SELECTED POEMS
by Walter de la Mare, edited by Matthew Sweeney
Faber, £12.99
There was a time when Walter de la Mare lorded it in the drawing room of the mansion of literature. Now he is demoted to an under gardener’s cottage where he chews on a straw, entertains children with his rambling visions and mutters quaint saws about the weather.
His best known poem is The Listeners, published in 1912: “ ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, / Knocking on the moonlit door . . . ‘Tell them I came, and no one answered, / That I kept my word,’ he said.”
In the pages of this new collection there are many ghost poems — Haunted, The Old Stone House, Some One — where someone listens and watches and we don’t know who or why. It is as if the poet, or poetry itself, is spying on our ephemeral existence.
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The question de la Mare asks over and again is: “Is there anybody there?” The answer is yes — he is, seeing and recording. In The Railway Junction, de la Mare shows that fragile coincidence of strangers coming together and then being parted by the journey. In Once, he recalls the excited ardour of the child “a sea of time ago”. In Israfel a bird singing in a London street challenges the everyday struggle of life in 1940:
“It was the contrast with a world / Of darkness, horror, grief, despair / Had edged with an irony so sharp / That rapturous song in Connaught Square.”
It may be that this comforting belief in an all-seeing presence was the reason for de la Mare’s popularity. Perhaps it also explains his fall from fashion, given our anxieties about the randomness of fate in a world where there is no longer any trusting to Providence.
But even in that case his poetic creed is appropriate. Another well known poem is Fare Well: “Look thy last on all things lovely, / Every hour. Let no night / Seal thy sense in deathly slumber / 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.”