Reading Walter de la Mare, edited by William Wootten
PAUL DEAN
Reading Walter de la Mare By Walter de la Mare and William Wootten (editor)
Faber £14.99
At one time, lots of children were made to read Walter de la Mare’s poem The Listeners at school. Nowadays, even if the Traveller broke the door down, he might find there was nobody there.
De la Mare, once a literary lion, centrepiece of the Georgian anthologies, was bypassed by the academy, written off as a melodious daydreamer with great technical skill but nothing to say. Despite being admired by T S Eliot and
W H Auden, he has dropped from view. ‘Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) wrote the dreamy Nod and the ghostly The Listeners’ is all John Carey has to say in A Little History of Poetry.
William Wootten’s new, intelligently annotated selection of 50 of his poems deserves to revive his reputation. We can once more appreciate that as a poet, he was tougher, more troubled and deeper than the graceful Georgian lyricist of popular memory.
Wootten’s discussion provokes questions. Was de la Mare really just ‘dreamy’ and ‘ghostly’? Wouldn’t ‘visionary’ and ‘uncanny’ be better? Or even ‘mystical’ and ‘macabre’? The blend is distinctive. For de la Mare, something lies about us in our infancy, but it may not be Heaven. He respected, even revered, childhood, as shown by his substantial critical study Early One Morning (1935), but he was less indulgent about it than A A Milne, and less mawkish than J M Barrie. His favourite Shakespeare plays were Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. He was a Romantic with a metaphysical strain.
De la Mare had a strange life. After singing as a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral, he endured 18 years of statistical drudgery at Standard Oil, keeping his wife (ten years his senior) and four children just about solvent. His poems, written after office hours, began to appear in magazines.
In 1908, when a Civil List grant freed him to write and review, his social world expanded to include Rupert Brooke, Katherine Mansfield and, later, Thomas Hardy. As a reader for Heinemann, he worked on manuscripts by D H Lawrence – a deliciously unlikely pairing.
Just before the First World War, during which he worked for the Ministry of Food, de la Mare published The Listeners and Other Poems (1912) and Peacock Pie (1913), which contain many of his best-known pieces. From then on, volume followed volume: poems, stories, essays, fiction, and fine anthologies such as Come Hither (1923).
He was an adult who remained a child in important ways, intrigued by the borderland between innocence and experience, impulse and caution. He was a bit of a mystic, too, convinced that this world is not all there is, and that we can catch glimpses, from time to time, of what lies beyond. In his eyes, a newborn baby was already an exile.
As a family man, de la Mare had mixed success. His own father died when he was four, and he was always close to his mother. After his wife died in 1943, de la Mare wondered if he had ever really known her. From 1911, his muse and (platonic) love obsession had been the novelist and journalist Naomi Royde-smith.
He was more open and spontaneous with his children, as a natural partythrower and player of games. But he clung to an idealised image of them. When his daughter Jinnie’s marriage collapsed in alcoholism and divorce, he hid from the facts and became estranged from his small grandson.
In old age, when the academic world had relegated him to the status of minor versifier, other honours accumulated: he had turned down a knighthood at 50, but became a Companion of Honour and was given the Order of Merit.
His last poems kept their trademark polish and grace, with darker shadows and more muted notes. Surviving recordings of him reading his poems and recalling a visit to Hardy have a natural, confiding, quite un-‘poetic’ tone. On his deathbed, towards the close of Midsummer Night 1956, he recited Fare Well, with its injunction to ‘Look thy last on all things lovely,/every hour.’
He did just that, and his voice can be heard clearly again in William Wootten’s excellent book.