'Silence Where Hope Was'

I’m coming to suspect that nothing is ever irretrievably lost to memory. The other night I dreamed of a schoolmate I hardly knew who died sixty years ago. His name was Randy Peck. He had a twin sister named Mandy. Their names invited jokes, of course, as did their Georgia accents in suburban Cleveland. They seemed better-dressed and a little more sophisticated than the rest of us. Both were tall, slender and attractive, with high foreheads and straight, light brown hair. Suddenly, it seemed, Randy died, and I remember nothing further about Mandy. Their images are fixed in memory, around 1966, like bugs in amber. 

I remember the names of other contemporaries who died when we were kids, and I would recognize them if they walked into the room. Back then it never occurred to me to consider the impact their deaths must have had on their families. For me, their disappearances were more interesting than anything else. They were a novelty, a rare childhood convergence with death. I don’t think I reflected at the time that I, too, was mortal. I wasn’t that contemplative a kid.

 

Walter de la Mare is the poet laureate of childhood, usually without sentimentalizing that time of life. Often, he projects himself into children, and thus comes to understand their fears as well as their joys. Here is “Autumn” (Poems, 1906);

 

“There is wind where the rose was;

Cold rain where sweet grass was;

And clouds like sheep

Stream o'er the steep

Grey skies where the lark was.

 

“Nought gold where your hair was;

Nought warm where your hand was;

But phantom, forlorn,

Beneath the thorn,

Your ghost where your face was.

 

“Sad winds where your voice was;

Tears, tears where my heart was;

And ever with me,

Child, ever with me,

Silence where hope was.”

 

As he often does, de la Mare is writing about an absence. Not until the second stanza does he write “Your ghost where your face was.” Six lines end in the past tense -- “was.” The poet may be remembering a real child or perhaps he writes of childhood itself. His final line is heartbreaking.