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Victoria Neumark on Walter de la Mare, Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages

Written on the Heart

My mother used to read to us on the battered old couch. As the light faded, we would snuggle up and read along with her pointing finger. It was magic; it was spells; it was home. Her glasses slightly askew on her thin, eager face, ‘Come hither,’ she would urge. Come Hither was the title of the orange-covered anthology from which she read. Sometimes she might break off to impress on us: ‘A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master-spirit. Milton.’ We always got quotations in that form. ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day. Shakespeare,’ she would pronounce, crossly plugging in the Hoover. Or ‘If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try again. Proverb’ – tartly, when we complained about homework.

This habit of quotation had been passed down from her own father, a notably grumpy old man who, after having had three horses shot under him at the Battle of Passchendaele, went to Cambridge to study English literature, worked as a teacher in the East End and knew a lot of poetry.

Come Hither was one of many poetry books with which my father courted my mother. Whisper poetry to her, take her to the opera and dazzle her with dark Charles-Boyer-style good looks – and her romantic heart, already primed by a childhood soaked in poetry by Grandpa, was won for life. Our copy of the anthology is inscribed ‘Come hither! From Ernst’ – my father’s name.

So it was that I encountered poetry through this selection scooped and skimmed from the treasury (as he would put it) of English verse by Walter de la Mare in 1923. Until I went to secondary school, I was scarcely aware the poems existed outside those orange covers, so that I was surprised to encounter the same pieces in the Oxford Book of English Verse and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), though celebrated in his day for his whimsical, outré imagination and tremendous facility

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My mother used to read to us on the battered old couch. As the light faded, we would snuggle up and read along with her pointing finger. It was magic; it was spells; it was home. Her glasses slightly askew on her thin, eager face, ‘Come hither,’ she would urge. Come Hither was the title of the orange-covered anthology from which she read. Sometimes she might break off to impress on us: ‘A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master-spirit. Milton.’ We always got quotations in that form. ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day. Shakespeare,’ she would pronounce, crossly plugging in the Hoover. Or ‘If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try again. Proverb’ – tartly, when we complained about homework.

This habit of quotation had been passed down from her own father, a notably grumpy old man who, after having had three horses shot under him at the Battle of Passchendaele, went to Cambridge to study English literature, worked as a teacher in the East End and knew a lot of poetry. Come Hither was one of many poetry books with which my father courted my mother. Whisper poetry to her, take her to the opera and dazzle her with dark Charles-Boyer-style good looks – and her romantic heart, already primed by a childhood soaked in poetry by Grandpa, was won for life. Our copy of the anthology is inscribed ‘Come hither! From Ernst’ – my father’s name. So it was that I encountered poetry through this selection scooped and skimmed from the treasury (as he would put it) of English verse by Walter de la Mare in 1923. Until I went to secondary school, I was scarcely aware the poems existed outside those orange covers, so that I was surprised to encounter the same pieces in the Oxford Book of English Verse and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), though celebrated in his day for his whimsical, outré imagination and tremendous facility with verse, may be known to modern readers chiefly as the author of ‘The Listeners’ – ‘“Is there anybody there,” said the Traveller . . .’ – guaranteed to send a shiver down the most stolid spine. He also wrote short stories for children, such as the wonderfully grotesque ‘The Lord Fish’ (1933), haunting novels like The Return (1910) and Memoirs of a Midget (1921), as well as many collections of verse such as Peacock Pie (1913). De la Mare tended to depict his life as one of childlike wonderment and unworldly charm, so I was slightly surprised to discover that he grew up in south London, went to St Paul’s and worked for the Anglo-American (Standard) Oil Company in London as a clerk in the department of statistics between 1890 and 1908, before being able to concentrate on writing, thanks to a government pension. He won many awards for fiction and poetry, had four children, and was famous for giving lively parties with lots of games. Children were always welcome. Come Hither is framed within the story of a child who finds a magical cottage with a strange châtelaine, Miss Taroon, and an even stranger lodger, the now absent Mr Nahum. Nahum’s manuscripts, de la Mare hints, may – but this is left misty – form the contents of the book. Divided into sections with such headings as ‘Morning and May’, ‘Lily Bright and Shine-a’ and ‘Evening and Dream’, the anthology invests its contents with shivers of the uncanny, accentuated by the singular notes which de la Mare appends under the heading of ‘About and Roundabout’. These take up 300 pages of an 864-page book and are an astounding gallimaufry of scholarship, keen observation of nature and personal anecdotes. He holds forth on the botany of snowdrops, the social history of Eton College, contemporary accounts of the christening of Queen Elizabeth I, the derivation of singing-games and rhyme schemes, the meaning of church bells: reading these notes is like reeling down the Gothic corridors of a mind jam-packed with fact and fancy. I have the book before me as I write. It includes poems ranging from early ballads to the Georgian poets, with whom de la Mare mingled. It opens naturally now at Mum’s favourites. Here is Walter Savage Landor’s ‘Rose Aylmer’: ‘Ah what avails the sceptred race’, with its rollicking rhythms pressed into the service of romance. Here is Kipling’s ‘The Way through the Woods’, with its spine tingling opening, mourning the loss of Arcadia:
They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once a road through the woods . . .
And here is Mary Coleridge’s ‘Unwelcome’, its first stanza invoking mystery and something dangerous just beyond our ken –
We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise, And the door stood open at our feast, When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes, And a man with his back to the East.
De la Mare’s selection veers even further towards the fey, the uncanny and sometimes the frankly twee. At our family concerts, I used to recite the gloriously kitsch ‘Overheard on a Saltmarsh’ by Harold Monro, which details a dialogue between a nymph and a goblin and begins: ‘Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?’ Mum would launch into ‘I remember, I remember, the house where I was born’ by Thomas Hood, a poem whose highly idealized version of childhood depends for its effect on repetition and nostalgia. We did like the sad ones. My sister and I used to weep at James Stephens’s ‘The Snare’: ‘I hear a sudden cry of pain! There is a rabbit in a snare’ – you can guess how that ends. Hankies would come out for Keats’s elegant elegy for a pet: ‘I had a dove and the sweet dove died’. Why did the dove have to die? ‘Of grieving’, Keats tells us: for its freedom. You should never put wild things in cages, Mum said. I am not quite sure how that squared with our regular family visits to the zoo, which would always feature the Big Cats and a bit of ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, In the forest of the night’. Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’ and ‘Songs of Experience’ were nominally written for children, and their strong quatrains, stressed rhymes and vivid images enthralled us. We learned from Mum to be punctilious in attributing authorship. In our house, the words ‘by William Blake’ were chanted after the title ‘Tyger, Tyger’ with equal reverence. I think Blake would have been pleased. He had little enough recognition in his lifetime and was fond of children, despite having none of his own. Biographical details were all part and parcel of reading from Come Hither. ‘Poor Shelley,’ Mum would say, ‘tormented at school for being sensitive, eloped with the woman who wrote Frankenstein, drowned with a volume of Keats in his pocket’. Then there was Keats himself dying young of TB; Byron, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, swimming the Hellespont (whatever that was) and dying ‘not on the battlefield as he would have wished but at Missolonghi of a mosquito bite’; Yeats taking up with a younger woman once his married lover had rejected him for good. They seemed just as real as Grandpa coughing away in his room upstairs and a deal more attractive. Mum read, the shadows lengthened in our sitting-room and dinner was late again. But the shadows were full of enchantment: Shakespeare’s ‘Tell me where is Fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head’, Milton’s
Sabrina fair, Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair . . .
In her later years, Mum had to go into hospital. I took Come Hither in to her, along with her thrillers. I don’t think she opened it. Its magic evaporated in the smell of antiseptic, but she liked to have the anthology there. I thought it was because of the poems, but more likely it was because of the inscription. Mum partly fell in love with my father because she loved poetry, but in the end she loved poetry because she loved him. And that was also what we shared with her on the couch during those long, dreamy evenings.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 43 © Victoria Neumark 2014


About the contributor

Victoria Neumark has just become a grandmother. She is looking forward to reading some of these poems to little Erin Iris, to link her to her great-grandmother and learn the magic of poetry.

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