Wanderers
- Wide are the meadows of night,
- And daisies are shinng there,
- Tossing their lovely dews,
- Lustrous and fair;
- And through these sweet fields go,
- Wanderers amid the stars --
- Venus, Mercury, Uranus, Neptune,
- Saturn, Jupiter, Mars.
- 'Tired in their silver, they move,
- And circling, whisper and say,
- Fair are the blossoming meads of delight
- Through which we stray.
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)
Walter de la Mare was an English poet and novelist born in
Charlton, Kent. After attending school at Saint Paul's School in London he was awarded a royal grant allowing him to devote himself completely to writing. His objective was to reveal the unseen magnitude of what was familiar. His prose and verse reveals delight in imaginative excursions into the shadowed world between the real and the unreal. It possesses a fatastic quality which becomes the vehicle for entering a world of a deeper reality. With charming ingenuity and deceptive childlike quality, his work takes the reader away from the specious world of appearances. Voyaging upon the far seas of his magnificent imagination makes him unforgettable.
De la Mare's first succesful book was The Listeners and is his most anthologized piece. Wanderers comes from his children's book Peacock Pie; A Book of Rhymes published in 1913. It's a light and well constructed verse that names all of the planets save one, Pluto. Although the plants existence was postulated 8 years earlier by Percivil Lowell it wasn't until 1930 when another American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto near the position Lowell had predicted. However, it was on today's date March 13, 1781 that another wandering star; a body in motion about the sun, Uranus was accidentally discovered by the British astronomer Sir William Herschel.
Sources:
Blair, Bob:
http://www.geocities.com/~bblair/000313.htm
Bram, Robert Philips, Norma H. Dicky, "de la Mare, Walter," Funk &
Wagnalls New Encyclopedia , 1988.
Public domain text taken from The Poets’ Corner:
http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/gp2_4.html#wanderers
CST Approved.