Faint Music -- Walter de la Mare

(Poem #1024) Faint Music The meteor's arc of quiet; a voiceless rain; The mist's mute communing with a stagnant moat; The sigh of a flower that has neglected lain; That bell's unuttered note; A hidden self rebels, its slumber broken; Love secret as crystal forms within the womb; The heart may as faithfully beat, the vow unspoken; All sounds to silence come. -- Walter de la Mare

All good poetry is magical in some way, but de la Mare's poems have a
_specific_ kind of magic, instantly recognizable, yet near impossible to
paraphrase or even parody. Certainly the precise blend of delicate phrasing
and carefully-chosen subject material that characterizes his art may strike
one as repetitive [1], but as long as it works (and work it does, most of
the time), who am I to cavil?

thomas.

[1] I'm not sure I could read an entire volume of de la Mare's poetry
uninterrupted, but I do enjoy dipping into his work every now and then.

[Minstrels Links]

Walter de la Mare:
Poem #2, The Listeners
Poem #272, Napoleon
Poem #483, Brueghel's Winter
Poem #725, Silver
Poem #1024, Faint Music

Silver -- Walter de la Mare

Guest poem sent in by sukrit

(Poem #725) Silver Slowly, silently, now the moon Walks the night in her silver shoon; This way, and that, she peers, and sees Silver fruit upon silver trees; One by one the casements catch Her beams beneath the silvery thatch; Couched in his kennel, like a log, With paws of silver sleeps the dog; From their shadowy cote the white breast peep Of doves in silver-feathered sleep; A harvest mouse goes scampering by, With silver claws and a silver eye; And moveless fish in the water gleam, By silver reeds in a silver stream. -- Walter de la Mare

        Silver is the creation of the moon. The sunlights falls on the
moon, it reflects it back to earth and the world becomes a poem.

        Devoid of any sort of quasi-intellectualism we often try to put
on, the poem  radiates a lovely naturalness. Try this - close your eyes
and be inside the frame of this poem. Its a pleasure beyond words.

        This poem has something that needs to be felt rather than
just read or admired (for Walter's dexterity with words) i quote from
"Three Pillars of Zen", "Every koan is a unique expression of the living,
indivisible Buddha-nature, which cannot be grasped by the  bifurcating
intellect...To people who cherish the letter above the spirit, koans
appear bewildering (and may i add trite, in our case)...(koans) force
us to open ours mind's eye and see the world and everything in it
undistorted by our concepts and judgments". Maybe its stretching it,
calling this poem a koan, or maybe it isn't?

sukrit

--
        "It's today!" said Piglet.
        "My favorite day," said Pooh.

Brueghel's Winter -- Walter de la Mare

(Poem #483) Brueghel's Winter Jagg'd mountain peaks and skies ice-green Wall in the wild, cold scene below. Churches, farms, bare copse, the sea In freezing quiet of winter show; Where ink-black shapes on fields in flood Curling, skating, and sliding go. To left, a gabled tavern; a blaze; Peasants; a watching child; and lo, Muffled, mute--beneath naked trees In sharp perspective set a-row-- Trudge huntsmen, sinister spears aslant, Dogs snuffling behind them in the snow; And arrowlike, lean, athwart the air Swoops into space a crow. But flame, nor ice, nor piercing rock, Nor silence, as of a frozen sea, Nor that slant inward infinite line Of signboard, bird, and hill, and tree, Give more than subtle hint of him Who squandered here life's mystery. -- Walter de la Mare

Of all the poems on 'Hunters in the Snow', de la Mare's is easily the most
subtle and haunting... it explores the hidden recesses, the dark shadows of
Brueghel's painting with a wonderfully delicate touch. As T. S. Eliot says in
his poem 'to Walter de la Mare' [1]:
        " - the delicate, invisible web you wove -
         The inexplicable mystery of sound."

Even the normally staid Brittanica is enthusiastic about his poetry:
        "[de la Mare had] an unusual power to evoke the ghostly, evanescent moments in
life... incantatory, other-worldly magic... "

"Other-worldly magic" - I couldn't agree more.

thomas.

[1] A very beautiful tribute; I'll run it on the Minstrels some time soon.

[Links]

'The Listeners' is one of the most famous and best-beloved poems ever written;
it was also only the second poem ever to feature on this mailing list. You can
read it at poem #2

'Napoleon' is short and direct, but no less effective for that: poem #272

Napoleon -- Walter de la Mare

(Poem #272) Napoleon 'What is the world, O soldiers? It is I: I, this incessant snow, This northern sky; Soldiers, this solitude Through which we go Is I.' -- Walter de la Mare

De la Mare, like Kipling, suffers from over-anthologization (especially in the
pages of school textbooks - has it ever occurred to you that, given the way
poetry is taught in schools these days, including a classic poem in a student's
curriculum is the surest way of ruining it forever?). Again like Kipling,
though, his work has risen above this handicap and insinuated itself into the
collective unconscious. And deservedly so - there are hardly any readers of
poetry, serious or casual, who haven't been affected by such classics such as
'The Listeners' (one of the very first poems to be run on the Minstrels).

'Napoleon' is straightforward enough; the diction is clear and confident, as
befitting the speaker, but the words are (in the hindsight offered by history)
ironic in the extreme - it was precisely the Russian campaign described in the
poem that led to the Little Corporal's downfall. A typical de la Mare touch, and
nicely done without being the slightest bit exaggerated.

thomas.

[Minstrels Links]

'The Listeners', which you can read at poem #2 was the first de la Mare
to be run on the Minstrels; we've had to wait 270 poems for the second.

A freebie at the same link is T. S. Eliot's wonderful tribute to Walter de la
Mare, which Anustup posted as a comment on the original poem. Eliot confesses
himself spellbound by
    the delicate, invisible web you wove -
    The inexplicable mystery of sound.
and I must say I concur. De la Mare's poems have true magic in them.

For another poetic portrayal of a tyrant, read Ted Hughes' powerful 'Hawk
Roosting', at poem #42

The Listeners -- Walter de la Mare

(Poem #2) 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. -- Walter de la Mare

One of my all time favourite poems; it recently came second in a poll
some British newspaper (I forget which) ran to determine the ten
best-loved poems. Take a guess at the first (mail me and I'll collate
the
answers - it would be interesting to see if junta get it).

The imagery finds a nice echo, incidentally, in Loreena McKennit's
'Mummer's Dance', including what is IMHO one of the most beautifully
evocative lines I've heard in a song:

  Who will go down to those shady groves, and summon the shadows there?

Martin.

PS. The best loved poem: two people guessed 'If', one 'The Road Not Taken',
and Jose got the right one, specifically 'Daffodils'. Personally it would
not even make my top 10 list, but as Jose says, it is indeed a ubiquitous
poem, and most people have studied and enjoyed it at some stage in their
lives.

Martin.