It must be the sunny weather that made me think of the poem Memory by Walter de la Mare. It’s an appropriate one for the changing of the seasons. De la Mare wrote two poems with this title and this is the earlier one that was published in the 1933 collection, The Fleeting.
Perhaps it hints at that all too human tendency to wish oneself elsewhere. The last two lines tell us that De la Mare sees this as a positive thing. Memory enables us to live in our physical surroundings and the world of the imagination at one and the same time.
There is some archaic language in the second verse. “Nowel” is an alternative spelling of “Noel”, and “Waits” are carol singers. This part of the poem requires careful reading because the word order has been inverted in a slightly tricky way.
Memory by Walter de la Mare
When summer heat has drowsed the day
With blaze of noontide overhead,
And hidden greenfinch can but say
What but a moment since it said;
When harvest fields stand thick with wheat,
And wasp and bee slave—dawn till dark—
Nor home, till evening moonbeams beat,
Silvering the nightjar’s oaken bark:
How strangely then the mind may build
A magic world of wintry cold,
Its meadows with frail frost-flowers filled—
Bright-ribbed with ice, a frozen wold!. . .
When dusk shuts in the shortest day,
And dark Orion spans the night;
Where antlered fireflames leap and play
Chequering the walls with fitful light—
Even sweeter in mind the summer’s rose
May bloom again; her drifting swan
Resume her beauty; while rapture flows
Of birds long since to silence gone:
And though the Nowel, sharp and shrill,
Of Waits from out the snowbound street,
Drums to their fiddle beneath the hill
June’s mill-wheel where the waters meet. . .
O angel Memory that can
Double the joys of faithless Man!
The Good Reader 