british poetry in the age of modernism

The poem moves between two beats and three per line, but the
uncertainty of de la Mare’s actual stress-patterns means that the silence
the poem is trying to resist can be heard creeping into the short lines, or
being conspicuously overridden in the long ones, as in the effort of ‘mu ́st /
Tre ́ad o ́n’, or the uncomfortable rapidity of ‘De ́adly disqu ́iet’. This
alternation comes together in the refrain itself, ‘Sweet sounds, begone’,
which would have three natural stresses in prose, but which the poem
either stretches over three beats (with too few off-beats) or compresses
into an over-brisk two, so that the line seems to hurry and linger at once,
wrestling with temptation. The tension between both possibilities,
though, is the space where the silence is making itself felt, just as the final
line closes with a faintly missing stress so that the unheard insinuates itself
into the very texture of the verse. It is theintimacyof the silence that is
threatening; just as de la Mare idealises child-like fascination because it
leaves the listener with no alternative, detached sense of self to step back
to, so poems such as ‘Silence’ or ‘Music Unheard’ open the space of this
silence within the ‘rhythmised’ consciousness of anyone reading them.^34
By dissolving the borders between silence and sound, self and its outside,
de la Mare’s verse brings its reader towards an experience of what Freud
classically defined as the uncanny.

the uncanny

Freud’s famous 1919 analysis of this phenomenon seems at first a gift-

wrapped explanation for de la Mare’s unusual combination of writing

about ghosts, death and silence and writing about young children. For the

former, the uncanny feelings of the adult have their roots in familiar

infantile complexes – primitive beliefs in doubles, narcissism, or the

compulsion to repeat.^35 Hence the uncanny is ‘nothing new or alien,

but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind, and has

become alienated from it only through the processes of repression’, and its

effects are particularly to be felt in literature. Yet although Freud goes into

great detail about some aspects of uncanniness, his overall approach is not

very sympathetic to de la Mare’s, since its aim is to demystify the feeling

by finding rational and scientific explanation for it, whereas the latter

wants delicately to evoke its mystery. Still, having introduced the topic

with his usual disclaimers about being no specialist in aesthetics, Freud

then admits that his own sensibilities may not be the right ones for this

problem:

122 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism