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de la Mare, Walter (1873–1956), English poet and writer. All de la Mare's short stories and longer prose works are touched with mystery, if not fantasy. The two recurrent themes are the child's vision of the world, and death; the usual setting is an unspecified candle‐lit, horse‐drawn age; houses are old, many‐roomed and have secrets. The characters often seem to have strayed from another world, or to be in close contact with it, and many of his stories touch on ghostly visitations. Though his verse often deals with conventional fairy matters—witches on broomsticks, fairy dancers, elves, will‐o'‐the‐wisps, he is far more oblique in his fiction. In Memoirs of a Midget (1921), for instance, Miss M, whose size is never specified though at a late stage we are told that she is barely taller than a book, seems more like Andersen's Thumbelina than a human, and the mystery of her final disappearance with an unknown visitor (death?), leaving a message ‘I have been called away’ is left unresolved, like much else in de la Mare's writing.

He wrote three other full‐length books. His first, Henry Brocken (1904), is subtitled ‘his travels and adventures in the rich, strange, scarce‐imaginable regions of romance’. Henry Brocken, a solitary dreamer who has spent his youth in the library of a remote old house, rides out to find people he has encountered in books, since to him they have more reality than the flesh‐and‐blood world. The Return (1910) describes how Arthur Lawford, falling asleep by the grave of a Huguenot adventurer who has died by his own hand, wakes to find himself physically changed into that man. The Three Mulla‐Mullgars (later retitled The Three Royal Monkeys), published in the same year, is supposedly for children, though there is very little difference in style or content from his adult writing. He had been reading Samuel Purchas's Purchas his Pilgrimes (1619) and many of the incantatory names, descriptions of exotic scenery, even actual adventures and the old sailor Andy Battle, have their origin in this compilation of travellers' tales. The Three Mulla‐Mullgars is the story of a spiritual quest, from life to death. The three little monkeys set out to find the Valleys of Tishnar, the kingdom from which their father had originally come and for which he has departed. Nod, the folkloristic youngest son, who is also the leader, is entrusted with the talismanic Wonderstone. In the journey ‘beyond and beyond, forest and river, forest, swamp and river, the mountains of Arakkkabao—leagues and leagues’ they encounter strange and wonderful animals, among them the spirit of evil, the menacing Immanala—‘she who preys across the shadows’, and survive terrifying perils, including the loss of the Wonderstone, wheedled from Nod by a seductive Water Maiden. Though the last few pages are anticlimactic, even weak compared to what has gone before, it is the most magical and original of all de la Mare's stories.

Most of de la Mare's fairy stories were published in collections for children. The title story in Broomsticks and Other Tales (1925) is about a sinister cat owned by a sedate lady who only gradually realizes that he is a witch's familiar. In ‘Alice's Godmother’ Alice has been summoned to the vast old house owned by her godmother, who is also her great‐grandmother to the power of eight. Aged 350, she can remember the funeral of ‘poor young Edward VI’. She suggests that Alice should live with her forever and share the secret of eternal life: ‘It means, my child, postponing a visit to a certain old friend of ours—whose name is Death.’ But Alice, terrified, wants ‘to die when I must die’ and runs back to the world of ordinary mortality. ‘The Three Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire’ are the ill‐used climbing boys of a miserly master sweep. At night in their dreams they can escape, but the miser resents even this, and asks a witch for a spell so that they can be totally his, body and soul. She cheats him as he has cheated her, and they only fall into a trance from which they cannot be woken. They sleep on for half a century, the marvel of Warwickshire, until one day a young girl kisses them in the glass case where they are displayed, and releases them to play forever as they had in their dreams. ‘Miss Jemima’ is the only story in this collection with a fairy, here one of those malevolent spirits who steal mortal souls, but also a manifestation of the hatred which an unhappy child feels for the unsympathetic housekeeper in charge of her; perhaps too of the woman's own malice. The child in her misery yields to its seductive calls and finally runs away in search of the enchantress's own country.

In 1927, de la Mare published Told Again: Old Tales Told Again, which contained 19 graceful but simple adaptations of classical fairy tales.

The stories in The Lord Fish and Other Tales (1933) are also straightforward, and include several like ‘A Penny a Day’ and ‘Dick and the Beanstalk’ in the traditional fairy‐tale style, where magic is an everyday matter. But two at least have the haunting qualities we associate with de la Mare. In ‘The Scarecrow’ a small boy chances upon a fairy lurking in a scarecrow; in ‘The Riddle’ seven children living with their grandmother in an old house wander off while she sits dreaming of the past. As the days pass by, one by one they climb into an old oak chest and are seen no more. These four pages epitomize de la Mare's style.

Bibliography

• Atkins, John, Walter de la Mare: An Exploration (1947).
• Bonnerot, Luce, L'OEuvre de Walter de la Mare: une aventure spirituelle (1969).
• Hopkins, Kenneth, Walter de la Mare (1953).
• Reid, Forrest, Walter de la Mare: A Critical Study (1929).
• Whistler, Theresa, Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare (1993).

— Gillian Avery

(də lə mâr) , 1873–1956, English poet and novelist. For many years he worked in the accounting department of the Anglo-American Oil Company. Much of his verse and prose shows delight in imaginative excursions into the shadowed world between the real and the unreal. Included among his books of poetry are Songs of Childhood (1902), The Listeners (1912), Peacock Pie (1913), Poems for Children (1930), and The Fleeting and Other Poems (1933). His fiction includes Henry Brocken (1904), The Return (1910), Memoirs of a Midget (1921), and On the Edge (1930), a collection of somewhat macabre short stories.

Bibliography

See J. Atkins, Walter de la Mare: An Exploration (1975); D. Cecil, Walter de la Mare (1978).

British writer whose delight in the fantasy world of childhood is reflected in his poems and novels, such as Early One Morning (1935).

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