british poetry in the age of modernism

Only the cricket whistling

While the dewdrops fall,

So I know not who came knocking,

At all, at all, at all.

The poem is a collection of tiny noises heard instead of a sound half-
heard. Expecting something or someone and not being satisfied, all one’s
faculties are left straining to hear, so they pick up the perpetual, minute
sounds usually drowned by people’s busy presence. The whole poem is
full of tiny repetitions that mimic the repetition of a door-knock rhythm

• ‘at all, at all, at all’, ‘sure – sure – sure’, ‘tap-tapping’ – or sounds that
  echo one another. ‘I listened...Ilooked to left’, ‘stirring in the still’,
  ‘busy beetle’, ‘whistling while’, ‘dewdrops’ and so on. ‘Whistle’ mimics
  the cricket, and ‘screech-owl’ is a double onomatopoeia. This doubling
  of sense and sound is not so much poetic reinforcement of a prior
  message as making the word-choice motivated by the same anxiety that
  drives the poem, compelled to repeat ‘sure-sure-sure’ by the hope or fear
  of the unheard knock, and the heart-in-mouth attention to the sounds of
  the forest, and in doing so, it only makes the absence of the actual sound
  more palpable. This scenario of an engrossing absence is one to which de
  la Mare’s poems return obsessively. Watching someone absorbed or
  asleep (‘Old Susan’, ‘Miss Loo’, ‘The Tailor’, ‘Martha’, ‘The Sleeper’,
  ‘All That’s Past’), pondering the perpetually absent dead (‘Never More,
  Sailor’, ‘When the Rose is Faded’, ‘The Stranger’, ‘Where?’), or the
  stillness of an empty house (‘Alone’, ‘The Dark Chateau’, ‘The Listen-
  ers’, ‘Time Passes’), the poems’ speakers, listeners or dreamers are
  confronted by an absence that is not merely a fact, but seems to await
  and precede them, so that they are thrown into the situation of ‘Silence’
  itself:

Unmoved it broods, this all-encompassing hush

Of one who stooping near,

No smallest stir will make

Our fear to wake;

But yet intent

Upon some mystery bent

Hearkens the lightest word we say, or hear.

The verse-form allows silence to press in upon its shortened middle
lines, and the final, deliberate comma lets it seep in so that readers can
hear that what they have been reading about is suddenly present, listening
to them – and has been since the poem was begun. Unlike simply not

120 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism