Who made his shroud?
I, said the beadle,
With my little needle,
And I made his shroud.
Who shall dig his grave?
I, said the owl,
With my spade and showl,
And I’ll dig his grave
[…]
And who’ll toll the bell?
I, said the bull,
Because I can pull;
And so, Cock Robin, farewell!
Who killed the ‘she’ referred to in the poem? ‘I’, said the Prince?
‘The Song of the Mad Prince’ is a nursery rhyme. Not only is it the heir to ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’, its peacock pie is baked to a similar recipe to that which in ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ sets four and twenty blackbirds in a pie before the king. Like the old nursery rhymes, these lines are at once easy to enjoy and hard to understand, but they have an intelligible gist. An old king, when presented with a sparrow on his plate, might very well say ‘Peacock Pie’. Harrows break up clods of earth and remove weeds to make the ground suitable for seeds. If ‘crops are ripe’ (l. 3), the harrow will be idle and rusting; the rust being, as it were, the ‘crop’ on the harrow. The ‘she’ whose resting place the Mad Prince wonders about bathes in the loveliness of eve (with a small ‘e’, so evening not Eve’s nakedness, although that sound may well be part of our sense of the word when we read the poem). One of the most important duties of a church sexton is to dig graves. People still say ‘mum’s the word’ (l. 9) when wanting someone to keep quiet about something: in using ‘mum’ to mean ‘silent’, the poem is employing the Middle English meaning of the word. The sexton telling a tree to keep silent is dealing in graveyard secrets, perhaps relating to the ‘she’ of the first verse. What the Mad Prince says in this second verse at first sounds dreamily rhapsodic, but ‘Life’s troubled bubble broken’ (l.15), with its slightly discordant rhythm, its internal rhyme and bubble-breaking ‘B’ sounds, breaks both life’s bubble and the poem’s reverie. Coming after ‘All Time’s delight/ hath she for narrow bed’ (ll. 13-14), it not only indicates that ‘she’ has died but also makes us uneasy about the fact. The last ‘That’s what I said’ appears to indicate that the Mad Prince is as guilty as the Sparrow.
There is a literary as well as a nursery rhyme heritage behind ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’. Walter Scott’s ‘The Pride of Youth’ is included in Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics. The copy in de la Mare’s personal library has several underlinings:
Proud Maisie is in the wood,
Walking so early;
Sweet Robin sits on the bush,
Singing so rarely.
‘Tell me, thou bonny bird,
When shall I marry me?’
– ‘When six braw gentlemen
Kirkward shall carry ye.’
‘Who makes the bridal bed,
Birdie, say truly?’
– ‘The gray-headed sexton
That delves the grave duly.
‘The glowworm o’er grave and stone
Shall light thee steady;
The owl from the steeple sing,
Welcome, proud lady.’
The questions of the bird, the bringing together of romantically presented woman, sexton and grave all seem to have played their small part in shaping ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’. ‘The Pride of Youth’ originally appeared in Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian, where it is sung by Madge, who is insane and dying. Her song wishes for marriage, imagining six men as escorts on her wedding day; nevertheless, it clearly foretells a funeral with six pall-bearers. It, like William Blake’s ‘Mad Song’, de la Mare’s poem or ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’, belongs to the genre of ‘Mad Poem’.
But who is the Mad Prince? I. A. Richards identified him as the Prince of Denmark in 1926,2 and once you decide that the Mad Prince is Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, sort of, a number of questions resolve themselves: the ‘she’ in the poem must be Ophelia, who drowned where ‘a willow grows aslant a brook’ (Hamlet, Act IV Sc. 7). The sexton’s ‘mum’s the word’ relates to the hushed burial of Ophelia, whose status as a probable suicide would, in usual circumstances, have precluded her from being buried in consecrated ground. Since Hamlet visits the grave and its diggers while the grave is still being dug, the song that is the poem would presumably be sung at this time and its acknowledgement of guilt would be an acknowledgement that as the man who killed Ophelia’s father, Hamlet himself was ultimately responsible for Ophelia’s death.
You can, if you wish, spot other likely correspondences with Hamlet. The critic Filomena Aguiar de Vasconcelos has pointed out that Hamlet calls Claudius a ‘very, very pajock’, i.e. a metaphorical peacock (Act III, Sc. 2); thus, in telling his son to kill Claudius, Hamlet’s father says ‘Peacock Pie’. Since Hamlet believes ‘There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow’ (Act V, Sc. 2), Hamlet is the sparrow.3 In a similar spirit, one could add the Ghost of Hamlet’s father declaring: ‘I could a tale unfold whose lightest word/ Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood’ (Act I, Sc. 5). The harrow in the poem might be this figurative harrow made literal and the rust upon it when crops are ripe could be interpreted as Hamlet’s famously delayed revenge.
The discovery of such tucked-away references might lead one to interpret ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’ as, essentially, a mini-Hamlet or, if not that, then a poem about Hamlet. But that may be to miss the point. De la Mare penned a number of blank verse poems on Shakespeare characters, including ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Ophelia’, which were included in Poems (1906). Those were tributes and imaginative glosses. ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’ is something altogether richer and stranger, not Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but Hamlet jumbled in dream and turned to song, a song remarkably similar to the old ballads in Hamlet sung not by Hamlet himself but by Ophelia in madness:
He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.
Act IV, Sc. 5
Who first said, ‘Green dusk for dreams,/ Moss for a pillow’ (ll. 11–12)? Not Hamlet.
In his letter to de la Mare of 15 October 1919, Thomas Hardy writes that ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’ has for him ‘a meaning almost too intense to speak of’. The editors of Hardy’s letters gloss this with the suggestion that Hardy seems to have associated the poem with the death of his first wife.4 ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’ was very probably the last poem written for Peacock Pie (it appears in none of the lists of poems prior to publication) and was therefore written when the liaison with Naomi Royde-Smith was at its most intense and de la Mare’s marriage was at its lowest ebb. ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’ is by no means an autobiographical poem, but it may be that if the poem recalled Hardy’s feelings of remorse and self-reproach towards his first wife, it was because it was a poem which has a husband’s guilt as one of its emotional spurs.
NOTES
1. Bells and Grass: A Book of Rhymes by Walter de la Mare with illustrations by J. Rowland Emett (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), p. 8.
2. I. A. Richards, Poetries and Sciences: A Reissue of Science and Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1926, 1935 and 1970), p. 69.
3. Filomena Aguiar de Vasconcelos, ‘The Song of the Mad Prince: The Me that Sings Throughout’ (Porto: Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Letras, 2001). The article is available at ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/ficheiros/artigo612.pdf and is adapted from her doctoral dissertation ‘That’s What I Said’. Dimensões do Sujeito na Poesia de Walter de Ia Maré. (FLUP, 1995).
4. Thomas Hardy, The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 330.
For All the Grief
For all the grief I have given with words
May now a few clear flowers blow,
In the dust, and the heat, and the silence of birds,
Where the friendless go.
For the thing unsaid that heart asked of me
Be a dark, cool water calling – calling
To the footsore, benighted, solitary,
Where the shadows are falling.
O, be beauty for all my blindness,
10
A moon in the air where the weary wend,
And dews burdened with loving-kindness
In the dark of the end.
from Motley and Other Poems (1918)
‘For All the Grief’ was written in a sketchbook which also contains drawings by Ralph Hodgson, who had plans to illustrate some of de la Mare’s rhymes for children, as well as doodlings by de la Mare’s son Colin. Other poems in the book – the love-forsaken ‘Alone’, the terrifying children’s rhyme ‘The Little Creature’ – find de la Mare in a very dark frame of mind. The reasons for this are not hard to fathom: not only was it now wartime but de la Mare was in Guy’s Hospital in London, recovering from the appendectomy he’d had on 12 November 1914.1 At a time when there was no free health care he was also badly off, his job as reader for William Heinemann having ended at the beginning of the war. What’s more, his romantic relationship with Naomi Royde-Smith was in its last days.
‘For All the Grief’, however, dwells not on the speaker’s misfortune but on the greater suffering of others. In the sketchbook, the poem is dated 23 November 1914. On Thursday, 19 November, de la Mare had been visited by Rupert Brooke.2 The two hadn’t known each other well, but Brooke had evidently taken a liking to de la Mare, writing to Edward Marsh, mutual friend and editor of the Georgian Poetry anthologies, from Tahiti in 1914: ‘What do the jolly people all do? I want to belong to the same club as de la Mare. Where does de la Mare go?’3 Brooke, by the time of the November visit, had recently returned from fighting at the fall of Antwerp and was awaiting his next posting. He was at this time full of the plight of the Belgian refugees, which he describes to another correspondent:
They put their goods on carts, barrows, perambulators, anything. Often the carts had no horses, and they just stayed there in the street, waiting for a miracle. There were all the country refugees too […] I’ll never forget that white-faced, endless procession in the night, pressed to let the military – us – pass, crawling forward at some hundred yards an hour, quite hopeless the old men crying, and the women with hard drawn faces.4
Brooke would, I imagine, have told similar tales to de la Mare.
Although Brooke seems to have promised de la Mare another visit, on returning home from seeing him he discovered he had received his next posting, to Portsmouth.5 Brooke wrote to de la Mare from the Royal Army Barracks on the twentieth, wishing first of all to tell de la Mare how ‘I loved your poem on the war in The Times in August’. The poem, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on 27 August, a week or so after Brooke had decided to enlist, was ‘Happy England’.6 The last three stanzas read:
Remember happy England: keep
For her bright cause thy latest breath;
Her peace that long hath lulled to sleep,
May now exact the sleep of death.
Her woods and wilds, her loveliness,
With harvest now are richly at rest;
Safe in her isled securities,
Thy children’s heaven is her breast.
O what a deep, contented night
The sun from out her Eastern seas
Would bring the dust which in her sight
Had given its all for these!
The poem, which de la Mare was to exclude from his Collected Poems (1942), has common ground with the war sonnets Brooke was writing, particularly ‘I. Peace’, which begins ‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,/ And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,’ and ‘V. The Soldier’.7 In his letter of 20 November Brooke shares his current state of mind: ‘We’re waiting here for the invasion: ready to go off at any hour of day or night. It’s queer that the Admiralty seem so certain of it happening. I’ve a kind of horror at the idea of England being invaded, as of some virginity violated. But I’d enjoy fighting in England. How one could die!’8
‘For All the Grief’’ makes a strong break with the hallucinatory symbolism and word magic of Peacock Pie and The Listeners for a much plainer, more direct style. Rather than delighting in words, it has turned to question them. The title phrase might mean ‘because of all the grief’ or ‘in spite of it’; both make sense, though the latter seems more likely. The word ‘clear’ (l. 2) is used in its older meaning of ‘free from murk’; ‘blow’ (l. 2) here means ‘bloom’. The metre mirrors the syntax, making a delicate pattern of call and response; it also results in some strong mimetic effects, including the weary slog of anapaests in the poem’s third line before its much shorter, friendless fourth. De la Mare has lost none of his great skill, but he has suddenly become a very different sort of poet.
NOTES
1. See Jill Benton, Avenging Muse: Naomi Royde-Smith, 1875–1964, p. 170.
2. In Brooke’s letter of Friday, 20 November, he talks of having seen de la Mare on Thursday, which was 19 November: Rupert Brooke, Letter to Walter de la Mare, 20 November 1914, Imperial War Museum, Document 10436.
3. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, with a Memoir by Sir Edward Marsh (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1930), p. cxvi.
4. Ibid., p. cxxxi.
5. See Christopher Hassall, Rupert Brooke: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 472.
6. Walter de la Mare, ‘Happy England’, Times Literary Supplement, 27 August 1914.
7. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, p. 144.
8. Ibid.
Fare Well
When I lie where shades of darkness
Shall no more assail mine eyes,
Nor the rain make lamentation
When the wind sighs;
5
How will fare the world whose wonder
Was the very proof of me?
Memory fades, must the remembered
Perishing be?
Oh, when this my dust surrenders
10
Hand, foot, lip, to dust again,
May these loved and loving faces
Please other men!
May the rusting harvest hedgerow
Still the Traveller’s Joy entwine,
15
And as happy children gather
Posies once mine.
Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
20
Till to delight
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
In other days.
from Motley and Other Poems (1918)
According to Theresa Whistler, ‘Fare Well’ was written while de la Mare was staying with Sir Henry and Lady Margaret Newbolt at Netherhampton in Wiltshire in either February 1915 or February 1916.1 The earlier date is the more probable; not only is the vein of ‘Fare Well’ similar to that of ‘For All the Grief’ but it feels like a poem by someone who has recently had a close brush with death. Moreover, as he was recovering his health in February 1915, de la Mare was also reading the final issue of the journal New Numbers, in order to write a book review for the Times Literary Supplement. That issue was the first place Rupert Brooke’s war sonnets were published, and de la Mare’s review of 11 March praises them very highly. Of ‘V. The Soldier’, he writes: ‘No passion for glory is here, no bitterness, no gloom, only a happy, clear-sighted, all-surrendering love’.2 De la Mare quoted the whole of the poem, which begins:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to lov
e, her ways to roam,3
This review brought the poem to the attention of the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, who proceeded to repeat it in an Easter sermon that, when reported by The Times, caused a rush of interest in Brooke and his verse.4
On 10 March, Brooke, who presumably had little inkling of the role his friend was taking in the process that would make him and his work famous, made de la Mare his heir and literary executor alongside the poets Wilfrid Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie, reckoning: ‘If I can set them free, to any extent to write the poetry and plays and books they want to, my death will bring more gain than loss.’5 Brooke’s books quickly went on to sell a huge number of copies, and the bequest played a key role in ensuring de la Mare’s financial security in the years ahead.
Brooke died of sepsis from an infected mosquito bite on 23 April 1915 while on his way to fight at Gallipoli; he was buried on the Greek island of Skyros. Thereafter, de la Mare would become something of an ambassador for Brooke’s legacy. Having been turned down for military service on the grounds of being ‘over age’ and ‘not hale’, de la Mare would travel to America in 1916 to accept a prize from Yale University on Brooke’s behalf.6
De la Mare did write a few war poems, including some far less blithe in the face of war’s slaughter than ‘Happy England’. Nevertheless, these poems were not especially suited to de la Mare’s poetic gifts and nor were they the product of any direct experience of battle. De la Mare’s keenness to serve eventually found war work behind a government desk in 1917, helping to introduce and then administer rationing.
The great poems de la Mare wrote in the war are, rather than war poems, poems of peace. The words of ‘Fare Well’ provide a generous and pacific alternative to poems like ‘The Soldier’ – its genuinely self-abnegating sentiment, acceptance of death and nobility of tone are not in the service of country or even the self, but of a pacific, nature- and future-loving blessing. It is the strength of the poem’s sentiment as much as its delicate lyric beauty that has made ‘Fare Well’ one of de la Mare’s best-loved poems. When the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1992, he was asked: ‘If you could take one other poet’s work … who would you take?’ and answered: ‘I’m very, very haunted by de la Mare’s poem “Fare Well” […] a magical writer.’ Pressed to enlarge on why it was so great, Walcott answered: ‘It’s the whole thing – it’s like nothing belongs to you in this world and you leave it behind and the commemoration of that, I think, is exquisite.’7 ‘Fare Well’ was the poem that de la Mare would haltingly speak on his deathbed, having been asked to recite it by his son Richard.8
Reading Walter de la Mare Page 10