from The Veil and Other Poems (1921)
‘Good-Bye’ is a list of last things, made after the last things have gone: the last language, the last flower, the last bell, the last rat giving up on the inedible rye, the last sight, scent and sound, the last music, the last thought. On its publication in The Veil in 1921, it must have seemed a desolate leave-taking breathed over the post-war wasteland. Yet the poem’s sense of aftermath dates from before that: a very slightly different version of the poem had been intended for inclusion in The Listeners. Indeed, its sense of things is the abject version of what we find in a poem such as ‘The Bells’: not the last, richly savoured reverberations and after-echoes of a heavenly sound, but the echoes and after-images of the world thinned to its final vestiges. ‘Good-Bye’ is, in a way, a counterpart to the rust-armoured knight of skin and bone who goes charging off into the void in ‘The Song of Finis’, the last rhyme of Peacock Pie. Quite how despairing a poem you take it to be ultimately depends on how you take its title, ‘Good-Bye’ being a contraction of ‘God be with ye’.
‘Good-Bye’ is, as Eric Ormsby points out, an example of de la Mare at his most rhetorical. The poem makes extensive use of the rhetorical devices of ‘anaphora’ (the repetition of words in successive clauses, as when ‘The last’ appears at the beginning of each line of the first verse) and ‘anastrophe’ (the inverting of the usual word order of subject, verb and object). De la Mare’s use of anastrophe has come in for a lot of criticism. Its employment risks sounding convoluted and old-fashioned, and can leave the reader needlessly uncertain of the intended meaning of a line. On the publication of The Veil, even de la Mare’s friend and admirer Forrest Reid was questioning his fondness for it: in his letter to de la Mare of 13 December 1921, Reid tells him that he was in the habit of swapping around subject and verb merely because he liked to do so.1 Yet, as Reid conceded in his next letter, if employed occasionally, the device can be used to achieve a particular effect.2 A stronger argument in favour of this and of how other verbal peculiarities of de la Mare can often be successful is put by the philosopher and critic Owen Barfield when he declares: ‘the liberties taken by de la Mare in the use of language were in fact a sine qua non of his achievement’.3 Eric Ormsby’s recent reassessment returns to something like Barfield’s view of the matter. For Ormsby, the rhetorical devices in ‘Good-Bye’ link with the poem’s intricate prosody (one doesn’t associate such music as one finds here with the iambic pentameter, but de la Mare has managed to write a pentameter whose feet are very rarely iambs) to function like ‘cunningly interlaced vines over the dark mouth of a pit’.4 One might add that not only can the inversion of verb and subject place an important emphasis on the verb (as in ‘All That’s Past’) but that the ambiguity created by anastrophe can, when handled with sufficient care, create a rich bifurcation of meaning.
In ‘Good-Bye’, the use of anastrophe is certainly ambiguous. Is ‘Good-bye’ the ‘last word’, or has the last word already been said? Do we witness, but not say our goodbye to the items mentioned in the poem (l. 1)? In the second stanza, do we take the ‘burnt-out candle’ to be the subject of ‘Shines’ (l. 6), ‘wasting incense’ to be the subject of ‘wreathes’ (l. 7) and ‘hunting-cry’ to be the subject of ‘Faints’ (l. 8), noting that ‘the whispering trees of Eden’ must be the subject of ‘Toss on in vain’ (l. 11)? Alternatively, do we read ‘A hardening darkness’ as the subject of all the clauses in the second stanza? In which case we discover how darkness hardens and shines before it wreathes wasting incense to scentless nothing and fainting (making faint) the ‘hunting-cry’. Surely de la Mare is creating a structure where all these readings may be plausibly entertained, the rejected interpretation ghosting the chosen one. Moreover, by placing the verb first, the framework of clauses enacts a repeated sense of activity followed by inactivity and dying away, the theme of the poem.
In the version that was nearly included in The Listeners, the word in place of ‘dismantled’ (l. 2) was ‘dispetalled’, and it may have been dissatisfaction over this that caused de la Mare to hold the poem back from publication. His final choice is a great example of the odd word being the right one, for it plays on the word’s literal meaning: ‘mantellum’ is the Latin word for cloak, hence ‘mantle’; the last flower in the hedge has had her cloak removed. Consciously or unconsciously, Elizabeth Bishop, who called Come Hither ‘the best anthology I know of’, seems to have borrowed de la Mare’s use of the word, though not quite its etymological justness, when in her ‘Poem’ she writes of ‘yet-to-be dismantled elms’.5
NOTES
1. Forrest Reid to Walter de la Mare, 13 December 1921, Walter de la Mare Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Box B107.
2. Forrest Reid to Walter de la Mare, 4 January 1922, Walter de la Mare Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Box B107.
3. ‘Poetry in Walter de la Mare’, The Denver Quarterly, 8.3, Autumn 1973, pp. 69–81.
4. Eric Ormsby, Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (Erin, Ontario: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2011), p. 45.
5. See Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Reviewed Work: Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages by Walter de la Mare’, Poetry, vol. 93, no. 1, October 1958, pp. 50–4.
The Railway Junction
From here through tunnelled gloom the track
Forks into two; and one of these
Wheels onward into darkening hills,
And one toward distant seas.
5
How still it is; the signal light
At set of sun shines palely green;
A thrush sings; other sound there’s none,
Nor traveller to be seen –
Where late there was a throng. And now,
10
In peace awhile, I sit alone;
Though soon, at the appointed hour,
I shall myself be gone.
But not their way: the bow-legged groom,
The parson in black, the widow and son,
15
The sailor with his cage, the gaunt
Gamekeeper with his gun,
That fair one, too, discreetly veiled –
All, who so mutely came, and went,
Will reach those far nocturnal hills,
20
Or shores, ere night is spent.
I nothing know why thus we met –
Their thoughts, their longings, hopes, their fate:
And what shall I remember, except –
The evening growing late –
25
That here through tunnelled gloom the track
Forks into two; of these
One into darkening hills leads on,
And one toward distant seas?
from The Fleeting and Other Poems (1933)
Graham Greene thought the ‘dominant symbol’ of de la Mare’s short stories was the ‘railway station or the railway journey’.1 It’s not hard to think of instances to support the contention: his ghost story ‘Crewe’, for instance. Nor is it difficult to work out why this should be: with their travellers, journeys, waits and departures, their perpetual air of transience, railways and railway stations are the perfect location for some of de la Mare’s most characteristic moods and themes.
Railways appear far less often in the verse, but it is hard to imagine a more de la Marean poem than ‘The Railway Junction’. Yet it is also a poem that brings to mind other great poems by de la Mare’s contemporaries that briefly stop upon a journey: Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ or Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’, and it is, in a way, conversing with them. For instance, as in reply to how Thomas’s poem begins with the affirmation ‘Yes. I remember’, de la Mare’s towards the end asks: ‘And what shall I remember, except’ (l. 23). Whereas Thomas’s singing blackbird has around him ‘all the birds/ Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’; de la Mare’s thrush is, like himself, quite alone.
As with a wait at a real train station, you ca
n’t dwell at ‘The Railway Junction’ for long without starting to construct narratives for the passengers you see. As is the way with real people-watching, the stories one concocts for the passengers here may proceed from false impressions and assumptions. Is this a groom of horses, ‘bow-legged’ (l. 13) from riding, or is he a bridegroom? Could the woman in the veil be the groom’s bride or does this veil indicate a withdrawal from romantic attachments? Could she even be wearing the veil of a nun? The widow and her son are clearly travelling together, but are they travelling with the parson in black to or from the funeral of her dead husband, or is he travelling to church with the bride and groom? And where are they travelling? The gamekeeper and the groom, should he be a groom of horses, will, in the usual way of things, be heading for the hills, and the sailor for the sea, but where the others go is less easy to be sure of.
The poet James Reeves writes that he had read ‘The Railway Junction’ many times without being sure what it meant, while finding it ever more suggestive. It would be easy, Reeves contends, to read into the poem’s situation an ‘allegory of human life, but perhaps this would be wrong’.2 The poem’s three routes and seven travellers do have the feel of allegory, and it is possible to construct and then abandon all sorts of allegorical schemes that might fit them. Could ‘The Railway Junction’ be an allegory of love? If we assume the groom to be a bridegroom, might he not represent romantic love? The parson could then represent religious love, the widow the love for the dead or filial love for her son. The sailor could be associated with love of adventure. However, once you start wondering whether the gamekeeper might represent a love of hunting and killing and the woman in the veil a love of mystery, the scheme starts to seem tenuous. Perhaps we should be following another allegorical scheme entirely.
Perhaps we should be looking for a meaning of the poem that is less general and more personal. Do those who were at the railway junction represent stages in de la Mare’s own life? ‘The evening growing late’ (l. 24) appears to be the reason for not remembering, which strongly implies that this evening is also life’s evening – de la Mare turned sixty in the year The Fleeting was published and, though the evidence is that he continued to have an excellent memory, he may have been aware that he was growing increasingly forgetful. The tunnelled gloom (l. 1) may thus bring to mind the grave, and the ‘darkening hills’ (l. 3) and ‘distant seas’ (l. 4) are possibilities for the afterlife. The three routes are also reminiscent of the routes shown in ‘Thomas Rymer’ (see the notes to ‘To K.M.’), in which case de la Mare, as poet, may be en route to Elfland, rather than travelling the path of wickedness or the path of righteousness.
As the meanderings above make clear, while there might be a single key to this poem, it is hard to find one that opens all its doors. I am more than happy to go along with Reeves’s conclusion that all one can be sure of is a ‘sense of the loneliness of the human situation’, the poem implying that life has a significance that we do not know. As he did in ‘The Listeners’, in ‘The Railway Junction’ de la Mare created a poem that encourages us to seek to interpret it again and again, with no real prospect of an all-encompassing answer; it is a poem which feels freighted with a huge, yet never quite defined, emotional significance, and which always seem to elude an attempt to keep its meaning fixed.
NOTES
1. Graham Greene, ‘The Short Stories’, in Tribute to Walter de la Mare on his Seventy-fifth Birthday (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), pp. 71–7: p. 71.
2. James Reeves, Understanding Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1965), pp. 92–4.
To K.M.
And there was a horse in the king’s stables:
and the name of the horse was, Genius
We sat and talked … It was June, and the summer light
Lay fair upon ceiling and wall as the day took flight.
Tranquil the room – with its colours and shadows wan,
Cherries, and china, and flowers: and the hour slid on.
5
Dark hair, dark eyes, slim fingers – you made the tea,
Pausing with spoon uplifted, to speak to me.
Lulled by our thoughts and our voices, how happy were we!
And, musing, an old, old riddle crept into my head.
‘Supposing I just say, Horse in a field,’ I said,
10
‘What do you see?’ And we each made answer: ‘I –
A roan – long tail, and a red-brick house, near by.’
‘I – an old cart-horse and rain!’ ‘Oh no, not rain;
A mare with a long-legged foal by a pond – oh plain!’
‘And I, a hedge – and an elm – and the shadowy green
15
Sloping gently up to the blue, to the west, I mean!’ …
And now: on the field that I see night’s darkness lies.
A brook brawls near: there are stars in the empty skies.
The grass is deep, and dense. As I push my way,
From sour-nettled ditch sweeps fragrance of clustering may.
20
I come to a stile. And lo, on the further side,
With still, umbrageous, night-clad fronds, spread wide,
A giant cedar broods. And in crescent’s gleam –
A horse, milk-pale, sleek-shouldered, engendered of dream!
Startled, it lifts its muzzle, deep eyes agaze,
25
Silk-plaited mane …
‘Whose pastures are thine to graze?
Creature, delicate, lovely, with woman-like head,
Sphinx-like, gazelle-like? Where tarries thy rider?’ I said
And I scanned by that sinking ship’s thin twinkling shed
30
A high-pooped saddle of leather, night-darkened red,
Stamped with a pattern of gilding; and over it thrown
A cloak, chain-buckled, with one great glamorous stone,
Wan as the argent moon when o’er fields of wheat
Like Dian she broods, and steals to Endymion’s feet.
35
Interwoven with silver that cloak from seam to seam.
And at toss of that head from its damascened bridle did beam
Mysterious glare in the dead of the dark …
‘The name,
Fantastical steed? Thy pedigree?
40
Peace, out of Storm, is the tale? Or Beauty, of Jeopardy?
The water grieves. Not a footfall – and midnight here.
Why tarries Darkness’s bird? Mounded and clear
Slopes to yon hill with its stars the moorland sweet.
There sighs the airs of far heaven. And the dreamer’s feet
45
Scatter the leagues of paths secret to where at last meet
Roads called Wickedness, Righteousness, broad-flung or strait,
And the third that leads on to the Queen of fair Elfland’s gate …
This then the horse that I see; swift as the wind;
That none may master or mount; and none may bind –
50
But she, his Mistress: cloaked, and at throat that gem –
Dark hair, dark eyes, slim shoulder …
God-speed, K.M.!
from The Fleeting and Other Poems (1933)
Until Kathleen Jones’s 2010 book about Katherine Mansfield, ‘To K.M.’ was assumed to have been conceived as Mansfield’s elegy.1 But, as Jenny McDonnell has since pointed out, the ‘origin of the poem is indicative of a mutually supportive working relationship between two living writers’.2 De la Mare published his poem in the Saturday Westminster Gazette on 26 January 1922, after first seeking Mansfield’s permission.3 At this point, the poem was called ‘Horse in a Field (To Katherine Mansfield)’. Since the typescript of ‘Horse in a Field’ originally dedicates the poem ‘To K.M.’, the decision to use her full name may have been made in order to make clear to readers this was the same not-very-well-known writer whose story ‘The Garden Party’ would be published in the paper the following week.4 On th
is occasion, the epigraph was attributed to The Arabian Nights. The words of the epigraph do indeed have the ring of Andrew Lang’s 1898 translation of the Nights, in which the word ‘Genius’, meaning ‘spirit’, is used to denote a ‘Genie’. However, since the sentence cannot be found there, and since de la Mare subsequently dropped the attribution, I suspect he made it up.
Mansfield used the initials ‘K.M.’ to sign both her journalism and her letters to de la Mare, but her initials may have had further significance for him. The heroine of de la Mare’s 1921 novel Memoirs of a Midget goes by the name of Miss M.; de la Mare, writing to Mansfield on 26 May 1921 and anxious that she will enjoy the book, calls Miss M. ‘your initialsake, so to speak’.5 The use of Mansfield’s initials may also have been de la Mare’s way of placing Mansfield in the same company as ‘E.T.’; ‘To K.M.’ is reminiscent both of the Edward Thomas tribute ‘Sotto Voce’ and ‘To Thomas Hardy’, and is placed next to ‘Sotto Voce’ in the 1942 edition of his Collected Poems. The poem is written in an iambic pentameter, but one which employs a huge amount of metrical variation, which allows de la Mare to replicate some of the incantatory effects of his lyric metres, particularly in the poem’s second half. (He breaks away from the metre in ll. 37–9 and ll. 51–2).
‘To K.M.’ begins by recalling an encounter between de la Mare and Mansfield which took place in her Hampstead house in June 1920 and a moment of lulled reverie and daydream, shared ‘as the day took flight’ (l. 2).6 Mansfield likewise associated her bond with de la Mare with a room’s fading light. In her journal entry of 1 January 1922, when she was writing her story ‘The Doves’ Nest’, Mansfield records: ‘Read W.J.D.’s [i.e. de la Mare’s] poems. I feel very near to him in mind. I want to remember how the light fades from a room – and one fades with it, is expunged, sitting still, knees together, hands in pockets …’7
Reading Walter de la Mare Page 13