Walter de la Mare: poems of mystery, childhood and imagination

In Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”, a traveller arrives at a house, knocks and calls out, but receives no answer from the people—or presences—within. The poem’s unanswered visit distils the mystery that runs through much of his work. Yet de la Mare was not only a poet of haunted thresholds: he wrote novels, short stories and books for children, and his writing ranged from ghostly unease to playful fantasy and reflections on the imagination.

A life alongside the writing

Walter John de la Mare was born in Charlton, Kent, on 25 April 1873. He attended St Paul’s Cathedral School and, from 1890 to 1908, worked in the statistics department of the London office of Standard Oil. His literary life began to take shape alongside that employment. In 1892 he joined the Esperanza Amateur Dramatics Club, where he met Elfrida Ingpen. They married in 1899 and had two sons and two daughters.

De la Mare’s first poetry collection, Songs of Childhood, appeared in 1902. He later left Standard Oil after the writer Sir Henry Newbolt arranged for him to receive a Civil List pension, allowing him to concentrate on writing. His career crossed several forms: he produced poems, novels, short fiction, plays and essays, as well as anthologies that brought together work by other writers.

The family lived in Beckenham and Anerley from 1899 until 1924, then at Hill House in Taplow from 1925 to 1939. From 1940, de la Mare lived in Twickenham. Elfrida had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease that year; she died in 1943. De la Mare remained in Twickenham until his own death on 22 June 1956, aged 83. His ashes were buried in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, where he had once been a choirboy.

Poems that leave room for mystery

The Listeners, published in 1912, is among de la Mare’s best-known poems. Its traveller knocks at a moonlit door and speaks into silence, aware of unseen listeners but unable to reach them. Rather than explain what has happened or who is present, the poem sustains uncertainty. That restraint is central to its effect: the reader is left to inhabit the gap between the traveller’s insistence and the house’s silence.

Another familiar poem, “Silver”, turns a night-time scene into a study of moonlight. A sleeping dog and doves in their cote appear within a landscape washed in silver. The poem’s close attention to familiar things gives its quiet scene an uncanny brightness. These poems show two sides of de la Mare’s imaginative practice: a world may become strange through what it withholds, or through the altered appearance of what is ordinary.

His poetry collections included Poems (1906), The Listeners (1912), Peacock Pie (1913), The Sunken Garden and Other Poems (1917) and The Veil and Other Poems (1921). Peacock Pie belongs to his writing for children, a part of his work that remains closely associated with his reputation. He also edited Come Hither (1923), an anthology made up mostly of poems, with some prose, arranged within a framing story. Its success led to further editions.

Children’s books and supernatural fiction

De la Mare’s writing for children was not confined to verse. His 1910 novel The Three Mulla Mulgars, later published as The Three Royal Monkeys, is a fairy tale and animal fantasy. He also wrote Collected Stories for Children, which won the Carnegie Medal in 1947. It was the first collection to receive the award, which recognised the year’s best children’s book by a British subject.

Alongside these imaginative works, de la Mare wrote supernatural fiction for adults. Stories such as “Seaton’s Aunt”, “The Green Room” and “All Hallows” rely on uncertainty and psychological unease rather than simple explanations of the uncanny. His stories appeared in collections including The Riddle and Other Stories (1923), The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926) and On the Edge (1930). His novel The Return was published in 1910; Memoirs of a Midget followed in 1921.

Memoirs of a Midget won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1921. The Carnegie Medal for Collected Stories for Children recognised another strand of his career: a writer able to work across audiences and forms without limiting himself to poems. De la Mare also explored how imagination develops. He distinguished between what he called childlike and boylike aspects of imagination, setting visionary perception against a more analytical way of seeing. For him, these were not simply categories of good and bad writing; he acknowledged the value of intellectual poetry while making clear his preference for the visionary.

Readers, writers and later works

De la Mare’s writing reached beyond its original publications. C. K. Scott Moncrieff used the final line of de la Mare’s poem “The Ghost” as the English title, The Sweet Cheat Gone, for the sixth volume of his translation of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Richard Adams used several of de la Mare’s poems as epigraphs in Watership Down (1972). Benjamin Britten set some of his verse to music, including a version of the traditional song “Levy-Dew”. These are specific traces of his work in translation, fiction and music, rather than a measure of influence on every later writer.

De la Mare continued to publish across different forms. His later poetry collections included Bells and Grass (1941), Time Passes and Other Poems (1942) and Inward Companion (1950). He also wrote essays and edited anthologies, among them Behold, This Dreamer! (1939), which gathered writing on subjects including sleep, dreams, the unconscious and imagination. His long career is best understood not as a single succession of famous poems, but as a sustained exploration of how people perceive what is hidden, remembered or imagined.

Why Walter de la Mare deserves a place in British Legacy

Walter de la Mare deserves a place in British Legacy for the range and lasting presence of his writing. “The Listeners” and “Silver” offer sharply different entrances into his work: one builds its effect from silence and an unanswered call; the other makes a familiar night scene luminous. Their enduring appeal lies in the precision of those choices, not in a need to explain away the mystery. His poems show how a small scene, carefully observed, can open onto larger questions about perception and the unseen.

His contribution also extends beyond poetry. De la Mare wrote for children, explored supernatural fiction and produced novels, essays and anthologies. The Carnegie Medal awarded to Collected Stories for Children in 1947 records recognition of his children’s writing, while the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Memoirs of a Midget acknowledges his achievement as a novelist. Later writers and musicians carried individual works into new settings: Adams used his poems in Watership Down, and Britten set his verse to music. Together, these examples make a specific British literary legacy: a body of work that moved between forms and audiences, and whose poems and stories continued to be read, adapted and heard after his death.

Sources

Walter de la Mare — Wikipedia, revision 1379634489

Adapted in part from Walter de la Mare by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.