Walter de la Mare’s “Miss Loo” is a memory portrait of a woman preserved not by great deeds but by the small, strange marks she left on a summer afternoon. Looking back through “thin-strewn memory,” the speaker sees Miss Loo with unusual clarity: her tabby cat, her caged birds, “her nose, her hair—her muffled words.” The poem is less interested in what she said than in how she existed—the way she opened her green eyes “as if in some immense surprise” at her own small remark. That surprise is the heart of the poem: a woman for whom ordinary tea-table talk feels enormous, perhaps because her world has grown so small. The repeated phrase “poor Miss Loo” is both pitying and affectionate; it acknowledges her stranded quality without making her ridiculous.
The construction mirrors that quiet enclosure. The lines run in rhyming couplets of iambic tetrameter, so each pair clicks shut like a door or a picture frame. Rhymes such as “through” and “Loo,” “birds” and “words,” “tea” and “me” give the verse a gentle, rocking predictability, while the even stresses fall like slow footsteps around a tea table. Yet the catalogue is deliberately broken by dashes—“Her nose, her hair—her muffled words”—as if memory keeps interrupting itself with whatever detail comes next. The syntax slows the reader just as the afternoon slows the speaker.
In the second stanza, time becomes almost immobile. The “westering sunshine in a pool / Floats in her parlour still and cool,” and the verb “floats” turns light into water. Against this hush, the caged bird shakes its “lean wires” and breaks into “piercing song.” The word “piercing” cuts through the stillness without destroying it. Peter the cat lies with “pale-green eyes ajar,” and the line “Dream, wake; wake, dream, in one brief bar” imitates blinking, blurring sleep and waking. Peter’s half-open green eyes quietly echo Miss Loo’s own green eyes, making woman and cat two dreamers in the same suspended room. The cat and the bird are not incidental: a singing bird behind wires and a drowsing cat create a small ecosystem of gentle captivity, with Miss Loo at its centre.
The third stanza lets pathos surface. The speaker is “dull and shy”; Miss Loo has “gaze of vacancy,” large hands folded on the tray, and a face “in such dismay” that it seems unkind to look her way. The language is unsparing but tender. Her sighs “softly ebb and flow,” so her sadness moves as slowly as the afternoon light. Then the poem changes key: “Until all cheerful back will come / Her cheerful gleaming spirit home.” The repetition of “cheerful” feels almost surprised, as if her lively self returns from somewhere else. The final couplet widens the scene to include us: “one would think that poor Miss Loo / Asked nothing else, if she had you.” That “you” turns the reader into a companion, and “asked” suggests how little she required—only presence.
The poem’s significance lies in that refusal to demand more from Miss Loo. De la Mare does not explain her loneliness or heal it; he keeps her company in memory. There is no resolution to her “dismay,” and the poem is honest enough to leave it as atmosphere. The caged bird, the parlour, the tea tray all become emblems of a confined life, yet the poem finds within that confinement a strange gleam. By paying such close attention to a plain, quiet woman, de la Mare suggests that memory and poetry can do the work of tenderness: they can sit with the overlooked and let them remain.