The second stanza is a description of death and the keys he is holding. “He sat with half-shut eyes like an old sailor in a ship”. This is a simile. In this verse De La Mare writes “These peeping small, Louisa saw quite clearly”. In this line he emphasising the fact that Louisa is small again. In the first verse he writes “Little Louisa lonely sat” and “She slanted her small bead brown eyes”. Walter De La Mare is using repetition. Also this verse says that death had two keys and one was small (just like Louisa).
The first line of the last stanza the poem says “Louisa laid her lesson book”. This is more alliteration. This verse is about how Louisa goes outside thinking she is going to see death, but instead she only sees a shadow. Another strange thing in this poem is the fact that De La Mare writes: “the small sun behind” which is not true, because the sun is big, much bigger than the earth. Also the rhythm in this poem is regular, and each line has four beats. “Keys Of Morning” is written in third person, this causes the poet to be detached from the poem – almost as if he’s watching the poem happen from above.
An interpretation of this poem could be about the first stanza when it says “And saw Death softly watching her In the sunshine pale and sweet”. This could mean that death is waiting to take her, because she is close to death – maybe she has an illness, and went she went out to meet death he disappeared. Maybe something forced him to go away from the girl (ghosts that knew Louisa, God?). Or maybe Death went away on his own accord, because Louisa was not ready to die. So some time after this poem – if De La Mare wrote a second poem about Louisa would she be dying or dead. Also why is this poem called “The Keys Of Morning” -are there different keys for the afternoon and night?
~ Louisa could have imagined death maybe, because she’s lonely. It says in the first stanza Louisa is lonely, and no other human apart from Louisa is mentioned in the poem. Maybe someone Louisa knew died recently, so she imagined a shadow was death. This poem is ambiguous– things can be understood in two or more ways such as the keys. No one knows why the keys are there or what they mean. They could symbolise big people and small people. For example: one key for children and one for adults. Another interpretation could be that the keys mean heaven and hell. Maybe one of the keys would be for Louisa when she dies, and she has to make a choice the biggest or the littlest. We don’t see things as they really are. In “The Keys Of Morning” De La Mare questions ideas of children and death. Death was a widely questioned theme when Walter De La Mare wrote “The Keys Of Morning”.