10
Moving on softly line to line;
It seemed to listen too – that shade,
Yet made no outward sign.
The fire-flames crooned a tiny song,
No cold wind stirred the wintry tree;
15
The children both in Faërie dreamed
Beside their mother’s knee.
And nearer yet that spirit drew
Above that heedless one, intent
Only on what the simple words
20
Of her small story meant.
No voiceless sorrow grieved her mind,
No memory her bosom stirred,
Nor dreamed she, as she read to two,
’Twas surely three who heard.
25
Yet when, the story done, she smiled
From face to face, serene and clear,
A love, half dread, sprang up, as she
Leaned close and drew them near.
from The Listeners and Other Poems (1912)
‘Winter Dusk’ is a mystery. We are given a number, but not all, of the pieces with which to solve it, and there are dark corners to be completed only by our guesses. Who is it who has cast the ‘less than even a shadow’ (l. 3) that stands inside the room? The absent husband and father? Surely he would have been more interested in seeing his wife and children again rather than in listening to the words of the story? More likely it is the spirit of a dead child, presumably the sibling of those who listen around the fire, who has come in from the cold to join them.
But how does this spirit listen, and to what? There is another sound beside the small story, a ‘tiny song’ (l. 13) crooned by the fire like a mother singing to an infant. For the child, maternal comfort and singing gives way to watching a mother’s eyes reading and, before long, to reading for oneself; tiny songs give way to ‘small’ stories, sitting on mother’s knee gives way to standing ‘beside’ (l. 16) it. But only when an infant does not die. Such little sights and sounds and distances – the crooning fire, the children suddenly far away from the mother and in the land of ‘Faërie’ – may themselves summon a dead child to the back of the mother’s mind and an expectation of a third child not seen as she surveys her children. No wonder she feels the need to pull the two children she has in close.
Each stanza of ‘Winter Dusk’ contains three lines of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of iambic trimeter, the way each stanza draws in at its close being ideally suited to the drawing in of the action in a number of them. The carefully measured metrical regularity is likewise a close fit for its domestic subject; it also allows one’s listening mind to register the slightest deviation from the usual rhythm, if only at an unconscious level. So when the line ‘When less than even a shadow came’ (l. 3) 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 – it is the poem’s metre as well as its meaning letting in less than a shadow.
The Keys of Morning
While at her bedroom window once,
Learning her task for school,
Little Louisa lonely sat
In the morning clear and cool,
5
She slanted her small bead-brown eyes
Across the empty street,
And saw Death softly watching her
In the sunshine pale and sweet.
His was a long lean sallow face;
10
He sat with half-shut eyes,
Like an old sailor in a ship
Becalmed ’neath tropic skies.
Beside him in the dust he had set
His staff and shady hat;
15
These, peeping small, Louisa saw
Quite clearly where she sat –
The thinness of his coal-black locks,
His hands so long and lean
They scarcely seemed to grasp at all
20
The keys that hung between:
Both were of gold, but one was small,
And with this last did he
Wag in the air, as if to say,
‘Come hither, child, to me!’
25
Louisa laid her lesson book
On the cold window-sill;
And in the sleepy sunshine house
Went softly down, until
She stood in the half-opened door,
30
And peeped. But strange to say,
Where Death just now had sunning sat
Only a shadow lay:
Just the tall chimney’s round-topped cowl,
And the small sun behind,
35
Had with its shadow in the dust
Called sleepy Death to mind.
But most she thought how strange it was
Two keys that he should bear,
And that, when beckoning, he should wag
40
The littlest in the air.
from The Listeners and Other Poems (1912)
The resonant title has its chief explanation in the keys and time of day we find in the poem. It can also be construed metaphorically. Louisa is in the morning of her life; nightfall is for sleeping. This morning, however, little Louisa has let herself drift off in the ‘sleepy sunshine house’ (l. 27), when she should be doing her homework.
The way Louisa sits, slanting her ‘bead-brown eyes’ (l. 5) is shadowed by the way Death sits with ‘half-shut eyes’ (l. 10) but also by how Louisa later peeps through ‘the half-opened door’ (l. 29). A pattern is formed of half-seeing and half-opening – Death and Louisa half-see each other, are half-awake or half-asleep – which makes us recognise, if in our own somewhat dreamy way, that death’s door, like that of Louisa’s house and eyes, now stands ajar. The poem which precedes ‘The Keys of Morning’ and which is its companion poem in The Listeners, is ‘The Sleeper’. In it, Ann enters a ‘house of sleep’ and sees her mother asleep upon a chair, her face transformed. The transformation is clearly a premonition of her mother’s death. Ann tiptoes out again, but while Ann sees her premonition of death and is afraid, Little Louisa is ‘lonely’ (l. 3) and when beckoned to by death, half-follows it outside. She has been beguiled.
The question that so puzzles Louisa at the end, why Death should have two keys, and ‘wag/ The littlest in the air’ (l. 39–40), likewise foxed the philosopher and critic Owen Barfield. De la Mare answered his question about it by saying ‘one was for Death’s big door, the other for the little’.1 In addition to having a big door for the grown-ups, Death has a door the right size for little Louisa.
At the close of the poem, Louisa almost believes that the decoy that has brought her to her door is no more than the shadow of the chimney pot. Yet the apparition of death becalmed upon his journey has been astonishingly vivid, and more so than a straightforward optical illusion would be. Louisa’s half-sleep has put her in a hypnagogic state. In Behold, This Dreamer!, de la Mare collects a number of explanations and eyewitness accounts of these states, including his own, and writes:
In a brief time, waking consciousness may be for an instant […] repeatedly submerged, and may repeatedly retrieve isolated peephole glimpses of an imagery at least as vivid as anything bestowed by fancy on the eye of day – glimpses, too, which occasionally have an aptness and a hint of profound significance usually denied to or unnoticed in the actual of the waking day.2
Little Louisa’s hypnagogic state has taught her a truth unlikely to be featured in her homework.
Forrest Reid (1875–1947), the novelist and friend of Walter de la Mare, observes in his study of de la Mare’s work that ‘“The sunshine pale and sweet” has literally the effect of an incantation’ and that ‘the Pre-Raphaelite detail makes the whole thing concrete and authentic.’3 The incantatory effect here that is most easy to pin down is a general one: the way de la Mare employs and adapts a balladic metre. If ‘The sunshine pale and sweet’ seems particularly incantatory, it is because of the way de
la Mare deploys the metre to impart a particular fullness to its syllables. The pair of stresses one naturally gives ‘sunshine’ slows down the line, a slowing process that has already been started by similar effects in the other lines in the second half of the stanza. 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. We too have been beguiled.
NOTES
1. Quoted in Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 416.
2. Walter de la Mare, Behold, This Dreamer! (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 57.
3. Forrest Reid, Walter de la Mare: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), p. 154.
The Pigs and the Charcoal-Burner
The old Pig said to the little pigs,
‘In the forest is truffles and mast,
Follow me then, all ye little pigs,
Follow me fast!’
5
The Charcoal-burner sat in the shade
His chin on his thumb,
And saw the big Pig and the little pigs,
Chuffling come.
He watched ’neath a green and giant bough,
10
And the pigs in the ground
Made a wonderful grizzling and gruzzling
And greedy sound.
And when, full-fed, they were gone, and Night
Walked her starry ways,
15
He stared with his cheeks in his hands
At his sullen blaze.
from Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (1913)
Charcoal-burning was a lengthy process. A mound or kiln was built. Once lit, this would require tending for several days and nights to ensure that the air-starved fire, and with it the desired slow carbonisation of the wood, was properly in hand. Since mounds and kilns were often constructed in forests and away from human habitation, the job tended to be a solitary one. Hungry too. De la Mare’s short story, ‘The Game at Cards’, begins with a charcoal-burner who has very little food, sitting beside his burning mound eating a supper of ‘black bread and onions’, while the red fire is ‘slowly gnawing its way inch by inch through the logs of fragrant wood’.1
For pig and piglet on the other hand, the forest can be a place of plenty. It was where they were taken to graze, its being full of ‘mast’ (l. 2), that is the fruits of the forest: acorns, beechnuts and other softer growths (‘mast’ is a word which in origin meant literally ‘food for swine’). The practice of keeping pigs in woodlands to consume mast is referred to as ‘acorning’ or ‘pannage’.2 Pigs have a fine sense of smell and, probably because of a similarity between the scent of the truffle and the pheromones of the boar pig, an especially fine nose for truffles. Whether it be the Traveller’s horse in ‘The Listeners’ or these greedy pigs, de la Mare is alive to animal existence and the straightforward delight in eating that seems to go with it. The ‘grizzling and guzzling/ And greedy sound’ (ll. 11–12) of the feeding pigs feels particularly relished. ‘Chuffling’ (l. 8) is a low snuffling.
Henry Charles Duffin interprets the pigs as the charcoal-burner’s dream.3 They are certainly an object of the charcoal-burner’s contemplation. As opposed to being in a sociable a happy, guzzling family, the charcoal-burner is left to a ‘sullen blaze’ (l. 16): the word ‘sullen’ comes from ‘sol’, the Anglo-Norman French for ‘solitary’. There is no more immediate satisfaction than that of some pigs having a good scoff; there are few occupations which required more solitary patience than charcoal-burning. Both transform the forest: one makes mast, food for energy and instant gratification, while the other takes the ‘green and giant bough’ (l. 9) and turns it to carbon, a substance which itself may be used to burn at high temperatures. It is not the wood itself, it is its after-image, the wood transformed, that interests the solitary charcoal-burner.
The pigs themselves may be transformed by the charcoal-burner’s quiet, solitary reflection. The pigs arrive ‘fast’ – here, closely or tightly as well as quickly – at the end of the poem ‘Night’ walks (ll. 13–14) and the benighted charcoal-burner is left unmoving, staring at his fire. Whose existence is preferable, that of the charcoal-burner or that of the pigs?
NOTES
1. Walter de la Mare, Out of the Deep, p. 253.
2. See Joseph Orefice, ‘Pigs ’n Trees’, Cornell Small Farms Program, Cornell University website, http://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2016/01/11/pigs-n-trees/.
3. Henry Charles Duffin, Walter de la Mare: a Study of his Poetry (New York: Haskell House, 1970), p. 87.
All That’s Past
Very old are the woods;
And the buds that break
Out of the brier’s boughs,
When March winds wake,
5
So old with their beauty are –
Oh, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose.
Very old are the brooks;
10
And the rills that rise
Where snow sleeps cold beneath
The azure skies
Sing such a history
Of come and gone,
15
Their every drop is as wise
As Solomon.
Very old are we men;
Our dreams are tales
Told in dim Eden
20
By Eve’s nightingales;
We wake and whisper awhile,
But, the day gone by,
Silence and sleep like fields
Of amaranth lie.
from The Listeners and Other Poems (1912)
The Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis (1895–1978) writes in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932): ‘Perhaps only a reader familiar with Mr de la Mare would note that in this first stanza he is playing in particular on reminiscences of Sleeping Beauty. The suggestion may seem unnecessary, but it is not random, and it serves to point the observation that in general, however serious his intention, he is exploiting the fairy-tale stratum of experience.’1 There’s no doubt de la Mare valued Sleeping Beauty (Leavis is probably thinking of the Sleeping Beauty chapter in de la Mare’s 1904 novel Henry Brocken) and indeed the fairy tale in general, but, beyond some vague echo through the mention of centuries and brier roses, there is no evidence de la Mare is playing on such reminiscences here. Moreover, Leavis’s belief that this is comforting escapism rests on a failure to read the poem properly: the state of briers and roses in the first stanza is in clear contradistinction to the state of humans as delineated in the last stanza, a state which may not be comforting at all.
‘All That’s Past’ is a poem about time, and in particular the contrast between the cyclical time of the natural world and the linear time and eternity familiar from the Christian religion. In its first stanza, that time is the renewable time of plants. Woods and the ‘brier’s boughs’ (l. 3) wake in spring-time, as they have done for years beyond man’s counting. The rose bush itself has roved back over wild centuries, briers being uncultivated roses free to move by re-rooting as well as by the seeding of their hips. In the second stanza the emphasis is again upon transience and renewal. Snow may sleep, but ‘rills’ (l. 10) (small streams) rise as snow melts. Since snow is melting, again it may be springtime. If skies are clear and azure over snow, that will pass, ‘every drop’ (l. 15) of those rills reminding the observer how the snow which melts to water will one day transpire, rising into the air again, before it clouds and falls once more. In that way, their every drop is as wise as was the wisest king in the Bible.
The last stanza of ‘All That’s Past’ turns to ‘we men’ (l. 17). ‘We’ too are very old. But while in that sense no different from the rose, ‘we’ dream stories of the nightingales of Eden. Our dreams are, then, tales of songs of nature heard before our fall from innocence, those songs having presumably been at one with the natural process of death and rebirth found in the first two stanzas. And yet, however we dream of Eden, we are exiled from it
s bounds; we wake (l. 21), and, unable to sing like nightingales, ‘whisper awhile’ (l. 21) before silence and sleep ‘like fields/ Of amaranth lie’ (ll. 23–24). The mention of amaranth is an allusion to Aesop’s fable in which the amaranth envies the rose its beauty and perfume and the rose envies the perennial amaranth its immortality, an association that is played on by Milton in Book III of Paradise Lost (ll. 352–64). In de la Mare’s poem, the rose is mortal: it lives, dies and carries on as part of the same process of existence as snow, brooks, clouds and rainfall and even nightingales. And ‘we men’ (l. 17)? Our ‘day gone by’ (l. 22), ‘we’ face the ‘Silence and sleep’ (l. 23) that is death. We have in our minds and wishes the prospect of fields of amaranth, the Elysian Fields of the eternal afterlife. Can this console us for our exile from the world of nature? It depends on how we read the last word of the poem. Those ‘fields of amaranth’ may, after all, be no more than a ‘lie’ (l. 24).
Like ‘“The Hawthorn Hath a Deathly Smell”’, ‘All That’s Past’ pushes de la Mare’s interest in the music of consonance, assonance and alliteration and the musical potential of various rhetorical devices, including inversions, to its fullest extent. Its prosody is at once carefully patterned and flexible, and contains metrical ambiguities (do we, for instance, stress the ‘Ve’ of ‘Very’ or glide into each stanza’s first line with an unstressed syllable)? Each stanza begins with, and the first and last stanza close with, an inversion of subject and object, an anastrophe. This has an effect on the sense as well as the sound of the poem. Writing ‘Roves back the rose’ (l. 8) is not the same thing as writing ‘The rose roves back’: the inversion stresses the verb, imbuing ‘Roves’ with a sense of dynamic movement, thus making clear that this isn’t a lightly used metaphor but a description of the actual progress of the plant.
Reading Walter de la Mare Page 7