Away
There is no sorrow
Time heals never;
No loss, betrayal,
Beyond repair.
5
Balm for the soul, then,
Though grave shall sever
Lover from loved
And all they share;
See, the sweet sun shines,
10
The shower is over,
Flowers preen their beauty,
The day how fair!
Brood not too closely
On love, or duty;
15
Friends long forgotten
May wait you where
Life with death
Brings all to an issue;
None will long mourn for you,
20
Pray for you, miss you,
Your place left vacant,
You not there.
from Memory and Other Poems (1938)
Commentaries such as these have a habit of prizing those poems they can say most about. The beautifully turned poem that says exactly what needs to be said in the clearest terms can make commentary seem redundant, but the danger is that the excellence of such poems then passes unremarked. Moreover, ‘Away’ is in other ways not a poem which draws attention to itself.
That might be one of the lessons to take from its appearance in the short story ‘Face’ by Alice Munro (other possible significances are discussed by Angela Leighton in her book Hearing Things).1 In the story, the words ‘None will long mourn for you,/ Pray for you, miss you,/ Your place vacant’ are read to the narrator, probably in a dream, by a ‘girl-child phantom’ as he lies temporarily blinded and in hospital.2 The narrator, who has recited many poems in his work as an actor for radio, has guessed the authors of all the other poems she has read out apart from this one. Later he finds the poem and the name of its author written on a piece of paper concealed in a book he had intended to give to a charity bazaar; it may well have been written out by a girl he knew in childhood who was sympathetic to his disfiguring birthmark. Suitably for a story about de la Mare, she seems to be at once the narrator’s double and also his anima (see the notes to ‘Autumn’ and ‘Sallie’).
What’s interesting about the story, and indeed the poem, is that the narrator takes comfort in the poem’s words, and yet these words are in some ways very bleak. You will die and soon enough be forgotten. Yes, time heals, but it takes away more or less everything as it does so. A school of critical opinion, beginning with de la Mare’s old adversary F. R. Leavis, still takes it as an article of faith that a poem which consoles the reader must somehow be at fault, must be pulling the wool over our eyes. But ‘Away’ and poems like it prove there are consoling poems that look the bleak and inevitable firmly in the face. It is possible that the poet regards death with such equanimity because he is confident of an afterlife, yet while lines 15–18 don’t deny one, they don’t clearly affirm it either and may simply refer to memories at the moment of death.
‘Away’, like ‘Fare Well’, is a poem which shows a rare generosity in the face of mortality: the thought that you won’t be long mourned should please you, if you think more of the happiness of your loved ones than the need for everyone to ache at your absence. While the poem has little in the way of imagery to show its gratitude for life’s wonder, there is a marvellous image of flowers preening their beauty in line 11, like birds doing the same following a rain shower. The short lines, with their variation between two and, occasionally, three stresses, are beautifully handled. Every bit as impressive is the irregular rhyme scheme: ‘never’ (l. 2), ‘sever’ (l. 6) and ‘over’ (l. 10); ‘beauty’ (l. 11) and ‘duty’ (l. 14) (‘closely’ (l. 13) may be counted as a near-rhyme); ‘issue’ (l. 18) and ‘miss you’ (l. 20) (‘for you’ (l. 19) looks more like a rhyme than it is – the ‘oo’ sound in the other words is unstressed), and, stretching across nearly the entire poem, ‘repair’ (l. 4), ‘share’ (l. 8), ‘fair’ (l. 12), ‘where’ (l. 16) and ‘there (l. 22).
NOTES
1. Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness (London: Vintage, 2010), pp. 138–63; Angela Leighton, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge Mass. and London: Belknap Press, 2018), pp. 148–51 and pp. 156–7.
2. Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness, p. 161.
Thomas Hardy
Mingled the moonlight with daylight – the last in the narrowing west;
Silence of nightfall lay over the shallowing valleys at rest
In the Earth’s green breast:
Yet a small multitudinous singing, a lully of voices of birds,
5
Unseen in the vague shelving hollows, welled up with my questioning words:
All Dorsetshire’s larks for connivance of sweetness seemed trysting to greet
Him in whose songs the bodings of raven and nightingale meet.
Stooping and smiling, he questioned, ‘No birdnotes myself do I hear?
Perhaps ’twas the talk of chance farers, abroad in the hush with us here –
10
In the dusk-light clear?’
And there peered from his eyes, as I listened, a concourse of women and men,
Whom his words had made living, long-suffering – they flocked to remembrance again;
‘O Master,’ I cried in my heart, ‘lorn thy tidings, grievous thy song;
Yet thine, too, this solacing music, as we earthfolk stumble along.’
from Memory and Other Poems (1933)
While clearing out a cupboard in 1918, Thomas Hardy chanced upon a hugely enthusiastic 1910 review of his gigantic dramatic poem for the page, The Dynasts. The name of the reviewer, Walter de la Mare, which had meant next to nothing to Hardy in 1910, now conveyed to him ‘those delightful sensations of moonlight & forests & haunted houses which I myself seem to have visited’.1 Hardy wrote to de la Mare to begin a friendship which would last until his death.
On 16 June 1921, de la Mare came to stay with him at his house in Max Gate. De la Mare would recall in a radio broadcast of 1955:
We actually met on Dorchester Station’s down platform. He showed a child’s satisfaction and a rare courtesy almost peculiar to himself, in his immediate apology that in spite of every effort he had failed to get me a cab simply because the complete fleet of Dorchester’s cabs had been secured by people with tickets for the first performance of a dramatised version of Tess [Theresa Whistler points out it was, in fact, The Mellstock Quire that the Hardy Players performed that week2]. Therefore, having compelled me to give my bag into his keeping, we set out on foot. And soon, as it seemed, our footsteps were muffled by the beautiful moss-quiet turf of his Dorsetshire downs.
Suddenly, in the midst of our talk, under the immense canopy of the pale-blue latening sky, not far from the sea of course, I became aware of a captivating, low, trilling chorus of birds, coming as it seemed from a shallow hollow of the downs no more than some thirty paces distant. I put up a finger and enquired of him what birds they were. We came to a standstill, he eyed me with a characteristically tilted glance that was never penetrating – always divining and comprehending – and replied that he could hear no birds. We continued after a few moments on our way. Were the birds that I had heard then really nature’s; or had Hardy magicked them into my mind?3
The next day, the two poets, along with Hardy’s second wife Florence, went to Stinsford churchyard. The Hardy family graves were underneath a yew, and Hardy had brought along a small spade-like implement in order to scrape off the moss. De la Mare said he preferred his tombstones green.4 The visit prompted Hardy to seek de la Mare’s advice on his poem ‘Voices From Things Growing in a Country Graveyard’.5 After encouraging Hardy to finish the poem and offering some suggestions, de la Mare then placed it in the London Mercury for Hardy.6 The poem was presumably shown to de la Mare on account of his interest in ghosts, epitaphs and graveyards. Whether or not on account of de la Mare’s influence or suggestion, ‘Voices From Things Growing in a Country Graveyard’ has lines th
at sound like the many imaginary epitaphs de la Mare had already written, both as standalone poems and in the graveyard stories eventually collected in Ding Dong Bell (1924). The description of the little girl ‘poor Fanny Hurd’, whose voice from the grave declares that she once fluttered ‘like a bird/ Above the grass, as now I wave/ In daisy shapes above my grave’, in particular, sounds more like de la Mare than Hardy. While it isn’t always easy to tell where mutual preoccupations end and influence begins, there is between the work of the two writers a fascinating connecting web, one which is currently being examined by Yui Kajita.7
Though published in Memory (1938), an earlier version of ‘Thomas Hardy’ entitled ‘To Thomas Hardy’ was intended for The Fleeting, only to be omitted at proof stage, and the title indicates that the first draft of the poem was written while Hardy was still alive. Similarities to ‘Sotto Voce’ and ‘To K.M.’ are clearly deliberate: the poems were conceived close to one another and form a triptych celebrating three writer friends for whom de la Mare felt affinity and admiration. ‘Sotto Voce’ and ‘To K.M.’ are written in a style that is thoroughly de la Mare’s own, while ‘Thomas Hardy’ is more of an hommage: a sonnet written in a manner that is deliberately close to Hardy’s. The word ‘Master’ (l. 13) is not mere flattery; de la Mare regarded Hardy as the greatest writer of his lifetime.
This is a ‘lully’ (l. 4) of birds and not a ‘lullay’, so we are presumably not supposed to think of John Skelton’s use of the word, as we are in ‘Sotto Voce’, but of the more straightforward lulling that may be prelude to vision, the sort we have in ‘To K.M.’. ‘All Dorsetshire’s larks’ (l. 6) echoes Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’, which listens to ‘all the birds/ Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’; it is the sound of the natural world.8 Hardy does not hear this sound. Still, listening to birds is a way of hearing his genius. By writing of a mixing of nightingale and raven in Hardy’s ‘songs’ (l. 7), de la Mare may not just be referring to the less melodious aspects of Hardy’s verse but also to the fact that the raven is both a bird of ill omen and a noted mimic of the human voice – a novelist among birds. It is, for once, not hearing that gives de la Mare his moment of insight, but looking into Hardy’s eyes where appear the ‘concourse of women and men’ (l. 11) from his works flocking like birds. If Hardy’s tidings are ‘[for]lorn’ (l. 13), in that they are full of disturbing post-Christian pessimism, it was a pessimism which de la Mare sometimes shared.
NOTES
1. Thomas Hardy, letter to Walter de la Mare, 1 November 1918, The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, edited by Richard Littlepurdy and Michael Millgate, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 284.
2. Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, p. 311.
3. Walter de la Mare, ‘Meeting Thomas Hardy’, The Listener, 28 April 1955, pp. 756–7: p. 756.
4. Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972), p. 442.
5. Ibid, p. 413.
6. See Theresa Whistler, The Life of Walter de la Mare, pp. 313–14. Whistler states that ‘Thomas Hardy’ also appeared in that issue of the London Mercury, but while de la Mare does have a poem in the issue, it is ‘The Last Coachload’, London Mercury, vol. 5. no. 26, pp. 119–23.
7. Most of Yui Kajita’s work on Hardy and de la Mare has yet to be published at the time of writing. She has, however, been generous enough to share with me the essay ‘“Something Tapped”: Haunting Echoes in Thomas Hardy and Walter de la Mare’, which says far more about the subject than I can cover here.
8. Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, p. 51.
Dry August Burned
Dry August burned. A harvest hare
Limp on the kitchen table lay,
Its fur blood-blubbered, eye astare,
While a small child that stood near by
5
Wept out her heart to see it there.
Sharp came the clop of hoofs, the clang
Of dangling chain, voices that rang.
Out like a leveret she ran,
To feast her glistening bird-clear eyes
10
On a team of field artillery,
Gay, to manoeuvres, thudding by.
Spur and gun and limber plate
Flashed in the sun. Alert, elate,
Noble horses, foam at lip,
15
Harness, stirrup, holster, whip,
She watched the sun-tanned soldiery,
Till dust-white hedge had hidden away –
Its din into a rumour thinned –
The laughing, jolting, wild array:
20
And then – the wonder and tumult gone –
Stood nibbling a green leaf, alone,
Her dark eyes, dreaming … She turned, and ran,
Elf-like, into the house again.
The hare had vanished … ‘Mother,’ she said,
25
Her tear-stained cheek now flushed with red,
‘Please, may I go and see it skinned?’
from Memory and Other Poems (1938)
Theresa Whistler dates the events depicted in ‘Dry August Burned’ to August 1910, when the de la Mare family were holidaying at the cottage in West Harting in West Sussex, within walking distance of the Thomas family. Their stay coincided with that of fifteen hundred troops on manoeuvres, which gave the family a foretaste of the militarisation of the country that would come with the First World War, and of Edward Thomas the artillery officer. It was, according to Whistler, the ten-year-old Florence de la Mare who, having cried at seeing a dead hare, ran out and was captivated by the soldiers.1 Whistler also believes the poem to have been composed at the time of the events it depicts, but I doubt this is correct.2 De la Mare isn’t a diaristic poet and would often write of events years after they happened, when their full significance had become clear and could be shaped poetically (see, for instance, ‘Sotto Voce’). ‘Dry August Burned’ is quite unlike any poem in The Listeners or Peacock Pie, but it does have the short story-like style, the brutality of subject matter and pessimism about modern humanity and its cruelties that is the hallmark of a number of poems from Memory (1938), the collection in which it first appeared. As I can find no manuscript evidence to date it earlier than that volume, I would suggest that ‘Dry August Burned’ is a poem of the mid-to-late 1930s.
The strange and arresting title appeared at proof stage. August was, until 1993 when the practice was banned, the time of stubble burning.3 The fires would cause panicked hares to break cover and run from the flames and smoke, more so in a dry summer when fires often spread out of control. Readers in the 1930s would naturally have thought of the dry, hot August of 1914, the month of the outbreak of the First World War, and de la Mare appears to be cultivating the assumption from the reader that the poem is set in 1914.
Prior to being called ‘Dry August Burned’, the poem was called ‘The Hare’. There is also a poem of that name in Songs of Childhood (1902), which provides a key to what happens within ‘Dry August Burned’:
‘The Hare’
In the black furrow of a field
I saw an old witch-hare this night;
And she cocked a lissome ear,
And she eyed the moon so bright,
And she nibbled of the green;
And I whispered ‘Whsst! witch-hare,’
Away like a ghostie o’er the field
She fled, and left the moonlight there.
(C.P., p. 6)
When de la Mare included ‘The Hare’ in his 1939 anthology Animal Stories, he let it stand as preface to a tale called ‘The Witch Hare’. The rural speaker has been ‘out thracking hares’. He then shoots a female hare, follows the track of its blood, ‘whist, whisper – right up to Katey MacShane’s door’. And there it seems to have taken on the shape of a woman who, when asked of her wound, merely says that it was cut with a reaping hook.4 Hares were on de la Mare’s mind again at the end of the 1930s. The early story ‘In the Forest’,
which features a male hare and soldiers, was dug out and collected in Stories, Essays and Poems (1939). Memory (1938) also includes the poem ‘A Hare’, which reflects on man’s enmity to the beast, its sympathy resting with the hare. Indeed, de la Mare’s increasingly dark view of humankind is matched by his ever-stronger sympathy with the animal world. The poem before ‘Dry August Burned’ in Memory is ‘Reserved’, a bitter indictment of the whole industrial-utilitarian approach to animals and the way of living it has created.
The girl in ‘Dry August Burned’ is depicted in the terms of a shape-shifting witch-hare. In a trial for witchcraft in 1662, the Scottish woman Isobel Gowdie declared that to turn into a hare she would chant:
I sall gae intil a hare,
Wi’ sorrow and sych and meickle care;
And I sall gae in the Devillis name,
Ay quhill I com hom againe.
[I shall go into a hare,/ With sorrow and sigh and much care;/ And shall go in the Devil’s name,/ In a while I’ll come home again]
To change back, she would say:
Haire, haire, God send thee caire.
I am in a hairis likness just now,
Bot I sall be in a womanis likenes evin now.5
[Hare, hare, God send thee care./ I am in a hare’s likeness just now,/ But I shall be in a woman’s likeness even now.]
At the opening of ‘Dry August Burned’, the girl runs out ‘like a leveret’ (l. 8), a young hare. She has identified so strongly with the hare that has been killed that she becomes a young hare herself. At the end of the poem, she, like the witch-hare in ‘The Hare’, nibbles of the green before running ‘Elf-like’ (l. 23) back into the house. The hare has ‘vanished’ (l. 24). By the end of the poem the girl has changed again, not into an innocent child among the beasts but into a bloodthirsty one, no longer able to sympathise with animal or, by implication, human victims.
Reading Walter de la Mare Page 16