Today’s Poem: The Birthnight

Walter de la Mare and the otherworldly marvel of a newborn child

Jessie Willcox Smith, illustration for George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, 1919 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Birthnight

by Walter de la Mare

Dearest, it was a night
That in its darkness rocked Orion’s stars;
A sighing wind ran faintly white
Along the willows, and the cedar boughs
Laid their wide hands in stealthy peace across
The starry silence of their antique moss:
No sound save rushing air
Cold, yet all sweet with Spring,
And in thy mother’s arms, couched weeping there,
Thou, lovely thing.

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The twentieth-century English poet Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) made a name for himself as both a poet for children and a poet of the paranormal. His poem “Some One” — which appeared in the 1913 collection Peacock Pie and has become a staple of anthologies for young readers — is, like Hughes Mearns’s comic poem “Antigonish,” a poem about absence-as-presence. Somebody knocks at the door, but when the speaker goes to look, nobody is there. Except for the natural sounds of beetle, owl, and cricket, the night is empty—yet full of mystery. For a child, the poem presents a perfect kind of eeriness, just creepy enough to beguile, hinting that the world keeps secrets, but never actually to threaten. 

This thread of bracing spookiness runs through de la Mare’s work. His best-remembered poem, the title poem to the 1914 book The Listeners, takes the sense of absence-as-presence up another notch. The “phantom listeners” in the still, dark, house, refusing to answer the Traveller’s knock, seem not exactly threatening, but less benign somehow than the “Some One” at the “wee small door.” In de la Mare’s rendering of a Christmas poem, meanwhile, the real action happens when the party’s over, and the house is filled with nothing but shadows. 

Sir William Rothenstein, Walter de la Mare, 1929 (Wikimedia Commons)

So it’s not surprising that a de la Mare poem on the birth of a baby would marvel at the mystery of the cosmos almost more than it marvels at the new child, the “lovely thing,” who has appeared so strangely out of that mystery. In “The Birthnight,” which first appeared in Poems: 1906, ten lines — rhymed ababccdede, — fluctuate from iambic trimeter to pentameter to tetrameter, swelling and contracting, resolving again into trimeter at the end.

With this ebb and flow, the poem follows the trajectory of a wind that seems to come from the stars themselves, before running down the willow branches and into the shadows laying their “wide hands” on the mossy earth. In all the poem, there is no sound but this wind and the crying of the child, who recalls Yeats’s “Stolen Child,” taken back from the fairies into the human world of weeping. 

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