Walter De La Mare "Peace" Poem Animation

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poetryanimations
February 07, 2009

Heres a virtual movie of the celebrated British poet and author Walter De La Mare (1873-1956)Reading his gentle contemplative poem "Peace" Walter de la Mare was born in Kent in 1873 and educated ...

Heres a virtual movie of the celebrated British poet and author Walter De La Mare (1873-1956)Reading his gentle contemplative poem "Peace"

Walter de la Mare was born in Kent in 1873 and educated at St Pauls Cathedral Choir School. At the age of sixteen he began work in the Anglo-American oil company, where he remained for twenty years. In 1899 he married Elfie Ingpen, a woman some years his senior.

Writing under the pseudonym Walter Ramal he published Songs of Childhood (1902), a volume that reveals his particular talent as a childrens writer. This he followed with Peacock Pie (1913) which remains to this day a well-known collection for children. Songs of Childhood and Peacock Pie emphasise the darker side of childhood, with recurrent strains of sadness, loss and cruelty.

In his early poetry for adults, The Listeners (1912) and Motley (1918), de la Mare established the themes that typified his work in ensuing years: dreams, memory, vacancy, transience. There is a recurrent sense of ghostly presence, with strong tones of faerie and folklore. Few of his poems refer directly to events, people and places, and it is de la Mares ostensible divorce from social actuality that has probably led to his lengthy neglect. In his own time, however, this fey quality was viewed more positively, with early critics such as Middleton Murry and Forrest Reid valuing de la Mare for maintaining a hint of the magical in the midst of modernity. At the same time he was greatly admired for his virtuosity in traditional verse forms. His fluent but conventional prosody leads to a lyrical, song-like pitch that is deeply suited to his unashamedly romantic content.

A friend of non-Modernistic English poets such as Newbolt, Edward Thomas, Wilfrid Gibson and Rupert Brooke, and contributor to Edward Marshs Georgian Poetry collections, de la Mares reputation is popular rather than academic. Several of his poems The Listeners, Arabia and The Mocking Fairy are frequently anthologised.

Kind Regards

Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2009

PEACE
Night is o'er England, and the winds are still;
Jasmine and honeysuckle steep the air;
Softly the stars that are all Europe's fill
Her heaven-wide dark with radiancy fair;
That shadowed moon now waxing in the west
Stirs not a rumour in her tranquil seas;
Mysterious sleep has lulled her heart to rest,
Deep even as theirs beneath her churchyard trees.

Secure, serene; dumb now the night-hawk's threat;
The guns' low thunder drumming o'er the tide;
The anguish pulsing in her stricken side....
All is at peace....But, never, heart, forget:
For this her younges, best, and bravest died,
These bright dews once were mixed with bloody sweat.

(from Memory and Other Poems (1938)

Category: Music

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poem animation de la mare henry newbolt rupert brooke ts eliot baudelaire lewis carrol rossetti poet poetry

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Walter De La Mare "Peace" Poem Animation

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