The Children of Stare – Walter De la Mare

The Children of Stare – Walter De la Mare (1873-1956)

    Winter is fallen early

    On the house of Stare;

Birds in reverberating flocks

    Haunt its ancestral box:                    

    Bright are plenteous berries

    In clusters in the air.

    Still is the fountain’s music,

    The dark pool icy still,

Whereupon a small and sanguine sun

    Floats in a mirror on,

    Into a West of crimson,

    From a South of daffodil.

    ’Tis strange to see young children

    In such a wintry house;

Like rabbits’ on the frozen snow

    Their tell-tale footprints go;

    Their laughter rings like timbrels

    ’Neath evening ominous:

    Their small and heightened faces

    Like wine-red winter buds;

Their frolic bodies gentle as

    Flakes in the air that pass,

    Frail as the twirling petal

    From the briar of the woods.

    Above them silence lours,

    Still as an arctic sea;

Light fails; night falls; the wintry moon

    Glitters; the crocus soon

    Will open grey and distracted

    On earth’s austerity:

    Thick mystery, wild peril,

    Law like an iron rod: —— 

Yet sport they on in Spring’s attire,

    Each with his tiny fire

    Blown to a core of ardour

    By the awful breath of God.——

Glossary:

sanguine:         cheerful and confident about the future

timbrels:          (Tumbrels) a kind of musical instrument

ominous:          suggest that sth (bad) is going to happen in the future

frolic:               play and move happily and lively

twirling:           to move or dance round and round

briar:               a wild bush with thorns esp a wild rose bush

lours:               looks sullenly or threateningly

crocus:             a small yellow, purple or white flowers that appears in early spring

austerity:          bad economic condition

peril:                threat, danger

ardour:             passion, enthusiasm

About the poet:

Walter De la Mare (1873 – 1956) was a highly regarded English poet and short story writer who had a particular talent for writing for and about children, although he was no means exclusively a children’s writer. His “The Children of Stare” was originally published in collection, “Poems” that appeared in 1906, and then in Volume 1 of his “Collected Poems 1901 – 1918)”. It is written, although it is not a poem that children would find easy to read or understand. It should therefore be regarded as a poem in which children are the subject matter rather than the intended audience.

Summary:

The first two stanzas of the poem “The Children of Stare” sets the scene of a winter evening in the grounds of a large mansion, “the house of Stare”. This name would appear to an invention on the poet’s part, but the world worked well in this context, with its implications of silence and lack of motion. The house can be imagined as staring at the grounds and the children who are introduced later, and the reader is invited to stare back.

The imagery of these stanzas is fairly standard, with emphasis being given to sound and colour. The flocks of birds are ‘reverberating’, whereas the ‘fountain’s music’ is silent. There is bright colour in the ‘plenteous berries’, but the chief function of ‘the dark pool icy still’ is to reflect the ‘Sanguine Sun’ as its colour changes from ‘daffodil’ to ‘crimson’ as it sets. There is no hint of movement apart from that of the sun, and even the birds ‘haunt’ rather than fly. There is something faintly sinister about this environment that reminds the modern reader of scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”

In the Third stanza the children (De la Mare does not say how many) are introduced, playing and laughing in the snow, but immediately one is thrown off one’s guard with the line

`Tis strange to see young children

In such a wintry house;

The children are clearly unexpected, but is there also another implication to ‘strange’? The final word of the stanza is ‘ominous’ which serves to take today’s reader away from thoughts of Hitch Cock and move towards Stephen King!

In the fourth stanza De la Mare present three similes that link the children to their environment. Their red faces are like ‘wine-red winter buds’ (which refers back to the barriers of the first stanza), and describes them as:

Their frolic bodies gentle as

    Flakes in the air that pass,

    Frail as the twirling petal

    From the briar of the woods.

The children clearly belong to this setting, even to the extent of there being mysterious connection between the world of Nature and these particular children.

The fifth stanza emphasizes the threat from Nature as ‘silence lours’, ‘light fails’ and ‘night falls’. The moon appears bright and all colour will soon be lost to become ‘grey and distracted’. The implication is that this is not the time or the place for children, and that they should be elsewhere. This theme continues at the start of the final stanza:

Thick mystery, wild peril,

Law like an iron rod,

although the reader must decide what nature this mystery and peril might take. Like wise, what is the ‘law like an iron rod’? Is it the law of Nature, or that of parents who might try to force the children to come indoors?

The view of De la Mare’s approach might seem to be belied by the way the poem ends:

“Yet sport they on in spring’s attire,

Each with his tiny fire

Blown to a core of ardour

By the awful breath of God.”

The air of mystery is deepened by the knowledge that these children are dressed “in spring’s attire”, but apparently solved by the revelation that they are warmed by “the awful breath of God”. De la Mare was not religious in an orthodox way, and this is not a religious poem, but he ends with an assertion of the divinity of innocent childhood (in a Blakean sense) as well as drawing attention to the frailty of that childhood in a threatening universe. For the children, the world extends no further than the confines of the (presumably) large garden of their “ancestral box”, But de lad Mare is aware of hostile (ominous) forces from beyond, as represented by the setting sun and “wintry moon” the determine “earth’s austerity”.

There is both hope and fear expressed by “The children of stare”. If the children can continue to play in an environment that would seem not to be conducive for play, thanks to their “tinyfire”, this bodes well for how they will face when they are exposed to the world beyond the garden. However, will those outside forces of “austerity” prove too much for their “frail” bodies? As mentioned this question, leaving the reader to make up his or her own mind

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