Slim Cunning Hands by Walter De La Mare

Slim Cunning Hands by Walter De La Mare

Walter De La Mare writes about ideas such as death, emotions, fantasy worlds, and death. He would be classified as a modern romantic poet. Alongside with writing poetry he also writes novels with the same complex ideas, most dealing with death.

 

Slim Cunning Hands

Slim cunning hands at rest, and cozening eyes-

Under this stone one loved too wildly lies;

How false she was, no granite could declare;

Nor all earth's flowers, how fair.

Death and deception are the ideas that De La Mare used to write this short poem. If you don’t read carefully this poem can be easily misinterpreted for something mellower and less passionate. This poem expresses the loss of a women and the large impact she made on the man. As we read the poem we get the sense that that impact was not the best. The women in his eyes is not described as a typical love poem about the loss of a love you, he portrays her the exact opposite way. De La Mare is very talented to able to express these deep and passionate feelings in only a short poem with five lines. Strong diction and very clever descriptions of the women give us much more insight and add underlying details to the poem. The first line describes the women as a clever liar with the use of the words "cunning" and "cozening". The next lines explores her death, as she know lies under the stone. Wildly is used to describe the women, she lies dead under the concrete stone and is still being described as wild, or uncontrollable. These distinct words create a vivid description in my mind of how even though the women is very much dead and barricaded under a cemented stone that is not stopping her from defying the rules and acting rebellious. He might be saying that even though she’s dead he wouldn’t be surprised if she fought her way out because of how conniving she was. Following that line he talks about the granite and the flowers, these items are symbolic to a grave site. He’s saying that nothing will give away what kind of a person she was. Nothing. By using granite and flowers, he creates in our mind the picture of a typical grave site and how you gaze for yards and yards at the exact same sight, a gravestone and a flower placed along side. Her true personality will never be known, because now she is just another one of the stone heads in the field.