Good-bye

The last of last words spoken is, Good-bye –
The last dismantled flower in the weed-grown hedge,
The last thin rumour of a feeble bell far ringing,
The last blind rat to spurn the mildewed rye.

A hardening darkness glasses the haunted eye,
Shines into nothing the watcher’s burnt-out candle,
Wreathes into scentless nothing the wasting incense,
Faints in the outer silence the hunting-cry.

Love of its muted music breathes no sigh,
Thought in her ivory tower gropes in her spinning,
Toss on in vain the whispering trees of Eden,
Last of all last words spoken is, Good-bye.

Walter de la Mare’s Georgian romanticism often rings hollow in my ears, and has done so since I was first introduced to his poems too late in childhood, since by then, in the final year of primary school, I had my own taste, if not much of an understanding, for the genuine Romantics I met in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. I haven’t since experienced any dramatic wholesale conversion. However, while following the current ascent of De la Mare’s critical star, and dipping into the work with a little reluctance, I come across poems that answer the question “Is there anybody there?” with more than a ghostly but melodramatic hush. This week’s choice is one of them, in which originality and a certain hard edge spear through the lingering vestiges of poets’ mist.

The first line is arresting: a perfect iambic pentameter sealing an aphorism. De la Mare expands its significance by the repetition of “last” in “the last of last words spoken …” The last word might be only the last word in a conversation to be continued. But “last words” strongly suggests words spoken shortly before death. Colloquially, “to have the last word” is to win an argument, and if two people “have words” the phrase implies a quarrel. The plot thickens.

Formal punctuation, a comma before Good-bye, plus a capitalised G, heightens the sense of an “edge”: here, it’s the edge of a real sound made by a voice. And the rhythm ensures that the word doesn’t linger: there’s a curt tone to the stressed “bye” that ends the line. Sad, angry or matter-of-fact, it truly sounds like the last word of a dead conversation.

Analogies with “Good-bye” in the first and third lines of the first stanza evoke a compromised pastoral. “Dismantled” as an epithet for “flower” emphasises the broken symmetry of a wild flower in its natural shedding and seeding. William Wootten in his annotated selection, Reading Walter de la Mare, mentions that an earlier draft of the poem had “dispetalled” instead of “dismantled”. A dactyl puts a skip into the second line (“flower in the”) and, in the third, a surprise hexameter conveys the sound of the “feeble bell far ringing”. Then, something more remarkable occurs, as the last “Good-bye” becomes “the last blind rat to spurn the mildewed rye”. The rat in its disgust and the rye in its decay force us to build a context of grave dissatisfaction between the person who says the good-bye and the unanswering addressee. They have disappointed each other and are themselves unsatisfactory: one, “the last blind rat” desperately lacking insight or foresight; the other, “the mildewed rye”, no source of emotional nutriment. Despite the end-stop, the thought is pursued with a further remarkable image in stanza two, line one. Imagine an eye glazing with unshed tears, expressionless with willed resistance to emotion. But the transitive verb De la Mare chooses, “glasses,” is fiercer than “glazes”. For readers now, “glassing”, means stabbing, cutting by glass.

The stanza goes on with a reversal of conventional word order which somehow avoids sounding mock-archaic. A verb begins each line. “Shines into nothing the watcher’s burnt-out candle” means “The watcher’s burn-out candle shines into nothing.” The idea that the “hardening darkness” would “shine” a burnt-out candle would be a very unlikely flirtation with surrealism.

Why does De la Mare’s anastrophe justify the tonal risk? Perhaps it’s because the opening stress on the verb forms a rhythmic weight that seriously keeps the poem from lapsing into twilight melancholy. The finality of the “Good-bye” is not only made unforgettable by the scheme which demands a sextet of rhymes with “bye”, but by the stress on the monosyllables, “Shines”, “Wreathes”, “Faints” and, in the third stanza, “Toss” (as in “Toss on”) as well as the personified abstract nouns, Love and Thought.

The Love “breathes no sigh” of its own “muted music”, which makes sense in terms of emotional repression. It is significant that the personification takes the neutral pronoun. Thought, though, is a woman, abandoned and hopelessly depressed, like Tennyson’s “Mariana in the moated grange”. De la Mare depicts Thought as unable to think, fogged and circling, despite the superior isolation of the forehead’s “ivory tower”. Conversely, the trees in Eden come alive in their continual tossing and whispering. The two significant trees in the Garden were the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Perhaps they are symbols of the war between a couple. Repeated with a slight variation, the first line takes on the new dimension of “the Fall”.

On first reading the poem, I imagined it referred to a final meeting between De la Mare and his friend Edward Thomas. The poem appears in The Veil and Other Poems, published in 1921, a period when De la Mare elegised his fellow poet, killed in 1917 at the Battle of Arras. But Wootten explains the poem was written earlier, and originally intended for the 1912 collection, The Listeners. Perhaps “Good-bye” became a kind of pre-elegy for Thomas. (How poets re-read their own work over time is a fascinating question, though perhaps one that only the poets themselves can answer.) Whatever the unhappy personal story behind “Good-bye”, if there is a personal story, it is a magnificent little poem that may yet reshape my image of the Tennysonian south London poseur.

For insight into the relationship of De la Mare and Thomas, see Poet to Poet: Edward Thomas’s Letters to Walter de la Mare, edited by Judy Kendall.