noticing a noise, silence is absorbing; it is an absence which is actively
heard, so to speak, as if one were on the receiving end of nothing. De la
Mare’s poems about empty houses or silent sleepers not only evoke the
atmosphere of their situations, but through their soundscapes attune the
reader’s attention to hear the same silence already present around them,
surrounding them. This kind of silence is wholly dependent, though, on
the poems’ regular form, because its pattern encourages expectations of a
sound, which then allows that sound’s actual absence to be heard too,
tense and alive: silence cannot exist within prose as prose, because it has
no formal markers to space the words in time, and becomes correspond-
ingly more elusive the more free verse resists pattern and its expectations
and obligations. Organic, fluid rhythms put pauses or breaks between
lines and stanzas, but the difference of the formal frame from its experi-
enced content in de la Mare’s patterns is what allows silence to be felt
withinthe line itself. In ‘Music Unheard’, for example, silence is a kind of
Siren call towards death, and the play of expectations in the lines are
witness to the struggle to stop it seeping in:
Sweet sounds, begone –
Whose music on my ear
Stirs foolish discontent
Of lingering here;
When, if I crossed
The crystal verge of death,
Him I should see
Who these sounds murmureth.Sweet sounds, begone –
Ask not my heart to break
Its bond of bravery for
Sweet quiet’s sake;
Lure not my feet
To leave the path they must
Tread on, unfaltering,
Till I sleep in dust.Sweet sounds, begone!
Though silence brings apace
Deadly disquiet
Of this homeless place;
And all I love
In beauty cries to me,
‘We but vain shadows
And reflections be.’Walter de la Mare’s ideal reader 121