Like “Dream Song,” which appeared as the Sun’s Poem of the Day this past April, today’s poem by Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) invites the reader to indulge in a little frisson of creepiness. Whether intended for adults or for children, de la Mare’s best-known poems— “Someone,” for example — read like incantations, with their hypnotic repetitions, their invocations of mystery and the supernatural.Take “The Empty House,” a poem for which summary falls flat. As its title indicates, it’s about an empty house. What animates the emptiness of this house is de la Mare’s relentless tetrameter, which resolves to trimeter in the last line of each stanza as well as, dramatically, in line fourteen: “only vacancy.“The rhyme scheme, too, is incantatory and not a little claustrophobic. The pattern set by the opening octet is four pairs of couplets, but the first three pairs of rhymes are so close, even when they slant — is/trees/cries/skies/gaze/ways — that by the time we reach the final stanza, it’s no surprise to find that its first four lines all rhyme, an effect something like the visual obliteration of nightfall. The intensity of meter and rhyme elevates the emptiness of this house to the level of archetype. No other house ever has been, or ever could be, so empty.The Empty Houseby Walter De La MareSee this house, how dark it is Beneath its vast-boughed trees! Not one trembling leaflet cries To that Watcher in the skies — ‘Remove, remove thy searching gaze, Innocent of heaven’s ways, Brood not, Moon, so wildly bright, On secrets hidden from sight.’ ‘Secrets,’ sighs the night-wind, ‘Vacancy is all I find; Every keyhole I have made Wails a summons, faint and sad, No voice ever answers me, Only vacancy.’ ‘Once, once . . .’ the cricket shrills, And far and near the quiet fills With its tiny voice, and then Hush falls again. Mute shadows creeping slow Mark how the hours go. Every stone is mouldering slow. And the least winds that blow Some minutest atom shake, Some fretting ruin make In roof and walls. How black it is Beneath these thick boughed trees!___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
