Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was a prolific poet, whose well-crafted, traditional-sounding verses are never exactly what they seem. They resist the Modern: the roots of de la Mare’s faith-bound metaphysics are in Donne and Vaughan, while the voice-print of his age – of everyone from Pound to MacNeice – is missing. “The Winnowing Dream”, a late poem published in the TLS in 1950 (though uncollected), is a melancholy little tale of moral revelation, with a seraph and a threshing fan, that leans heavily on Matthew 3:12. It is a little like Wordsworth, a little like Rossetti – but too sadly aware of its own retrospection, in the wake of the Second World War, to have much in common with them. A man dreams of an angel sifting the thoughts of man. The angel wearies of his task, and the dreamer, when he takes a closer look at the “saving grace”, finds nothing on the threshing floor “of much account”. A chill wind of devastation blows through the six quatrains; they are the work of a skilful writer of ghost stories, in which the keynote, as here, is never an explicit monstrosity but always the quiet strangeness of loneliness and loss.

The Winnowing Dream

I saw a Seraph, brighter than the East,
Who held a rushing fan,
Wherewith, from best to worst from first to least,
He fanned the thoughts of Man.

Like simple birds that tumble in the air,
Thin ashes in the sky,
This scattered draff streamed up, unresting there,
Blown through tempestuously.

Only upon the floor a little grain
Of Truth lay, strange to see;
The which that Seraph gathered up for gain,
Man’s saving grace to be.

He turned away, mighty in weariness:
And I in doubt drew near
To scan the little left poor man to bless
‘Gainst his last night of fear.

My heart fell in me, sickened and forlorn;
Scarce aught of me and mine –
A few poor things of love not yet outworn,
Sorrow had made me divine;

Here, an old childish faith in rueful state,
There, lost simplicity;
Nothing of much account, rare, subtle, great,
Nor valued even by me.

WALTER DE LA MARE (1950)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen" by Les Murray, click here.

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