'A Silence Settles Upon Language'

No poet’s charm is more difficult to describe for our contemporaries than Walter de la Mare’s, which accounts for his virtual disappearance even among dedicated readers. He has been ghettoized in Kiddie Lit, if read at all. Yet de la Mare is more than a rhymester for children. He is seldom merely whimsical and never didactic. He understood children without being childish and was a master of technique with near-perfect pitch. His language is musical without being sing-song. He died on this date, June 22, in 1956, and the following year the American poet William Jay Smith published in Poetry an essay about him titled “Master of Silences.” It begins: 

“When a poet of stature dies, a silence settles upon language. One becomes suddenly aware that words will never again be handled as they have been by this particular man. All that can be said or heard resides in his poems: the rest is silence.”

 

The Wittgenstein echo, I’m certain, is unintentional. Smith’s essay strikes me as the best I have read about de la Mare. It is admiring but not slavishly so. “[B]ecause he seldom raised his voice in his poems,” Smith writes, “and indeed spoke at times in a whisper, his qualities had to be listened for; few people had the patience.” Nothing has changed.

 

Smith notes the familiar setting of many de la Mare poems: a “rambling Victorian house,” a sleeping little girl, moonlight through the window, a face, fog. The same is true of de la Mare’s marvelous novel, Memoirs of a Midget (1921). Gothic props in an atmosphere utterly non-Gothic. Rather, dream-like. The writer whose world de la Mare’s often resembles is Henry James, especially in the ghost stories. Both charted consciousness and in-between states, the realm of dreams and visions. De la Mare was, as Auden described James, “Master of nuance and scruple.” Smith notes the centrality of houses in de la Mare’s poems:

 

“The house--and how often the word it occurs in his work--is for him the very habitation of the mind. Old, decaying, abandoned, it is like the mind haunted by memory; it is the voice of an eternal silence, choosing its speech in our almost involuntary utterances.”

 

Once you’re  alerted to it by Smith, houses show up everywhere in de la Mare, usually suggesting more than a convenient setting. Here is “The Old House”:

 

“A very, very old house I know--

And ever so many people go,

Past the small lodge, forlorn and still,

Under the heavy branches, till

Comes the blank wall, and there's the door.

Go in they do; come out no more.

No voice says aught; no spark of light

Across that threshold cheers the sight;

Only the evening star on high

Less lonely makes a lonely sky,

As, one by one, the people go

Into that very old house I know.”

 

The clever ones think, "Ah, Death.” Perhaps. But there’s more to it. Think of “The Empty House” and “The House”:

 

“‘Mother, it’s such a lonely house,’

The child cried; and the wind sighed.

‘A narrow but a lovely house,’

The mother replied.

 

“‘Child, it is such a narrow house,’

The ghost cried; and the wind sighed.

‘A narrow and a lonely house,’

The withering grass replied.”

 

Again, Death. The “narrow house” is the grave? Smith – a gifted poet and discerning critic, author of a good memoir (Army Brat) -- concludes by making fine distinctions:

 

“Nor is he completely at home in the field of nonsense; he lacks the zany spirit of Edward Lear. In his stories, for all their fantasy and implied unearthly terror, he never truly abandons the real world; nor in his children’s poems does he ever allow good sense to become nonsense.”