from his supernatural characters, de la Mare’s poems are haunted at a more philosophical level. A poem such as “The Bells” is a prime example, ending with “Those echoing bells rang on in dream, / And stillness made even lovelier seem,” which, as Wootten points out, is something of an inversion of the Romantic afterimage. “The thing itself is less to be valued than the effect it produces, the object is inferior to the shadow and the sound is less than its echo will be,” Wootten writes. This feels fundamental to de la Mare, both his strengths—the artifice, the music, the ability to enchant—and his limitations. Writing on de la Mare for the Nation in the 1940s, Randall Jarrell picked up on just this aspect of his approach:

He has made himself a fool for the sake of Faerie, for the sake of everything that is irrational, impractical and at the same time essential…his poetry represents our world only as the flickering shade-pattern of leaves upon an arm can represent the arm; the hard hot flesh in the sunlight has nothing to stand for it but vacancy.

Instead of hard hot flesh, de la Mare taps into the long, anonymous line of the ballads, the unauthored folk wisdom that was at the heart of his anthology Come Hither, in which official and “unofficial” poetry rubbed shoulders, the chants and songs of England presented alongside its most illustrious literary treasures. Edward Thomas and Thomas Hardy, among many others, identified this element in de la Mare’s writing, the poems’ aim for a timelessness that stretched back to his paradigmatic, biblical sense of things as being at once themselves and also symbolically resonant. Poems such as “An Epitaph,” “Autumn,” or “All That’s Past” might aspire to being authored by Anon—such is their elemental keynote. Some of his best-known poems also fit into this rich history of traditional tall tales, songs of the cursed woods or the off-kilter dark corners of a collective national psyche, older and deeper than the usual matter of respectable literary fare. If anything of de la Mare’s poetry can be claimed to have survived the erosion of his reputation in popular or academic circles, it’s “The Listeners,” itself an ominous, metrically complicated narrative with both many and no “answers” to the questions it poses:

But only a host of phantom listeners
   That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
   To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
   That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
   By the lonely Traveller’s call.

Wootten, citing an observation by Robert Frost, points out that the poem has a strange “double metre.” He writes, “it is possible to scan almost all its lines either with three stresses or with four”—just part of the enduring mystery of the poem, its seemingly allegorical Traveller at the threshold.

With this book, Wootten gives modern readers the keys to de la Mare’s odd, haunted door and restores a body of poetry at once hopelessly unfashionable and winningly atemporal. His modesty as a guide (in his note to “The Scarecrow,” he concedes “it would be hard to maintain such an interpretation as definitive; there are other ways of reading the poem”) is matched by an impressive willingness to get into the nuts and bolts of each poem under discussion, at times going several extra miles, such as in the applause-worthy note for “Of a Son,” in which he offers five alternative readings all predicated on the game of bridge that takes place in the poem. The entire span of de la Mare’s career is represented in this volume, albeit with flagged-up golden periods: the years of his freedom from Anglo-American Oil and his love affair of sorts with Naomi, which resulted in the great flourishing of 1912 and 1913, and a later renaissance in the 1930s, in part thanks to the discovery of an old notebook that reignited his dulled lyric gift with the aid of some forgotten poetry from his youth. Wootten has rescued from the fringes of oblivion—or at least from a fate as an escapist ghost story writer whose one hit was “The Listeners”—a singular, often delightful, poet. Modern readers should bear in mind another insight—from Jarrell again—about how to approach de la Mare’s work: “the man who would wish him a different writer would wish the Great Snowy Owl at the zoo a goose, so as to eat it for Christmas.” What this particular snowy owl offers are the pleasures of vision, of divination, hung on a score by a “magician of poetic sound.”