for the listener can never be absorbed in its strangeness and simultan-
eously view it from a mental distance.
At the end of his essay, Freud dismisses the uncanny effect of solitude,
dark and silence as childhood anxieties, which he explains elsewhere are
coded fears for losing a parent.^42 But if, as his essay has shown, the
experience of the uncanny is not simply an absence which leaves the loser
bereft and alone, but a suspicion that one has already been enveloped and
absorbed by it, then the uncanny effects of silence and solitude would be
inseparable from their very intimacy. The difference between a normal
experience of absence and an uncanny one perhaps emerges more clearly
in Leavis’s misunderstanding of what he called de la Mare’s poetic ‘spell’,
‘legerdemain’, ‘trick’ and ‘illusion’ inNew Bearings in English Poetry,
which argues that while de la Mare recognises the human plight of the
universe’s silent ‘indifference to human desires’, his poetry describes the
encounter with a relish that tempers and sweetens it, insidiously soothing
us into the experience of nothing. This diagnosis enables Leavis to put de
la Mare away with the other Georgians as a poetry that refuses to face up
to modern ‘reality’, and by way of contrast he cites Hardy’s ‘The Voice’,
which really does evoke ‘the emptiness of utter loss’.^43 Granted, loss is a
staple of Hardy’s work; lost love, the non-appearance of God, the cart that
doesn’t come to take Jude away all manifest the disappointing absence of
an expected presence, but Hardy’s work is not in the least uncanny, for all
its ghosts and spectres. De la Mare, on the other hand, is more interested
in the presence of an absence, the tentativeexperience of nothing, or
silence itself. Hardy or Leavis’s loss would create a lonely hero, whereas
de la Mare is more interested in the absorbing silence than any formation
of character. His work is, in a way, the opposite of Leavis’s ‘indifference’;
its uncanniness depends on the suspicion that the indifference of
nothingness and absence is actually a reflection of our own insensitivity.
One such intimation occurs in an early, unpublished story called ‘The
Master’, in which a young aesthete is invited to view a gallery of paintings.
One of them, entitledNothing, attracts his attention, though it is nothing
but an abstract square of vivid blue. Yet when he comes close to it, he
realises that this blue is made up of thousands of eyes. Nothing is
watching him; and the uncanny alternation between both senses of this
sentence – is it? does it? – is the emotional core of poems such as ‘The
Sleeper’, where Ann feels her mother’s gaze even though she sees her
asleep, or with the donkey ‘Nicholas Nye’ who by day seems to communi-
cate ‘something much better than words’, but who at night is left immo-
bile and unresponsive, ‘still as a post’. ‘All But Blind’ reasons that since
Walter de la Mare’s ideal reader 125