Walter de la Mare, nonsense, and animals

Abstract

‘It’s odd how little horses feel’, runs a line in Walter de la Mare’s Stuff and Nonsense (1927). It’s a stark line for a writer who knew the enchanting possibilities and affective power of animals, from the night-swans that row women to fairyland, or the unsettling ‘crool’ of a dove, to the horse that summons Sophia’s ‘inward melody’. In ‘A Dream’ (1938), a drowsy reading of The Tyro’s Outline of Biology prompts a Kabla Kahn vision of Eden with leopards, gazelles, birds and serpents ‘far, far from gene, as far from chromosome’. Yet if his animals, liked Edward Lear’s, could be the best transport to enchantment and intuitive knowledge, de la Mare is equally fascinated by their role in commerce, from the butcher’s ‘perambulating tombs of beef’ to the ‘glare, heat, bars, crowd and stink’ of the zoo. The animal encounter finds de la Mare’s work both at its most whimsical and its most political. It also promised danger: like T.S. Eliot, de la Mare knew there were ‘more ways of going wrong than going right’ with animal poetry. This chapter explores how de la Mare’s animals shaped his poetic vernacular, and his conception of the poet’s role. It will argue that the language of deficiency and differentiation often used in reference to his animals – the ‘cold voiceless fish’, or the ‘small continuous silence’ after swallows fly – framed his understanding of his own work, and proved a means of separating his poetry from ‘scribbling for scribbling’s sake’ or ‘frantic incredible nonsense’, to quote his protagonist in The Return (1910). Nietzsche defines humans as a ‘promising animal’: Derrida glosses his phrase as ‘an animal that is permitted to make promises’. This chapter explores how the promise of the animal encounter in de la Mare’s poetry created his distinctive voice.

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