John Mouldy by Walter de la Mare - Hellesdon.org

John Mouldy by Walter de la Mare
De la Mare’s most famous
children’s poem – The
Listeners – is also sinister, but
not quite as sinister as this
one. It could be taken as an
extended personification about
decay, and its most direct
relation in The Rattle Bag is, of
course, Lollocks. In casual
quatrains – irregular linelengths,
XAXA rhyme scheme
(except for the “falling/Norway”
assonance half-rhyme in
Stanza Three) – it is a kind of
stunted ballad which tells no
story, with the first stanza
repeated as the last, like a
ballad’s refrain. Its theme of
inaction is reinforced by its
lazy repetitions – besides the repeated stanza there is the anaphora of lines 3 and 4
of Stanza Three and the isocolon of line two of Stanza Two.
It has a Gothic air, with its historical references to candle-snuffing and to the
Plague/Black Death – the “slim brown rat of Norway”, rattus norwegicus, was the
carrier of the disease. Moreover, the symbolism of the Dog-Star (which usually
represents decay through heat, not applicable in a damp cellar) used to be an
alternative term for a comet, which was thought (long before de la Mare’s time) to
prophesy evil or death.
What else to say? Perhaps how self-conscious the narrator is, with his constant
repetition of “I” – as if he’s conducting a child’s game of “I spy”. There is more
personification with the whispering drip of water. The “smiling” of John Mouldy may
refer to the way damp appears on walls.
Would you read this poem to a child nowadays?
Other Views:
De la Mare's poems for children are models of their kind and include numerous small
masterpieces, such as ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’, ‘Old Shellover’, ‘Hi!’, and ‘Tit
For Tat’, collected in Collected Rhymes and Verses (London, 1944 ). What starts out
as a children's poem can, in a few lines, turn unexpectedly into an exercise in
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controlled terror, as in ‘John Mouldy’, ‘smiling there alone’ in his rat-infested cellar.
[www.jrank.org]
Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was never a Poet of Importance. He made no
prophecies, issued no manifestos. To the burning questions of the age he
responded, if at all, only with dreamy silence. He was doggedly vague. If he ever
contemplated the Zeitgeist, he would probably have personified it as “Herr Professor
Zeitgeist” and included him, like “John Mouldy,” in one of his riddling children’s
poems:
I spied John Mouldy in his cellar,
Deep down twenty steps of stone;
In the dusk he sat a-smiling,
Smiling there alone.
De la Mare was, in his vexing way, deeply frivolous. He preferred the misty, the illdefined,
the indeterminate, to the hard-edged fact.
[Eric Ormsby]
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