Only Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) would write a creepy poem about being kissed under the mistletoe — but not by a creep. At least, not by that kind of creep. “Mistletoe,” with its floating, disembodied, “unseen lips,” may win the prize for “Least Physical Kissing Poem Ever Published,”  or possibly “Most Paranormal Poem About Christmas.”  
 
Either way, it is a beguiling poem. New York Sun readers, already familiar with de la Mare’s “Dream Song” and “The Empty House,” will recognize the elements that make his poems as spellbinding as they are: the repetitive, even claustrophobic rhymes, and the short lines that bring those rhymes around in rapid sequence. In both septets of this tetrameter poem, “mistletoe” repeats and rhymes with itself, as if the word alone were an incantation.

And then there’s that uncanny sense of a disembodied presence, which recurs as a motif in de la Mare’s poems. In “The Empty House,” absence itself becomes a presence. Here, it is as if the strange “someone” of another of de la Mare’s poems (who “came knocking at my wee, small door”: someone who knocks but is never there) has been invited to the world’s dreamiest, drowsiest Christmas party. There, this someone goes wafting about, voiceless and bodiless, in search of a forgotten person, half-asleep in the light of the last candle, on whom to bestow the world’s most spectral kiss.