2.18 Walter de la Mare, the Dying Fish, and the Creepy Listeners

Incredibly fortunate writer of unsettling poetry and prose, for children and adults

I thought that it would be good to have a break from writing about the Bloomsbury group, after discussing them at length last week. I had come across them whilst writing articles about Rupert Brooke and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and needed to know more, but having found out more I felt that I had reached the point when I could say enough is enough. I decided to leave them be, thinking that it might be nice to write something about Walter de la Mare and turn to another poet that I knew little about. In fact all that I really knew about Walter was that he was responsible for writing that lovely if slightly creepy poem, The Listeners, and to be honest I wasn’t even sure when he wrote it. De la Mare seems such an old fashioned name to me. Reminiscent of William de la Pole who was a twelfth century Lord Mayor of Hull. I knew that de la Mare was more modern than that, but I wasn’t really sure how much more modern, so I began to read around and discovered to my amazement that he had been a friend of both Rupert Brooke and Lady Ottoline Morell, the one who hosted social functions that the Bloomsburies regularly attended, and who had enjoyed love affairs with, amongst others, Bertrand Russell, Augustus John and Virginia Woolf.

Were there any active poets in the early decades of the twentieth century who were not associated in some way with that crowd? Well, Thomas Hardy was a couple of decades too old for such nonsense. A E Housman was nearer to their age, but he was an Oxford Man, whereas the Bloomsburies were more associated with Cambridge. In addition to wielding his oars in the wrong boat, Housman preferred solitarily lusting over lads to Bloomsbury style group activities. He wouldn’t have got an invite from Lady Ottoline but if he had, you would probably have always found him in the kitchen at her parties.

Walter de la Mare (or Jack, as he preferred to be called by his friends) was from a different background to the Bloomsbury set. Although from a relatively wealthy background, he didn’t go to university, and actually worked for 18 years in an office job in London. He had always wanted to be a writer and had some strokes of good fortune which allowed him to give up his day job and concentrate on literature as a career. Firstly, in 1908 he was granted a £200 lump sum by the then Prime Minister, Asquith, at the suggestion of the influential poet Sir Henry Newbolt.

This gave him the freedom to follow his poetic muse which, like the muse of his friend Rupert Brooke led him to create a memorable fish based piece of poetry. Alas, Alack was published in a 1912 collection called Peacock Pie. Rather surprisingly it was subsequently set to music, much as the works of Meredith and Housman were, by a number of different composers¹

Alas, Alack

Ann, Ann! 
 Come! quick as you can!
There's a fish that talks
 In the frying pan!
Out of the fat,
  As clear as glass,
He put up his mouth
  And moaned "Alas!"
Oh, most mournful,
  "Alas, alack!"
Then turned to his sizzling
  And sank him back.

You can almost hear the indignant voices - “He got a government grant – to write stuff like that, when us ordinary folk are scrimping and saving to make ends meet, with a world war just around the corner!”

To add fuel to such outrage, in 1915, the lump sum granted became a pension of £100 a year for life. Then, in the same year, a second stroke of luck. Walter was named in Rupert Brooke’s will as one of three people who would benefit from the sales of his writings. As Brooke grew in popularity, so did this income and by the 1920s it was worth £2,000 a year.

What modern poets would give to be freed of the burden of the toad of work by such good fortune? I am consumed with envy of him at a distance of more than a century.

But I have to admire the fabulous morbidness of his tale of the fish. It brings Solomon Grundy to mind in its merciless contemplation of death delivered in the form of a child’s rhyme.

Strange, uneasy ideas seem to be at the heart of much of de la Mare’s writing. In addition to his poetry, he was an accomplished writer of ghost stories or psychological horror fiction, as the nerds over on Wikipedia have it.

Another piece from Peacock Pie, considers the fate of poor Jim Jay. It could almost be an episode of the Twilight Zone

Poor Jim Jay

Do diddle di do,
Poor Jim Jay
Got stuck fast
In Yesterday.

Squinting he was,
On Cross-legs bent,
Never heeding
The wind was spent.

Round veered the weathercock,
The sun drew in –
And stuck was Jim
Like a rusty pin...

We pulled and we pulled
From seven till twelve,
Jim, too frightened
To help himself.

But all in vain.
The clock struck one,
And there was Jim
A little bit gone.

At half-past five
You scarce could see
A glimpse of his flapping
Handkerchee.

And when came noon,
And we climbed sky-high,
Jim was a speck
Slip - slipping by.

Come to-morrow,
The neighbours say,
He'll be past crying for;
Poor Jim Jay.

There is something of the Roald Dahl about de la Mare. The poetry, the childish delight in the surreal and the macabre, the humour. Perhaps, like Dahl, his reputation as one who created work for children somewhat overshadowed his more adult pieces. It always surprises me that his most famous poem The Listeners, is often presented as a children’s poem, when it seems to me to be quite adult in its theme and the questions that it brings to mind. Like the two pieces above it was first published in 1912, but in a different collection, called The Listeners and Other Poems. I doubt that de la Mare would have minded if people thought of it as a children’s poem. He had some special theories about the minds of children and the minds of boys (and presumably girls too) as they grow up. He considered them to be full of wonder and imagination and quoted Wordsworth to make his point.

From Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth

Heaven Lies about us in our infancy
Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy
But he beholds the light and whence it flows
He sees it in his joy…
… At length the man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day. 

Poets, thought Walter, keep something of their childlike wonder, and boylike imagination and enable their readers to see the world through those perspectives. He spoke of the poetry of Rupert Brooke as sharing his secrets with the world as if a boy had turned out the contents of his astonishing pockets just before going to bed.

What did Walter pull out of his pockets in the Listeners? It asks more questions than it answers. Are the listeners ghosts, or God and his angels, or what? And what is the promise that the Traveller has made? I suppose that it is up to us to decide for ourselves.

The Listeners

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,   
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses   
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,   
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;   
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;   
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,   
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners   
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight   
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,   
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken   
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,   
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,   
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even   
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,   
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,   
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house   
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,   
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,   
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

1. Alas, Alack, musical setting by Herbert Howells