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Biography of Walter de la Mare, 1873-1956

"Between Waking and Dreaming": Biographical Sketch by Anne White

"You must have a silver penny to get into Fairyland." (Preface to Silver Pennies)

"And when--after a hot breathless night during which she had lain between waking and dreaming while the lightning flared at her window, and the thunder raved over the sea--when, next morning, she came down very early to find that the hungry mice had stolen more than half of the handful of oatmeal she had left in the cupboard and that her little crock of milk had turned sour, her heart all but failed her. She sat down on the doorstep and she began to cry." ("A Penny a Day")

I read this story at about the age of eight, and it was my first meeting with Walter de la Mare, along with the poem "Some One." It's a fairy tale about a poor but generous girl and a dwarf named Moleskins who offers to help her in exchange for a penny a day . . . but he may not be entirely trustworthy (is he the one stealing back her pennies?). Visits to fairy grottoes are also involved. I found it a very enjoyable story, although I didn't quite understand it all. I thought it was sort of funny and sad and strange all at the same time.

Who was this writer who tried, like Moleskins, to lure young readers into his own fairy grotto? His father was a banker, and his mother was said to be related to the poet Robert Browning. He was born in the county of Kent, but had his schooling at St. Paul's Cathedral Choir School in London.

His own day job, perhaps appropriately considering his fixation on pennies, was working in the accounting department of a London oil company. He published his first short story in 1895, when he was twenty-two years old; but it was not until he was in his thirties that he received what we would now call an artist's grant, a yearly allowance from the government which allowed him to work only at writing. He experimented with stories, for both adults and children, that might be called "eerie" and "supernatural," but they were never as horrific as those of Edgar Allan Poe; they tended to be more romantic and dreamlike, involving the world of the imagination, and secret, hidden places (such as Moleskins' fairy grotto). One of his most famous poems, "The Listeners," combines all of these elements:

'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor . . .
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.

Walter de la Mare married and had four children, one of whom became a publisher and published his father's books.

He received various types of official recognition for his poems and stories, such as the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1948 and the Order of Merit in 1953. He died in 1958 and is buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. The English writer Thomas Hardy admired his poetry so much that, a few days before he died (in 1928), Hardy asked his wife to read him "The Listeners," and afterwards said, "That is possibly the finest poem of the century."

Words may create rare images
Within their narrow bound;
'Twas speechless childhood brought me these,
As music may, in sound. ("The Burning-glass")