Poet · Georgian
Walter de la Mare
English poet · 1873–1956
Walter de la Mare spent almost twenty years as a clerk in the London office of an oil company, writing in the evenings; his first book, Songs of Childhood (1902), came out under the name "Walter Ramal." "The Listeners" (1912), with its traveller knocking at a moonlit door that nobody answers, made his name, and Peacock Pie (1913) became one of the best-loved books of rhymes for children.
His poems are quiet, musical and faintly haunted: empty rooms, moonlight, voices just out of sight. He also wrote ghost stories and the novel Memoirs of a Midget (1921).
He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1953, died in 1956, and is buried in St Paul's Cathedral, where he had been a choirboy.
1 poem by Walter de la Mare
Full text, free to read. Each poem records its source and display decision.