WALTER DE LA MARE
THERE will be few readers who will not remember, from their childhood, several poems by Walter de la Mare. Even if poetry was not to have any effect or importance in their later life, a special place for the words of de la Mare exists to this day and have echoed over the decades. Never was this more true than of his poem The Listeners. Nowadays this poem would doubtless be labelled “spooky” and what could be more apt for children who remain endlessly fascinated by ghosts, ghouls and things that go bump in the night? The phenomenal success of JK Rowling’s fantasy novels chronicling the life of a young wizard, Harry Potter, illustrates how such stories show no sign of losing their grip on the reader.
As a poem, The Listeners exudes a timeless sense not only of mystery but also the mysterious. Is it relating an actual event? Is it describing a real person? Is the narrator an onlooker or a participant? Is the house a real house? Who ARE the listeners? The poem provides no satisfactory answer to any of these questions; nor to many more which are raised each time one reads it. Whether or not you are a child, it is surely this which provides the poem with unending fascination.
De la Mare was born on April 25, 1873 at Charlton in North East Kent on the fringe of the London Borough of Greenwich. He came from a family of French Huguenot silk merchants and was educated at St Paul’s Cathedral school. His father was an official in the Bank of England and Walter had a conventional Victorian upbringing with his two brothers and four sisters (one of whom died in infancy). De La Mare disliked the name Walter and preferred to be known as Jack by his family and friends. At the age of 17 he began his working life in the statistics department of the London office of Standard Oil and stayed there for 18 years. Number-crunching was far removed from poetry.
In 1892 he joined a local amateur dramatic society and it was here that he met and fell in love with his future wife, 10 years his senior, Elfrida Ingpen. They went on to have four children, two boys and two girls, and lived in the London suburb of Beckenham.
De la Mare’s first book of poems, Songs of Childhood was written here. The family later moved to Montpelier Row, Twickenham, in the same street where, by coincidence, the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson had lived a century earlier.
He was also a prolific writer of short stories especially about the supernatural and continued to publish throughout the 1920s and into the 1940s. Despite his unblemished and successful career as a writer, his poem The Listeners retains a sense of unease which is never wholly dispelled or put to rest,
His wife died in 1943 and de la Ware, after suffering a heart attack, died aged 83 in 1956. His ashes are buried in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral.