'It All But Lovely As Silence Is'

Thanks to S.J. Perelman and his 1952 collection The Ill-Tempered Clavichord, I get confused with Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (1722) and with that bone that runs from the sternum to the shoulder blade. You know, the clavicle. Each time I need to cite one of the three, in writing or conversation, I’m briefly backed up like a plugged drain. My memory is heavily visual and I have to picture the object in question, whether book, score or bone. With the aid of Walter de la Mare and his poem “Clavichord” (Memory, and Other Poems (1938), I hope to eliminate some of the confusion: 

“Hearken! Tiny, clear, discrete:

The listener within deems solely his,

A music so remote and sweet

It all but lovely as silence is.”

 

The poem has been set to music and sung by Diana Blom, with Ayşe Göknur Shanal accompanying her, of course, on clavichord. No modern poet is so musical as de la Mare. Even I, a non-musician, find myself singing his poems, at least internally, when reading them. Anthony Hecht wrote of him:

 

“De la Mare’s poetry is richly, sometimes dreamily, melodic, and the subtlety and skill of his prosody probably derives in part from his familiarity with folk literature and traditional English nursery rhymes.”

 

De la Mare died on this date, June 22, in 1956 at age eighty-three.