The scene is tiny: an old woman, her household work finished, sits by one guttering candle with the window open to the sweet night air. Through a watching speaker, we see Susan read—so attentively that the real room seems to thin around her. The central idea is less that she escapes into a book than that she is rooted in it; the ordinary world and the world of Romance coexist, and Susan belongs mainly to the second.
De la Mare’s construction is deliberately close to the act it describes. The poem moves in rhyming couplets, mostly four stresses to a line, so the verse feels like a slow, companionable rhythm—a thumb turning a page or a candle flame wagging in a draught. The repeated word “guttering” gives the candle something precarious and almost alive. It is not a neat, steady light but a “fat” flame wasting itself in the wind from the window; the room itself flickers. That unstable light suits a poem in which the boundary between reality and fiction is unsure.
Susan is drawn with a series of carefully balanced details. She is “old” and “round,” with “great glasses” and a “shuffling thumb,” but she is also “rapt and stern,” a serious reader rather than a sweet old lady. Her “mild eyes gliding very slow / Across the letters to and fro” suggest enjoyment and extreme patience; the eyes do not jump but move “to and fro,” as if she is rocking inside the sentence. When she mutters a line aloud and shakes her head, saying “You silly souls, to act this way!”, the poem turns comic. She talks back to fictional characters as if they were neighbours who have disappointed her. That small moment makes the world of the book feel densely real to her.
The speaker, listening in the night, registers how little else moves. The only sound from outside is a “far-off cock” crowing “clear,” a distant, slightly mysterious noise that deepens the silence. Meanwhile Susan’s thumb “shuffling” a page becomes one of the poem’s main events. When she suddenly looks over her glasses at the speaker, De la Mare uses the poem’s most important phrase: she “would glance into reality.” Reality is not her home here; it is the brief interruption. Her reprimand—“You!--I thought you was in bed!”—is brisk and colloquial, and the slightly ungrammatical “you was” gives the line an unpolished, lived-in voice. But it is only a pause. She tilts the book again and remains “rooted in Romance.”
The capital R of “Romance” is not accidental. It means the older world of tales, adventures, and improbable wonders, not simply a love story. By contrast, “reality” appears without decoration. The final line is not defeat or escape; “rooted” makes reading her true place of growth. What makes the poem significant is how much it finds in a very small scene. De la Mare turns a lamplit room into a threshold where two worlds press against each other, and he treats an old woman’s reading as a form of serious, settled life. That refusal to patronise Susan—and the quiet wit of the speaker watching her—gives the poem its affectionate, unmistakable atmosphere.