Reading Walter de la Mare

by Walter De la Mare

  NOTES

  1. Walter de la Mare, undated letter to Edward Thomas (probably written in the spring of 1915), Edward Garnett Papers, Harry Ransom Centre, Texas.

  2. Walter de la Mare, Private View, introduction by Lord David Cecil (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), p. 116.

  3. Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 412–13.

  4. See Thomas’s letter to de la Mare postmarked 6 October 1913: ‘Thank you for what you said last night. I think I have now changed my mind though I have the saviour in my pocket.’ Poet to Poet: Edward Thomas’s Letters to Walter de la Mare, edited by Judy Kendall, transcriber’s preface by Piers Pennington (Bridgend: Seren, 2012), pp. 169–70.

  5. Edward Thomas, Collected Poems, with a foreword by Walter de la Mare (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 6.

  6. Ibid. p. 12.

  Sotto Voce

  To Edward Thomas

  The haze of noon wanned silver-grey

  The soundless mansion of the sun:

  The air made visible in his ray,

  Like molten glass from furnace run,

  5

  Quivered o’er heat-baked turf and stone

  And the flower of the gorse burned on –

  Burned softly as gold of a child’s fair hair

  Along each spiky spray, and shed

  Almond-like incense in the air

  10

  Whereon our senses fed.

  At foot – a few sparse harebells: blue

  And still as were the friend’s dark eyes

  That dwelt on mine, transfixèd through

  With sudden ecstatic surmise.

  15

  ‘Hst!’ he cried softly, smiling, and lo,

  Stealing amidst that maze gold-green,

  I heard a whispering music flow

  From guileful throat of bird, unseen: –

  So delicate the straining ear

  20

  Scarce carried its faint syllabling

  Into a heart caught up to hear

  That inmost pondering

  Of bird-like self with self. We stood,

  In happy trance-like solitude,

  25

  Hearkening a lullay grieved and sweet –

  As when on isle uncharted beat

  ’Gainst coral at the palm-tree’s root,

  With brine-clear, snow-white foam afloat,

  The wailing, not of water or wind –

  30

  A husht, far, wild, divine lament,

  When Prospero his wizardry bent

  Winged Ariel to bind …

  Then silence, and o’er-flooding noon.

  I raised my head; smiled too. And he –

  35

  Moved his great hand, the magic gone –

  Gently amused to see

  My ignorant wonderment. He sighed.

  ‘It was a nightingale,’ he said,

  ‘That sotto voce cons the song

  40

  He’ll sing when dark is spread;

  And Night’s vague hours are sweet and long,

  And we are laid abed.’

  from The Veil and Other Poems (1921)

  The phrase sotto voce is Italian and its literal meaning is ‘under voice’. Written on a piece of music, the term is a direction to sing very quietly.

  In the poem, Edward Thomas alerts de la Mare to the ‘whispering music’ (l. 17) of a nightingale. This is what is now termed the nightingale’s ‘subsong’, which at the time was referred to as its ‘whisper song’ and is most associated with young birds learning their song from a tutor bird. Nightingale subsong is quieter than adult song and also contains a different pattern of notes, with more chattering and rattles.1

  The presence of ‘harebells’ (l. 11) would suggest that ‘Sotto Voce’ is set in July or August, so towards the end of the nightingale’s residence in England and after the adult males would typically have finished their nightly songs of courtship. I would guess that the event described in the poem happened during one of the de la Mare family’s summer stays in West Harting in 1909, 1910 or 1911, when de la Mare and Thomas would regularly take walks together. It is hot noon, under a white sky. The middle of the day has ‘wanned’ (l. 1) (paled) to take on a lunar look: mansions are stages in the moon’s progress, rather than the sun’s. ‘The soundless mansion of the sun’ (l. 2) could also be a description of one of de la Mare’s old houses.

  The comparison of the gorse blossom with the ‘gold of a child’s fair hair’ (l. 7) recalls Laura in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. Enchanted by the goblin’s call to taste their deadly fruit, she declares:

  ‘I have no copper in my purse,

  I have no silver either,

  And all my gold is on the furze

  That shakes in windy weather

  Above the rusty heather.’

  ‘You have much gold upon your head,’

  They answer’d all together:

  ‘Buy from us with a golden curl.’2

  ‘Furze’ here is a synonym for gorse. In Come Hither, de la Mare quotes Thomas’s ‘If I Should Ever By Chance’ with its line ‘But if she finds a blossom on furze’, a poem which also seems to have Goblin Market at the back of its mind. Commenting on Thomas’s poem, de la Mare notes how ‘As a matter of fact, the scent of the furze-blossoms is not exactly sweet, but nutlike and aromatic’, before quoting the nature writer W. H. Hudson:

  The gorse is most fragrant at noon, when the sun shines brightest and hottest. At such an hour when I approach a thicket of furze, the wind blowing from it, I am always tempted to cast myself down on the grass to lie for an hour drinking in the odour. The effect is to make me languid; to wish to lie till I sleep and live again in dreams in another world, in a vast open-air cathedral where a great festival of ceremony is perpetually in progress, and acolytes, in scores and hundreds with beautiful bright faces, in flame yellow and orange surplices, are ever and ever coming toward me, swinging their censers until I am ready to swoon in that heavenly incense!3

  The words ‘sudden ecstatic surmise’ (l. 14) recall John Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’:

  Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

  He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men

  Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –

  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.4

  The other Keats poem that de la Mare clearly has in mind here, even if he doesn’t explicitly allude to it, is ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

  When Thomas first sent de la Mare his verse in 1915, de la Mare, though appreciative of some of the poems, thought Thomas had ‘gone wrong over metre sometimes’.5 Nevertheless, de la Mare was to become a vigorous public champion of Thomas’s poetry and its innovations in the months and years after the latter’s death. In an article in the Times Literary Supplement on 18 October 1917, de la Mare justifies Thomas’s metrical experiments by comparing them to a nightingale practising its song:

  It is a poetry that not only breaks away from poetic convention, into a verse in which the rhymes are the faintest of echoes, the metre at times scarcely distinguishable, and the form as insubstantial as a ghost’s, but much of it is ‘about’ what most poets leave unremarked, or, at any rate, unrecorded. We listen to a kind of monologue, like that of one of his own nightingales softly practising over its song, as though in utmost secrecy we were overhearing a man talking quietly to himself, or to a friend strangely silent and understanding, pouring out his reveries, ruminations, remembrances. Yet these are not remembrances only of what has happened in the past, but of what is almost insupportably real and near and present, taking the aspect of the past on the eve of a long farewell.6

  This is the germ of what de la Mare would convey in ‘Sotto Voce’. The poem celebrates what united Thomas and de la Mare as well as what divided them, including the verse of Keats, Christina Rossetti and Shakespeare, and a mystical attachment to the beguiling qualities of birdsong.7 Nonetheless, the two po
ets appears to be cast into their different types: Thomas as the whispering poet of carefully observed nature, de la Mare as the singer of reverie and dreams. According to Prospero in Act I Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Ariel’s binding took place when Prospero released him from the pine tree in which Ariel had been bound by Sycorax. De la Mare may also have in mind scenes from the play featuring Ariel. In his introduction to an edition of Shakespeare’s songs, de la Mare writes how Ariel ‘decoys Ferdinand […] within sight of Miranda, with his “Come unto these yellow sands” […] Ferdinand speaks sorrowfully and sotto voce of his father, and Ariel’s “Full fathom five,” is his mocking reply.’8 But de la Mare’s Ariel has as much to do with his own dreams of desert islands as Shakespeare’s.

  In his introduction to A Choice of De la Mare’s Verse, W. H. Auden, whose fantasia on The Tempest, The Sea and the Mirror, owes something to ‘Sotto Voce’, declares how in each poet ‘dwells an Ariel, who sings, and a Prospero, who comprehends’ but that in every poem, and sometimes in a poet, one will have the upper hand. De la Mare, like Thomas Campion, is an ‘Ariel-dominated poet’.9 For an example of the more rational Prospero, Auden gives the Wordsworth of The Prelude. ‘Sotto Voce’ doesn’t find de la Mare casting himself as Ariel, but both the nightingale and by implication Edward Thomas, the future poet, are presented as Ariel-taming Prosperos.

  ‘Sotto Voce’ calls to mind a number of instances of memorable ‘unseen’ birds in Thomas’s poetry and prose, particularly ‘The Unknown Bird’, with its call ‘As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,/ As if the bird or I were in a dream’ and its description of Thomas’s past listening self that (in the manner of Ariel) is ‘Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore’.10 ‘Lullay’ and indeed ‘lully’, ‘lulla’ or ‘Lulley’ are all to be found in poems included by de la Mare in Behold, This Dreamer! All are variants of the soothing refrain from old lullabies, and it is from this refrain that the word ‘lullaby’ derives: a lulling sound, its appearance in ‘The Coventry Carol’ of the sixteenth century is its best known. The word is spelled ‘lullay’ in de la Mare’s transcription of John Skelton’s ‘With lullay, lullay lyke a childe/ Thou slepyst to long; thou art begylde’, as a refrain used by a false woman to sooth her lover to sleep.11 The nightingale in this poem is described as ‘guileful’ (l. 18); it is, like the false lover in Skelton’s poem, soothing to sleep in order to betray. The call to sleep is, as it is in ‘To E.T.: 1917’, a call to death, a promise to him to be in full song come nightfall.

  NOTES

  1. Mark Constantine and the Sound Approach, The Sound Approach to Birding: A Guide to Understanding Birdsound (Poole: The Sound Approach, 2006), p. 95.

  2. Christina Rossetti, Poems and Prose, edited with an introduction by Simon Humphries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 108.

  3. Walter de la Mare, Come Hither, vol. 1, p. 339.

  4. John Keats, Selected Poems, edited by John Barnard (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 12.

  5. Edward Thomas to Walter de la Mare, 24 March 1915 in Poet to Poet: Edward Thomas’s Letters to Walter de la Mare, p. 201.

  6. Walter de la Mare, ‘Edward Thomas’, first published in the Times Literary Supplement, 18 October, 1917; Private View, pp. 119–22: p. 119.

  7. For a further elaboration of the themes raised here, see my essay ‘“A Richer” Opportunity: Walter de la Mare’s Presentations of Edward Thomas’, Edward Thomas: Roads from Arras (Manchester: Cambridge Scholars, 2018). The essay also points out the allusions to Rossetti and Keats.

  8. The Shakespeare Songs: Being a Complete Collection of the Songs written by or attributed to William Shakespeare, edited by Tucker Brooke, introduction by Walter de la Mare (London: J. M. Dent, 1929), p. xxii.

  9. Walter de la Mare, A Choice of De La Mare’s Verse, edited by W. H. Auden (London: Faber and Faber, 1963).

  10. Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, edited by Edna Longley (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2008), p. 55.

  11. Walter de la Mare, Behold, This Dreamer!, p. 263.

  Titmouse

  If you would happy company win,

  Dangle a palm-nut from a tree,

  Idly in green to sway and spin,

  Its snow-pulped kernel for bait; and see

  5

  A nimble titmouse enter in.

  Out of earth’s vast unknown of air,

  Out of all summer, from wave to wave,

  He’ll perch, and prank his feathers fair,

  Jangle a glass-clear wildering stave,

  10

  And take his commons there –

  This tiny son of life; this spright,

  By momentary Human sought,

  Plume will his wing in the dappling light,

  Clash timbrel shrill and gay –

  And into Time’s enormous Nought,

  15

  Sweet-fed, will flit away.

  from The Veil and Other Poems (1921)

  The titmouse is not an actual mouse but a small bird with a mouse-like tail: a tit or tomtit, a popular visitor to England’s bird tables. In Come Hither, de la Mare writes:

  to anybody who cares to watch a living nimble delightful thing at all, even a glimpse of a Long-tailed Tit is an event. To see one, indeed, is usually to see a complete family. You hear their small shrill calling, look up, and lo! – scattering from tree to tree they flit, with their loose, grey, ruffish feathers, small hooked beaks, and long slim tails, searching for caterpillars and tiny beetles, clinging to spray or twig wrong-side-up and upside-down, noisy, merry, alert. And then – all gone, vanished, fled! Into some other green garden – as momentary as a rainbow.1

  In ‘Titmouse’, de la Mare is using the word ‘company’ (l. 1) in line with its etymological meaning: those one shares bread with. Other pieces of the poem’s vocabulary may be technically archaicisms but are, nonetheless, perfectly chosen. To ‘prank’ (l. 8) is to dress or decorate, a word associated with human dress – so not the same thing as ‘to preen’. To ‘wilder’ is to go or lead astray – a ‘wildering stave’ (l. 9) would be a wandering piece of music; the word is presumably chosen for its relationship to ‘wildness’, though a wildness in terms of that emblem of human culture, the musical stave. To take one’s ‘commons’ (l. 10) is to eat food shared by a community (originally of monks, nuns or scholars), the word here strongly implying a commonality between human and bird. A ‘spright’ (l. 11) is a sprite. The sense of the supernatural, but also the sense of its being souled, is pertinent; the old spelling also conveys a sense of ‘sprightly’. A timbrel is a tambourine-like instrument, familiar from the King James Bible.

  In his introduction to Animal Stories, de la Mare writes:

  Watch a ‘wild’ animal, as far as you can, following its own ways and habits. Imagine what a joy it would be if, in wood or field or garden, a rich and genuine friendliness were the rule between yourself and it; and if it could, as far as nature allows, share your mind to the extent to which, as far as nature and a generous heart allows you, you might learn to share its. […] Of one thing […] we can be positively certain: namely, that, with very few exceptions – a tiger in the kitchen say, a boa constrictor in one’s bed, or a scorpion in one’s shoe (unusual little experiences all three) – we shall never regret having spared the life of the least of living creatures, or be sorry for having shown kindness to one in need.2

  ‘Titmouse’ has a significant place in contemporary thinking on animal rights, having been quoted in a much-discussed passage in an influential 1978 essay by the philosopher Cora Diamond.3 Diamond is struck by the phrase ‘this tiny son of life’ (l. 11) and the way the titmouse is presented as a fellow creature, stressing how this is connected with the bird’s appearing out of ‘earth’s vast unknown of air’, and flitting off into ‘Time’s enormous Nought’. It is this response to ‘animals as our fellows in mortality, in life on this earth’ that Diamond finds instructive for thinking on humans’ relationship with other animals more generally.4

  NOTES
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  1. Walter de la Mare, Come Hither, vol. 1, p. 409.

  2. Animal Stories: Chosen, Arranged and in Some Part Rewritten by Walter de la Mare (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), pp. xlviii–xlix.

  3. Cora Diamond, ‘Eating Meat and Eating People’, Philosophy, vol. 53, no. 206, October 1978), pp. 465–79. The essay is collected in Diamond’s book The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1991).

  4. Ibid., p. 474.

  Good-Bye

  The last of last words spoken is, Good-bye –

  The last dismantled flower in the weed-grown hedge,

  The last thin rumour of a feeble bell far ringing,

  The last blind rat to spurn the mildewed rye.

  5

  A hardening darkness glasses the haunted eye,

  Shines into nothing the watcher’s burnt-out candle,

  Wreathes into scentless nothing the wasting incense,

  Faints in the outer silence the hunting-cry.

  Love of its muted music breathes no sigh,

  10

  Thought in her ivory tower gropes in her spinning,

  Toss on in vain the whispering trees of Eden,

  Last of all last words spoken is, Good-bye.