CREATIVE REFRESHMENT
‘Silver’ by Walter de la Mare
‘Pups in the woods’ ink drawing by Susan Alison
‘Silver’ by Walter de la Mare
Slowly, silently, now the moon Walks the night in her silver shoon*; This way, and that, she peers, and sees Silver fruit upon silver trees; One by one the casements catch Her beams beneath the silvery thatch; Couched in his kennel, like a log, With paws of silver sleeps the dog; From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep; A harvest mouse goes scampering by, With silver claws, and silver eye; And moveless fish in the water gleam, By silver reeds in a silver stream.
*Shoon is an archaic plural of shoe.
Walter John de la Mare was an English poet, short story writer, and novelist born in Kent in 1873. He didn’t like the name of ‘Walter’, preferring to be called Jack. A lot of his work was for children — he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1921, and the Carnegie Medal for his ‘Collected Stories for Children’ in 1947.
To support his family he worked in the accounting department of the Anglo-American Oil Company for eighteen years until he was able to give it up to write full-time.
From 1940 until his death, he lived in Twickenham on the same street on which Alfred Lord Tennyson had lived a century earlier. His ashes are in St Paul’s Cathedral, where he had once been a choirboy.
Some Jack de la Mare quotes:
“Without imagination of the one kind or of the other, mortal existence is indeed a dreary and prosaic business… Illumined by the imagination, our life, whatever its defeats — is a never-ending unforeseen strangeness and adventure and mystery.”
“All day long the door of the sub-conscious remains just ajar; we slip through to the other side, and return again, as easily and secretly as a cat.”
“As long as I live I shall always be My Self — and no other, Just me.”
“And it always seems to me,’ he went on ruminatingly, ‘that, after all, we are nothing better than interlopers on the earth, disfiguring and staining wherever we go.”
“A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.”
My own creativity is always refreshed by reading the creative works of others — especially some of the classic poems, knowing they were written in a different world at a different time, with a different mindset.
*This poem is in the public domain. Stuff you need to know about the use of other people’s work.
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