Uploaded March 2012 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
This is not a typical poem from Walter de la Mare, it's a little coarse for him - he sounds more like Patrick Barrington. Middlesex is an English county adjoining Surrey, Buckinghamshire and Kent.(and Essex and Berkshire but these aren't mentioned in the poem).
de la Mare penned some excellent ghost stories, but apart from that he wrote mostly for children. Some of his children's stories were very frightening and we wouldn't read them to our kids these days. Terrifying children's literature was common in the Victorian era.
He had an enthusiastic, romantic view of children as visionaries with boundless imaginations, saying "Facts to them are the liveliest of chameleons. They are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence and into a waking vision."
The font is a free-download called "Rumpelstiltskin", a name which means, according to some of naughty elves, "rumpled foreskin"; however, the good fairies hotly deny this, while the other fairies just blush and look the other way.
I suppose the most famous Victorian fairy was Tinkerbell, who was brought back from the brink of death when all the children in the audience who believed in fairies clapped their hands vigorously. Well, I suppose it's one way of keeping them out of mischief.
Tinkerbell was the invention of James Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan. He also invented Wendy - he didn't actually invent that name but he made it popular for girls. It was, in fact, his name: the little boys he played with called him Fwendy-Wendy... er, actually it's not going to make you happier to find out much more about that.
The fairies depicted are merely to illustrate the poem and set the mood. There's no reflection on their sexual orientation, nature of their chromosomes or genitalia intended or implied. Fairies, like angels, are not considered to have sexual characteristics anyway.
I like Victorian Fairy Paintings. Especially the ones that got quite tittilating latterly, in the Naughty Nineties. Then it was any excuse to paint some hot, soft, rotund, rollicking, female nudity ... I'm sorry, I got quite carried away there for a minute.
The paintings are:
"Ariel" by Joseph Severn (1793-1879).
"The Concert" by John Anster Fitzgerald (1832-1906)
"The Long Cry of the Reeds at Even" by Alexander Mann (1853-1908).
"A Sylph Distributing The Early Morning Dew" by Edward A. Fellowes Prynne (1854-1921)
There lived a small hermaphrodite beside the Silver Brent,
A stream meandering not in maps of Surrey, Bucks, or Kent;
Yet jealous elves from those sweet parts, this tiny mite to vex,
Would tease, torment, and taunt, and call him, "Master Middlesex!"
He lived on acorns, dewdrops, cowslips, bilberries, and snow --
A small, shy, happy, tuneful thing, and innocent of woe;
Except when those malignant imps, his tenderness to vex,
Would tease, torment, and taunt, and call him, "Master Middlesex!"
He ran away; he went to sea; to far Peru he came.
There where the Ataquipa flows and odorous cinchona blows
and no one knows his name,
He nests now with the Hummingbird that sips but never pecks;
And silent slides the Silver Brent, and mute is "Middlesex."
This is not a typical poem from Walter de la Mare, it's a little coarse for him - he sounds more like Patrick Barrington. Middlesex is an English county adjoining Surrey, Buckinghamshire and Kent.(and Essex and Berkshire but these aren't mentioned in the poem).
de la Mare penned some excellent ghost stories, but apart from that he wrote mostly for children. Some of his children's stories were very frightening and we wouldn't read them to our kids these days. Terrifying children's literature was common in the Victorian era.
He had an enthusiastic, romantic view of children as visionaries with boundless imaginations, saying "Facts to them are the liveliest of chameleons. They are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence and into a waking vision."
The font is a free-download called "Rumpelstiltskin", a name which means, according to some of naughty elves, "rumpled foreskin"; however, the good fairies hotly deny this, while the other fairies just blush and look the other way.
I suppose the most famous Victorian fairy was Tinkerbell, who was brought back from the brink of death when all the children in the audience who believed in fairies clapped their hands vigorously. Well, I suppose it's one way of keeping them out of mischief.
Tinkerbell was the invention of James Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan. He also invented Wendy - he didn't actually invent that name but he made it popular for girls. It was, in fact, his name: the little boys he played with called him Fwendy-Wendy... er, actually it's not going to make you happier to find out much more about that.
The fairies depicted are merely to illustrate the poem and set the mood. There's no reflection on their sexual orientation, nature of their chromosomes or genitalia intended or implied. Fairies, like angels, are not considered to have sexual characteristics anyway.
I like Victorian Fairy Paintings. Especially the ones that got quite tittilating latterly, in the Naughty Nineties. Then it was any excuse to paint some hot, soft, rotund, rollicking, female nudity ... I'm sorry, I got quite carried away there for a minute.
The paintings are:
"Ariel" by Joseph Severn (1793-1879).
"The Concert" by John Anster Fitzgerald (1832-1906)
"The Long Cry of the Reeds at Even" by Alexander Mann (1853-1908).
"A Sylph Distributing The Early Morning Dew" by Edward A. Fellowes Prynne (1854-1921)
There lived a small hermaphrodite beside the Silver Brent,
A stream meandering not in maps of Surrey, Bucks, or Kent;
Yet jealous elves from those sweet parts, this tiny mite to vex,
Would tease, torment, and taunt, and call him, "Master Middlesex!"
He lived on acorns, dewdrops, cowslips, bilberries, and snow --
A small, shy, happy, tuneful thing, and innocent of woe;
Except when those malignant imps, his tenderness to vex,
Would tease, torment, and taunt, and call him, "Master Middlesex!"
He ran away; he went to sea; to far Peru he came.
There where the Ataquipa flows and odorous cinchona blows
and no one knows his name,
He nests now with the Hummingbird that sips but never pecks;
And silent slides the Silver Brent, and mute is "Middlesex."
