Today’s Poem: Mistletoe
Walter de la Mare: not that kind of creep
Mistletoe
by Walter de la Mare
Sitting under the mistletoe (Pale-green, fairy mistletoe), One last candle burning low, All the sleepy dancers gone, Just one candle burning on, Shadows lurking everywhere: Some one came, and kissed me there. Tired I was; my head would go Nodding under the mistletoe (Pale-green, fairy mistletoe), No footsteps came, no voice, but only, Just as I sat there, sleepy, lonely, Stooped in the still and shadowy air Lips unseen — and kissed me there. ═══════════════════════
Leave it to Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) to write a creepy poem about being kissed under the mistletoe — but not by a creep. At least, not by that kind of creep. “Mistletoe,” with its floating, disembodied, “unseen lips,” may win the prize for “Least Physical Kissing Poem Ever Published,” or possibly “Most Paranormal Holiday Verse.”
Either way, it is a beguiling poem. Poems Ancient and Modern readers, already familiar with de la Mare’s “The Birthnight,” will recognize the elements that make his poems as spellbinding as they are: the repetitive, even claustrophobic rhymes, and the short lines that bring those rhymes around in rapid sequence. In both septets of this largely trochaic tetrameter poem, “mistletoe” repeats and rhymes with itself, as if the word alone were an incantation.
And then there’s that uncanny sense of a disembodied presence, which recurs as a motif in de la Mare’s poems. Here, it is as if the strange “Some One” who “came knocking at my wee, small door” had been invited to the world’s dreamiest, drowsiest Christmas party and, while there, felt phantasmically amorous. In the party’s aftermath, everyone else departed, the candles burned down, this someone goes wafting about, voiceless and bodiless, in search of a forgotten person, half-asleep in the shadows, on whom to bestow the world’s most spectral kiss.
Thank you for including a poet who is generally under-appreciated. I value him
for his music. His Memoirs of a Midget makes for strange and captivating reading.
Oh, I love this: it’s so efficient. While short and repetitive, it keeps the reader on their toes.
I love the built up delay to the last line in the first stanza, and the “… burning low…burning on” of the candle.
And the switching up of the meter in line 4 of the next stanza, combined with the immediacy of “no voice”.
He knows how to get under your skin!