Walter de la Mare’s “All That’s Past” reads less like a description of history than like a doorway into it. The central idea is that the past is not a closed chapter but a depth inside the present: the woods, the brooks, and our own sleeping minds all carry an antiquity too vast to measure. In three parallel stanzas, each beginning with the phrase “Very old are,” de la Mare moves outward from nature to human consciousness, gradually suggesting that we belong to the same ancient story as the rose and the stream.
The first stanza takes the ordinary signs of spring and makes them strange. The buds that break “out of the briar’s boughs, / When March winds wake” are not fresh, innocent things; they are “so old with their beauty” that nobody can trace them. The word “wild” in “what wild centuries / Roves back the rose” is crucial: the rose is not a neat garden flower but a wanderer through deep time. The short, often indented lines give the poem a rocking movement, as though thought itself is dipping between present and past. The rhymes are simple but strong—“break” with “wake,” “knows” with “rose”—as if the poem is finding its own quiet certainties inside that long history.
In the second stanza, the focus shifts from vegetation to water. The brooks and rills that rise from snowbanks beneath “azure skies” are said to “sing such a history / Of come and gone” that every drop is “as wise / As Solomon.” Here de la Mare turns running water into a form of memory. The allusion to Solomon, the biblical king famed for wisdom, elevates the stream’s knowledge above human book-learning. Water seems to remember every passage of time it has witnessed, and its murmur is a history not written down but sung. The rhyme of “rise” and “skies” links the upward movement of water with the vast stillness above, while the looser chime of “gone” and “Solomon” keeps the stanza from feeling too neatly finished.
Only in the third stanza do humans enter, and the poem quietly changes key. “Very old are we men,” the speaker says, drawing us into the same ancientness as the woods and brooks. Our dreams, rather than being merely private nighttime events, are “tales / Told in dim Eden / By Eve’s nightingales.” The image is deliberately dreamlike: it places human imagination in a garden before history, sung by birds that seem both real and mythical. Dreams, the poem suggests, are inherited stories whispered to us from the earliest edge of human experience. The final image deepens the mood. After the brief “whisper” of waking life, “Silence and sleep like fields / Of amaranth lie.” The amaranth, a flower long associated with unfading beauty or immortality, turns sleep into something endless and peaceful rather than empty. The verb “lie” lets the phrase mean both rest and stretch out, so the poem ends in a quiet landscape beyond time.
What makes “All That’s Past” significant is the way it compresses enormous timescales into a few short lines without becoming abstract. The repeated opening phrase gives the poem the force of a ritual, while the progression from woods to brooks to human beings makes antiquity feel increasingly close and personal. Instead of mourning the past, de la Mare presents it as a living presence—rooted in spring, flowing in water, and surfacing in the stories we dream.