'Whence Comes That Small Continuous Silence?'

“Whence comes that small continuous silence / Haunting the livelong day?—” 

We might think of Walter de la Mare as the poetic opposite of more clamorous poets like Ezra Pound. De la Mare hints, whispers, evokes without naming. The lines above are taken from his six-line poem “Swallows Flown” (Memory and Other Poems, 1938). The birds in the title are not mentioned in the body of the poem, which seems appropriate in a verse about absence:

 

“Whence comes that small continuous silence

Haunting the livelong day?—

This void, where a sweetness, so seldom heeded,

Once ravished my heart away?

As if a loved one, too little valued,

Had vanished—could not stay?”

 

All of us live with absence, whether the result of death, geographical change or the dissolution of friendship. Remove the title and who or what would you conclude is being described in de la Mare’s poem? It’s a sort of Rorschach test for the reader. I might think of our dog, who died this week, or my brother.

 

Swallows arrive in de la Mare’s England in the spring and move on early in the autumn. A little reading suggests the sounds they produce change as the seasons change. Early on we would hear courtship songs followed by the chattering of the newly hatched brood. As they fledge, the sounds diminish and then the swallows leave.

 

I’m reminded of William Maxwell’s 1937 novel They Came Like Swallows, structured around another absence -- the death in the 1918 flu epidemic of the main character’s mother. Bunny is eight, Maxwell was ten when his mother died in the same epidemic. Maxwell takes his title from Yeats’ “Coole Park, 1929” and uses six lines from the third stanza as his novel’s epigraph:   

 

“They came like swallows and like swallows went,

And yet a woman’s powerful character

Could keep a Swallow to its first intent;

And half a dozen in formation there,

That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,

Found certainty upon the dreaming air . . .”