3 December 1914
Edward Thomas’s field notebook for October-December 1914 (FNB79) contains jottings that enter his first poems. Here anticipations of Up in the Wind are set out like poetry: ‘I could wring the old girl’s neck / That put it here / A public house! (Charcoal burner) / But she’s dead long ago / by bringing up and quite outdoing / The idea of London / Two woods around and never a road in sight / Trees roaring like a train without an end / Only a motorist from far away / Or marketers in carts once a fortnight / Or a few fresh tramps ignorant / of the houselessness’. On 27 November Thomas noted: ‘Clothes on the line violently blowing in wind crackle like a rising woodfire’. Up in the Wind, like Old Man, also began as a prose sketch: ‘The White Horse’ (LML, 16 November). In each case, comparison between the two versions suggests what it means to move from one medium to the other. The setting of Up in the Wind and ‘The White Horse’ is a pub on the Froxfield plateau, above Steep, in the parish of Prior’s Dean.
Tall beeches overhang the inn, dwarfing and half hiding it, for it lies back a field’s breadth from the byroad. The field is divided from the road by a hedge and only a path from one corner and a cart track from the other which meet under the beeches connect the inn with the road. But for a sign board or rather the post and empty iron frame of a signboard close to the road behind the hedge, a traveller could not guess it an inn. The low dirty-white building looks like a farmhouse, with a lean-to, a rick and a shed of black boarding at one side; and in fact the landlord is more than half farmer. Except from the cottages which are scattered far around, only one of them visible from the inn, customers are few. And yet it is almost at a crossing of roads. One field away from the field with the signpost the byroad crosses a main road at a high point on the table land: the inn itself stands so high that its beeches mark it for those who know and form a station for the eyes of strangers, many miles away on 3 sides. But both roads lack houses and travellers, especially on the main road, are motorists from the ends of the earth and farmers going to market from remote villages. The main road runs for one length of 4 miles without a house of any sort. Once the land was all common. Many acres of it are still possessed by gorse and inhabited chiefly by linnets and a pair of stone curlews. The name of Common clings to it though it is hedged. Gorse and bracken mingle with the hedgerow hawthorns and keep memories of the old waste alive. Few trees of any age stand alongside the road, and as the hedges are low and broken, and everywhere gorse is visible, even the [traveller] stranger has whiffs of the past and tastes something like the olden sensation of journeying over wide common, high and unpopulated, higher than anything except Butser Hill far behind him and Inkpen far before him northward.
The farmhouses naturally then are placed far back behind the gorse or the fields once belonging to it and are reached by lanes of various lengths out of the main road. Once, I think, the roads crossed in the midst of a tract of common which perhaps ended where now the inn is. But as things are it might well seem to have been hidden there out of someone’s perversity. ‘I should like to wring the old [thing’s] girl’s neck for coming away here.’ So said the [girl] woman who [served me] fetched my beer when I found myself at the inn first. She was a daughter of the house, fresh from a long absence in service in London, a bright [active] wildish slattern with a cockney accent and her hair half down. She spoke angrily. If she did not get away before long, she said, she would go mad with the loneliness. She looked out sharply: [there was nothing for her to see but] all she could see was the beeches and the tiny pond beneath them and the calves standing in it drinking, alternately grazing the water here and there and thinking, and at last going out and standing still on the bank thinking. Who the ‘old girl’ was, whether she had built the house here, or what, I did not inquire. It was just the loneliness of the high placed little inn isolated under those tall beeches that pleased me. Every year I used to go there once or twice, never so often as to overcome the original feeling it had given me. I was always on the verge of turning that feeling or having it turned by a natural process, into a story. Whoever the characters would have been I do not think they would have included either the ‘old girl’ or the landlord’s [mysterious] indignant cockney daughter. The story that was to [explain] interpret the look that the house had as you came up to it under the trees never took shape. The daughter stayed on several years, bearing it so well that her wildish looks and cockney accent seemed to fit the scene, and I used to look forward to meeting her again. She would come in with her hair half down as at first or I would find her scrubbing the bricks or getting dinner ready in the taproom which was kitchen also. But before I had learnt anything from her she went. [I can only trust] I have to be content with what the landlord told me years afterwards, when he left his wheelbarrow standing in profile like a pig and came in to his taproom out of his farmyard for a glass and stood drinking outside the door.
Originally or as far back as he knew of, the house was a blacksmith’s, the lean-to taproom was the smithy as you can tell by the height of it, and the man was remembered and still spoken of for his skill. The landlord spoke of him yet had never seen him. The smith died and left a widow and as she could not use hammer and tongs and as no 2nd smith arrived to marry her, she turned the smithy into a [taproom] shop and had an off-licence to sell beer. Presently a man came along from the Chiltern beech country with a two-cylinder engine for sawing timber. At that day the land here carried far more woodland. The beech trunks were cut up to make chairs. The branches were burnt for charcoal, and the circular black floors of the charcoal-burners’ fires are still now and then cut into by the farmer’s plough. The man from the Chilterns came here to saw beech planks and brought with him a little boy, his nephew, who had to pick up chips to feed the fire of the engine. ‘My uncle’ said the landlord ‘fell in love, I suppose, with the widow, and married her.’ He continued to go about the country with his engine sawing timber. But the beeches overhanging the house were spared. The boy stayed on and farmed. The shop was turned into a taproom with a full licence and the widow sold ale until she died. The man grew old and gave up sawing and then he died. Now the nephew farms the land. It is worth a guinea a mile he says, but he has grown fat on the beer which his daughters draw. On the wall of the taproom is a list of the officers of a slate club and also coloured diagrams illustrating certain diseases of the cow. The room smells as much of bacon and boiled vegetables as of ale and shag, and it is often silent and empty except for a painted wooden clock ticking loudly above the fire. Yet it is one of the pleasantest rooms in Hampshire, well deserving the footpaths which lead men to it from all directions over ploughland and meadow, and deserving as good a story as a man could write. [Not every erasure has been transcribed.]
Up in the Wind is Thomas’s closest approximation to the Robert Frost “eclogue” in which rural speakers tell or act out their story. In Frost’s dramatic monologue ‘A Servant to Servants’ a disturbed woman talks to strangers about her hard life in a lonely place. Yet, despite Frostian echoes, and the poets’ shared symbolism of houses and trees, Thomas establishes distinctive poetic co-ordinates. He sets London against ‘wild’ land, society (‘public-house’) against solitude (‘hermitage’). And he shows his power to imagine the English countryside historically. The poem traces shifting relations between family history and socio-economic history, between landscape and rural work. In Stan Smith’s words: ‘It compacts into a brief space an individual narrative which has the generations behind it’ (SS, 159).
1. ‘I could wring the old thing’s neck that put it here! In the poem, the woman’s voice becomes the main narrative voice. By giving primacy to speech-rhythms, Thomas lays down an aesthetic marker. A sixth of the poem’s blank-verse lines are monosyllabic (the proportion is high in Frost’s eclogues) and many have eleven or more syllables.
9. forest parlour. By replacing ‘taproom’ with ‘parlour’, Thomas brings ‘wild’ and ‘homely’ (l.45) into tension.
12-13. flashed up…shriek. These verbs (‘shriek’ recurs) might seem to exaggerate the girl’s ‘wildness’, but they signal its later inward turn. Her brooding on ‘wind’ prepares for the more purely psychological scenario of Wind and Mist.
15. I might have mused of coaches and highwaymen. William Cooke comments: ‘If Thomas had forced the “story” in 1911 it might have appeared as one of the romantic tales in Light and Twilight’ (WC, 166). He quotes from a passage in The Isle of Wight which also fertilised The Chalk-Pit (see 237): ‘there are other places which immediately strike us as fit scenes for some tragic or comic episode out of the common. I know a little white inn standing far back from the road, behind a double row of noble elms – an extraordinary combination, this house no bigger than a haystack, and these trees fit to lead up to a manor house where Sidney or Falkland was once a guest. You approach the inn from the road by crossing a stile and following a path among a tangle of gorse which is much overgrown by honeysuckle. Well, I never see this place, the gorse, the great trees, the house at their feet, without a story haunting my mind but never quite defining itself. To others more ready of fancy it is no doubt already a scene of some highway robbery, with blunderbusses, masks, pretty ladies, and foaming horses’ (IOW, 29). Yet the passage as a whole prefigures the poetic strategy whereby Thomas splits perspectives between different voices. Another speaker says: ‘I don’t know why you should want to fit a story to a scene like that. I am quite willing to wait until the tragedy or comedy arrives’ (IOW, 30).
20. houseless: a word, and construction, that Thomas repeats – perhaps because it combines presence and absence. Cf. ‘nameless’, ‘flowerless’, ‘beeless’, ‘lightless’, ‘footless’, ‘sunless’, ‘branchless’. ‘Windless’ (Sowing) and ‘stormless’ (Haymaking) are more positive instances.
32. When all was open and common: an allusion to the time before the major phase of land enclosure, initiated by the government in 1760, sealed the transition from feudal to modern tenure. Even before the industrial revolution, this shift accelerated emigration from country to city. The girl’s story points to more recent rural depopulation (see Introduction, 23). The inn’s apparently odd position is due to the fact that ‘before the common of Froxfield, called the Barnet, was enclosed [in 1805] and farmed, an old road from Alton to Petersfield…came across the plateau past the inn, where a smithy and a pond met some other needs of eighteenth century travellers’ (WW, 32). The White Horse, known as ‘the pub with no name’ (because of the absent sign), also as ‘the highest pub in Hampshire’, currently flourishes amid further socio-economic and gastronomic shifts.
Ms: LML. Published text: CP1920. Differences from CP1978: 1 here! there! 3 such-like suchlike 9 London, London 10 the those 35/41 ‘The White Horse’ the ‘White Horse’ 45 homely, too, homely too 46 that knows who knows 50 inn; inn: 63 again – again, / – 64 ale ale, 72 these…gone: those…gone. 77 should could 79 a public-house and not a hermitage not a hermitage but a publichouse 90 the pond our pond 93 were was 96 wood fire woodfire 98 me: me. 106 distant far off Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [JT], which seems earlier than the typescript [MET] followed here as, except for minor discrepancies, in CP1920. CP1920, CP1928 and CP1944 omit ‘a’ before ‘waste’ in l.36.
4 December 1914
FNB79 indicates Thomas’s obsession with weather: ‘After yesterday’s rain and a dull showery morning a glorious high blue winter [?sky]’, ‘up and down in deep muddy lanes among hopgardens’ (1 November 1914); ‘lovely cold bright pale blue cloudless day, almost windless after heavy rime frost’ (24 November); ‘a fine bright morning then sunny drops slanting a few in a sprinkle, then heavy rain and a blue and black sky where wind comes from. Then at 12-3 bright sun, clear sweet cold sky with a few white clouds low – the sky so bright and clear and clean, the roads all muddy with mashed leaves and twigs, and bare hedges and sodden fields. Clear till moon rise (big full white moon towards East and sun going crimson cloudless in West – When Jupiter was visible at 4.45 there was some wet sandcoloured cloud in West – a big rag of it. Beautiful hobnail pattern on path over reddish light ploughland’ (1 December); on opposite page: ‘fields stamped over by sheep – mud and mangolds’.
On 15 December Thomas accepted Frost’s criticisms of November and rejoiced in his first poetic riff: ‘I am glad you spotted “wing’s light word”. I knew it was wrong & also that many would like it; also “odd men” – a touch nearing facetiousness in it. I’ve got rid of both now. But I am in it & no mistake…I find myself engrossed & conscious of a possible perfection as I never was in prose’ (RFET, 38-9). The typescript sent to Frost has ‘And in amongst them clearly printed / The foot’s seal and the wing’s light word’ (lines 6-7) and ‘Only odd men (who do not matter) / Care’ etc (lines 11-12).
1. November’s days are thirty. Thomas liked ‘weather rhymes’ (see Lob, 100-1), which his own poems often are.
5-7. dinted…overprinted…charactered. These verbs imply a penetrating poetic ‘eye’ (l.33) that reads landscape like a text or palimpsest. The poem proceeds to a microscopic analysis of ‘mud’.
16. Condemned as mud: cf. ‘Few care for’ (l.12) and ‘all that men scorn’ (l.14). This sequence of phrases asserts an aesthetic that notices what other poets miss: ‘it is characteristic of modern poetry, as a criticism of life by livers, that it has left the praise of rain to hop farmers and of mud to shoe-blacks’ (RAP, 42).
21. after-tempest cloud: a favourite adjectival construction, cf. Two Pewits (‘after-sunset sky’), and in prose: ‘The moon was mounting the clear east, and Venus stood with Orion in the west above a low, horizontal ledge of darkest after-sunset cloud’ (IPS, 74). ‘After-tempest’ appears in a passage that parallels the trajectory of lines 28-36: ‘Just before night the sky clears. It is littered with small dark clouds upon rose, like rocks on a wild and solitary coast of after-tempest calm, and it is infinitely remote and infinitely alluring. Those clouds are the Islands of the Blest. Even so alluring might be this life itself, this world, if I were out of it’ (SC, 216).
28-36. One imagines…skies. The ‘one’ who ‘imagines a refuge’, and fails to grasp the interdependence of ‘earth’ and ‘sky’, may represent Thomas’s former literary self. Romantically vague language (‘in the pure bright’) parodies the writer who could ask of sunset clouds in ‘Recollections of November’ (HS, 86-102): ‘To what weird banquet, to what mysterious shrine, were they advancing?’ ‘Another’ (l.31), whose ‘clear’ sight seems endorsed by the poem, knows how to value ‘earth and November’. Despite the second stanza’s skyward movement, ‘earth’ occurs five times, exerting a gravitational rhythmic pull. The dialectic here resembles that at the end of The Signpost (see note, 153).
Ms: LML. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: November [P] November Sky Note on title: CP1978 follows a typescript [JT]. ‘Sky’ is cancelled in PTP.
5 December 1914
March complements November. Together they initiate the seasonal movement that occurs between, and within, many of Thomas’s poems. They also promise that his diurnal time-settings (a day’s seasons) will be precise. March may be a direct result of Frost’s telling Thomas to turn passages from In Pursuit of Spring into poetry (see Introduction, 15). Reciprocally, March may have influenced Frost’s ‘Our Singing Strength’, in which a snowstorm prompts massed birds to ‘sing the wildflowers up from root and seed’. The first chapter of In Pursuit of Spring records volatile March weather:
Snow succeeded, darkening the air, whitening the sky, on the wings of a strong wind from the north of north-west, for a minute only, but again and again, until by five o’clock the sky was all blue except at the horizon, where stood a cluster of white mountains, massive and almost motionless, in the south above the Downs, and round about them some dusty fragments not fit to be used in the composition of such mountains. They looked as if they were going to last for ever. Yet by six o’clock the horizon was dim, and the clouds all but passed away, the Downs clear and extended; the blackbird singing as if the world were his nest, the wind cold and light, but dying utterly to make way for a beautiful evening of one star and many owls hooting.
The next day was the missel-thrush’s and the north-west wind’s. The missel-thrush sat well up in a beech at the wood edge and hailed the rain with his rolling, brief song; so rapidly and oft was it repeated that it was almost one long, continuous song But as the wind snatched away the notes again and again, or the bird changed his perch, or another answered him or took his place, the music was roving like a hunter’s…
…[days] of cloudy brightness, brightened cloudiness, rounded off between half-past five and half-past six by blackbirds singing. The nights were strange children for such days, nights of frantic wind and rain, threatening to undo all the sweet work in a swift, howling revolution. Trees were thrown down, branches broken, but the buds remained…With the day came snow, hail, and rain, each impotent to silence the larks for one minute after it had ceased. (IPS, 26-7)
Thomas writes of another March evening: ‘All the thrushes of England sang at that hour, and against that background of myriads I heard two or three singing their frank, clear notes in a mad eagerness to have all done before dark; for already the blackbirds were chinking and shifting places along the hedgerows’ (IPS, 178).
March blends several March days and Thomas’s perennial ‘pursuit of Spring’ into a quintessential symbol. He identified with an English Spring’s halting progress: In Pursuit of Spring takes three hundred pages to find ‘Winter’s grave’. A favourite poem was William Morris’s ‘The Message of the March Wind’: ‘Fair now is the springtide, now earth lies beholding / With the eyes of a lover, the face of the sun…’ Given the radical thrust of Morris’s ‘message’, March may have Romantic-visionary as well as psychological resonances. At one level, the irrepressible birdsong, and the way in which it energises the rhythm, affirm Thomas’ paradoxical ‘hoar Spring’ (It was upon) as man and poet. In celebrating Spring’s moral victory here, he celebrates his own. He, too, would ‘pack into that hour / [His] unwilling hoard of song’.
7-9. The sun…tears of joy. Cooke finds these lines ‘unsatisfactory’ (WC, 130), because they approach too nearly the inflated style of a prose equivalent: ‘Day after day the sun poured out a great light and heat and joy over the earth and the delicately clouded sky…So mighty was the sun that the miles of pale new foliage shimmered mistily like snow’ (LAT, 1). Thomas is usually at his weakest where he personifies natural phenomena.
30-1. silence / Stained with all that hour’s songs. When Thomas took opium in his early twenties, it intensified his hearing: ‘I experienced for 1st time since I was about 10 my early wild sensations of silence…It was to ordinary silence what shouting is to speech’ (Diary, 8 March 1901, NLW). H. Coombes says: ‘we feel the silence not only as something enjoyed and as perhaps heralding a near spring but also as the silence which always comes back and which exists at the back of every sound; we note too that for the poet the silence was stained, equivocally but not deprecatingly – stain may beautify or mar, or beautify while it mars’ (HC, 197-8). That Thomas packs so much into ‘silence / Stained’, with its hint of stained glass, its synaesthesia of ear and eye, is one reason for regarding this version of the line as his improvement on that cited below.
Ms: LML. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 15 lost too…chill lost, too,…cold 25 screamed; screamed, 26 soft; soft, 31 Stained with all that hour’s songs Rich with all that riot of songs Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [JT] rather than LP, mainly cognate with another typescript [MET] which [see above] seems preferable on aesthetic grounds.
6 December 1914
Appropriately, many experiential and textual strata underlie this poem (for Thomas and memory, see Introduction, 23). Like Up in the Wind, Old Man was first written as prose: ‘Old Man’s Beard’ (LML, 17 November 1914). But, in contrast to the narrative expansiveness of ‘The White Horse’, ‘Old Man’s Beard’ sounds like a prose poem or prose from which poetry is trying to get out. Similarly, the blank verse of Old Man is braced by assonance and refrain, by the ghost of stanzaic structure. In combining blank-verse freedoms (including lines that run to twelve or thirteen syllables) with lyrical intensity, the poem pioneers one of Thomas’s distinctive forms.
Just as she is turning in to the house or leaving it, the baby plucks a feather of old man’s beard. The bush grows just across the path from the door. Sometimes she stands by it squeezing off tip after tip from the branches and shrivelling them between her fingers on to the path in grey-green shreds. So the bush is still only half as tall as she is, though it is the same age. She never talks of it, but I wonder how much of the garden she will remember, the hedge with the old damson trees topping it, the vegetable rows, the path bending round the house corner, the old man’s beard opposite the door, and me sometimes forbidding her to touch it, if she lives to my years. As for myself I cannot remember when I first smelt that green bitterness. I, too, often gather a sprig from the bush and sniff it and roll it between my fingers and sniff again and think, trying to [remember] discover what it is that I am remembering. [but in vain.] I do not wholly like the smell, yet would rather lose many meaningless sweeter ones than this bitter [unintelligible] one of which I have mislaid the key. As I hold the sprig to my nose and slowly withdraw it, I think of nothing, I see, I hear, nothing; yet I seem too to be listening [as I hold the sprig to my nose and withdraw it], lying in wait for whatever it is I ought to remember but never do. No garden comes back to me, no hedge or path, no grey-green bush called old man’s beard or lad’s love, no figure of mother or father or [chil] playmate, only [an endless] a dark avenue without an end. [Not every erasure has been transcribed.]
On 11 November Thomas had noted: ‘Old Man scent, I smell again and again not really liking it but venerating it because it holds the secret of something very long ago which I feel it may someday recall, but I have yet no idea what’ (FNB79). The plant’s names appear in a list of ‘Associations’ in a 1908 notebook (FNB19); and R. George Thomas quotes from an unpublished story ‘The Old House’ (1909) in which ‘Mr Banks’ sniffs ‘a feathery sprig of grey green’ and tries ‘to think and smell at the same time, closing his eyes, as if he were diving through some new medium into a strange land, – but in vain’ (CP1978, 380).
Memory and childhood gardens come together in Thomas’s prose: ‘I confess to remembering little joy, but to much drowsy pleasure in the mere act of memory. I watch the past as I have seen workless, homeless men leaning over a bridge to watch the labours of a titanic crane and strange workers below in the ship running to and fro and feeding the crane…I recall many scenes: a church and churchyard and black pigs running down from them towards me in a rocky lane – ladslove and tall, crimson, bitter dahlias in a garden – the sweetness of large, moist, yellow apples eaten out of doors – children: I do not recall happiness in them, yet the moment that I return to them in fancy I am happy’ (SC, 127). ‘I once saw a girl of seven or eight years walking alone down a long grassy path in an old garden…For the child there was no end to the path. She walked slowly, at first picking a narcissus or two, or stooping to smell a flower and letting her hair fall over it to the ground; but soon she was content only to brush the tips of the flowers with her outstretched hands, or, rising on tiptoe, to force her head up amongst the lowest branches of cherry-bloom. Then she did nothing at all but gravely walk on into the shadow and into Eternity, dimly foreknowing her life’s days’ (SC, 139-40). ‘[In a friend’s] back garden I first saw dark crimson dahlias and smelt bitter crushed stalks in plucking them. As I stood with my back to the house among the tall blossoming bushes I had no sense of any end to the garden between its brown fences: there remains in my mind a greenness, at once lowly and endless’ (CET, 15-16). See, too, ‘The Perfume of an Evening Primrose’, W.H. Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia (1893).
1. Old Man, or Lad’s-love: folk-names of the long-cultivated plant ‘southern-wood’ or artemisia abrotanum, which played a continuing part in Thomas’s life and now grows on his grave in Agny. A mundane explanation for the plant’s contradictory names is that the former derives from its silvery-‘feathery’ foliage (‘old man’s beard’ as a name for ‘traveller’s joy’ derives from that plant’s seed-heads); the latter from its use in lovers’ bouquets – hence another folk-name: ‘maiden’s ruin’. Old Man, with its bitter taste as well as scent, has many traditional uses in herbal medicine, and is combined ‘with rosemary and lavender’
for drawer sachets etc. Writing from Wick Green in April 1910, Thomas told Gordon Bottomley: ‘The Old Man or Lad’s Love you gave me is now a beautiful great bush at my study door’ (LGB, 201). A cutting from this bush was planted in the Thomases’ garden at Yew Tree Cottage: the poem’s immediate setting. ‘I hope you have a dooryard as neat as ours is, with all the old man & rosemary & lavender strong & the vegetable rows fairly continuous & parallel & the may thick in the hedge’ (RFET, 57).
6-8. Half decorate, half perplex…And yet I like the names. Stuart Sillars argues that Thomas’s approach to language anticipates the poststructuralist stress on the non-identity of word and thing: ‘dissolution of self and dissolution of language in relation to objects’ (Structure and Dissolution in English Writing [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999], 178). Besides pondering contradictory names, Old Man variously terms its central image ‘herb’, ‘bush’, ‘almost a tree’. Yet, rather than an insuperable gulf between the human mind and the world it aspires to name, such variants may mark their fluid intercourse in time and space. Thus Thomas brings the different faces of ‘Old Man’ closer together in the freshly coined oxymoron ‘hoar-green’. Cf. the metamorphoses traced in Fifty Faggots (see note, 240). Thomas recoiled from Walter Pater’s style precisely because ‘We are forced to regard the words as words, and only in part able to think of the objects denoted by them’ (WP, 125). At one level, Old Man reflects on poetry-as-language. The poem begins with (or from) the allure of words (‘decorate’); then probes their failure to pin down ‘the thing it is’ (‘perplex’). But this discrepancy or mystery, perhaps the founding impulse of poetry, neither invalidates the poet-speaker’s ‘liking’ for words, nor cancels their associations with the phenomenal world, even if ‘the things are forgotten, and it is an aspect of them, a recreation of them, a finer development of them, which endures in the written words’ (RJ, 298). Poetry, like memory, functions at a remove: further mysteries are latent in the conundrum of ‘how much’ the child ‘will remember’.
10. the child: Myfanwy Thomas, on whom (as in Snow and The Brook) Thomas usually bases his generic ‘child’. In the Romantic tradition, he situates children close to the threshold of vision. The speaker’s own consciousness moves between adult and childhood selves.
14-15. perhaps / Thinking, perhaps of nothing: a rhetorically cunning line-break. The verb ‘think’ is as central to the poem as the verb ‘remember’. The tension between them suggests that memory, and certain kinds of ‘meaning’, operate in zones unreachable by the conscious mind or zones that only poetry might reach: ‘try /…to think what it is I am remembering’ (lines 27-8). In l.33, where ‘thinking of nothing’ becomes scarier, ‘nothing’ carries its full weight as ‘no thing’.
19-24. And I can only…Forbidding her to pick. As with the speculative movement of the opening lines, Thomas plays syntax against metre. This rhythmical crescendo, like its darker counterpart (lines 36-9), emerges from ‘Old Man’s Beard’. ‘Forbidding her to pick’ evokes the Garden of Eden. Its wording and placing make the prohibition more forbidding than in the prose.
39. Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end. Here Thomas presents a prospect of ‘dissolution’ (see note on lines 6-8). But this pole of his dialectic may have less to do with the arbitrariness of language than with a psychic split in the speaker, or a cognitive breach between humanity and earth, or both. Yet, at all its removes from various origins, the poem itself serves as transposed memory. More disturbingly, it may ‘remember the future’.
Ms: LML. Published text: AANP, LP.
7 December 1914
The Signpost may be in subtextual dialogue with Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth…
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Frost conceived ‘The Road Not Taken’ as a parody of Thomas, consciously assuming his friend’s more hesitant personality: ‘While living in Gloucestershire in 1914, Frost frequently took long walks with Thomas through the countryside. Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a “better” direction’ (SLRF, xiv). But Cooke questions Frost’s story as an ‘attempt to veil …secret places of his mind from the over-curious’ (WC, 206). Certainly, Frost objected to readers taking the ‘sigh’ of his last line straight, rather than as an ironical implication that no real ‘difference’ is at stake. On 26 June 1915 he wrote to Thomas: ‘I wonder if it was because you were trying too much out of regard for me that you failed to see that the sigh was a mock sigh, hypo-critical for the fun of the thing. I dont suppose I was ever sorry for anything I ever did except by assumption to see how it would feel. I may have been sorry for having given a certain kind of people a chance at me: I have passionately regretting exposing myself’ (RFET, 70). Here Frost is replying to a letter in which Thomas had both accepted the ‘sigh’ at face value, and represented ‘choice’ as illusory: ‘It is all very well for you poets in a wood to say you choose, but you don’t. If you do, ergo I am no poet. I didn’t choose my sex yet I was simpler then. And so I can’t “leave off” going in after myself tho some day I may’ (RFET, 63-4). Frost’s wariness of being seen to sigh and Thomas’s compulsion to ‘go in after myself’ cast light on their aesthetic ‘divergences’.
Even if he did not altogether know himself, Frost knew Thomas. That this poem’s ‘I’ (pursuing a kind of static quest) never leaves the signpost reflects patterns elsewhere: ‘I could not decide. If I went on foot, I could do as I liked on the Plain. There are green roads leading from everywhere to everywhere. But, on the other hand, it might be necessary at that time of year to keep walking all day, which would mean at least thirty miles a day, which was more than I was inclined for’ (IPS, 16). ‘I looked at my maps. Should I go through Swindon, or Andover, or Winchester, or Southampton? I had a mind to compass all four; but the objection was that the kinks thus to be made would destroy any feeling of advance in the journey’ (IPS, 26-7). The moral map (above all, the choice between enlisting and going to America) also exacted obsessive deliberation or retrospection. Thomas would ‘spend hours, when I ought to be reading or enjoying the interlacing flight of 3 kestrels, in thinking out my motives for this or that act or word in the past until I long for sleep’ (LGB, 129). With its echo of folk-tales in which travellers fatefully choose their road, The Signpost gives Thomas’s poetic journey ‘in after’ himself an archetypal starting-point. If his poems are stages in a quest or question, it stands as question mark.
8-10. A voice says…never been born. The first ‘voice’ speaks for (what should have been) zestfully confident youth. In fact, the gloom-quotient in Thomas’s early letters and diaries supports the second voice’s point that self-doubt is not age-specific. Seemingly older and wiser, like ‘another’ in November, this voice speaks for earthly existence with all its necessities and contradictions. Notes for the poem include: ‘When – / Will there come a day /When I could wish to be alive / Somehow 20 or 40 or not’ (FNB79).
11. One hazel lost a leaf of gold. This shorter line and a flattening out of stress in its first three syllables intensify ‘loss’. The contrasting anapaestic beat of l.12 epitomises a larger counterpoint between lyrical and folk-verse rhythms in Thomas’s couplets: tradition and the individual talent also meet at the signpost. Delicate variations of stress enhance the eerie setting: ‘chill’ sea, ‘shy’ sun, ‘skeleton weeds’. These images are among the ‘signs’ that the poem ‘reads’. But when the second voice takes over, stressed and unstressed syllables become more sharply distinguished, rhymes and line-endings more emphatic. ‘Be’, significantly, is rhymed three times.
13, 21. ’twould…’Twill. Such dialect contractions, most frequently ‘’twas’, recur in Thomas’s poems, not only where (as in Man and Dog) country people are speaking or spoken with. Depending on context and tone, Thomas also switches between them and Standard English in first-person lyrics. Indexed to the poem’s urgency, ‘’twas’ occurs four times in March. It appears in the last line of Ambition (an ironical usage); in l.39 of May 23 (a celebratory usage); and in l.4 of Home (81, an affirmative usage). But he slowed down ‘’Twas June’ in Adlestrop (l.4) to ‘It was late June’. According to his brother Julian, Thomas wished to make his later prose ‘as near akin as possible to the talk of a Surrey peasant’ (quoted, CET, Preface, 6). In The Signpost such talk adds to the archetypal aura, as do phrases like ‘it must befall’ and ‘between death and birth’. For Thomas’s interest in proverbial speech, see general note to Lob (215).
21-9. and your wish may be…out in the air. After reading ‘poems abounding in references to a future life’, Thomas reflected: ‘If we survived – “we” in any real sense – what joy could it be if from our thoughts this life were blotted?…And how “heavenly”? if we know not the lives beneath us, as poets and scientists know’ (Diary, 22 November 1901, NLW). ‘The life of Tirnanoge was all beautiful, being of a kind that men have always refused to think possible, because it was active and full of variety yet never brought death or decay, weariness or regret. This cannot easily be imagined by earthly men. They say that perfect happiness would be dull if it were possible. If they could imagine it, they would not love it so utterly when they possessed it like Ossian; many would refuse it because it wipes out the desire and the conscious memory of earth’ (CS, 78). Thomas often quotes or misquotes Wordsworth’s affirmation that ‘the very world’ (‘earth’ in Thomas’s versions) is ‘the place where in the end / We find our happiness, or not at all’ (1804 poem on the French Revolution). Even ‘a mouthful of earth’ is not a wholly ironical ‘gift’. Homesickness for earth, as predicted in these lines, also amounts to an ars poetica. Thomas lays out the conditions and materials of his poetry; sets its diurnal/seasonal coordinates; and attaches his underlying artistic ‘voice’ to someone ‘Standing upright out in the air /Wondering…’.
30. Wondering where he shall journey, O where?’ In coming full circle, the poem confirms a preference for earthly doubts over heavenly answers. To be is a question.
Ms: LML. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 5 the traveller’s-joy traveller’s-joy 14 see, see 24 birth, – birth, 27 Spring, – Spring, Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [MET] where it diverges from P.
14 December 1914
After Rain is the first poem in Thomas’s working notebook M1. No manuscript of the four poems printed next in this edition (Interval, The Other, Birds’ Nests, The Mountain Chapel) survives. Nor can any of these poems be precisely dated (some may antedate After Rain), although they were written before The Manor Farm (24 December). All five poems have been placed in a sequence chosen by the editor.
‘Each autumn a dozen little red apples hung on one of [the apple-tree’s] branches like a line of poetry in a foreign language, quoted in a book’ (HGLM, 145). ‘[?]Dripping clear (wind light) after days of rain and about 12 yellow apples are scattered smooth bright all over big crab in leafless dark copse…all boughs and berries plastered with raindrops…Rain shines on boughs and drops on dead leaves Stone has a green edge of grass but also under that a purple narrowed edge of dead moist leaves thick together’ (14 December, FNB79). As Coombes says, an ‘interesting “rain” anthology could be compiled from Thomas’s writings’ (HC, 89):
At all times I love rain, the early momentous thunder-drops, the perpendicular cataract shining, or at night the little showers, the spongy mists, the tempestuous mountain rain. I like to see it possessing the whole earth at evening, smothering civilisation, taking away from me myself everything except the power to walk under the dark trees and to enjoy as humbly as the hissing grass, while some twinkling house-light or song sung by a lonely man gives a foil to the immense dark force. I like to see the rain making the streets, the railway station, a pure desert, whether bright with lamps or not. It foams off the roofs and trees and bubbles into the water-butts. It gives the grey rivers a daemonic majesty. It scours the roads, sets the flints moving, and exposes the glossy chalk in the tracks through the woods. It does work that will last as long as the earth. It is about eternal business. In its noise and myriad aspects I feel the mortal beauty of immortal things. (SC, 274-5)
The ‘myriad aspects’ of rain are central to Thomas’s symbolism. It can suggest an alien or alienated ‘immense dark force’ (Rain) or softer qualities and a more sympathetic universe: ‘Half a kiss, half a tear’ (Sowing). In After Rain it is ‘both dark and bright’: a destroyer that has ravaged the scene (perhaps also interior) and a creator, an artist, adding new beauties.
17-18. like little black fish, inlaid, / As if they played. In Thomas’s fantasy ‘The Castle of Leaves’ children watch, when the castle falls, ‘the dead leaves swim by like fishes, crimson and emerald and gold’ (HGLM, 214). Thomas maintained a polite argument with Eleanor Farjeon over these lines: ‘“As if they played” I was anxious to have in. It describes the patterns of the fish but it comes in awkwardly perhaps after inlaid.’ Six days later: ‘I wonder whether I can do anything with “inlaid” and “played”. The inlaid, too, is at any rate perfectly precise as I saw the black leaves 2 years ago up at the top of the hill, so that neither is a rhyme word only’ (EF, 110-11). ‘Inlaid’ is an inlaid word.
24. Uncountable. This one-word, off-rhymed, run-on line breaks the poem’s formal mould just as it and the rainless lull end. Also placed in a sequence of liquid sounds, the line brims with the subliminally therapeutic return of rain. Thomas employs the same ‘limping’ couplet form to different effect in Head and Bottle.
Ms: M1. Published text: AANP, LP.
December 1914
For date, see general note to After Rain (154). While After Rain and Interval seem closely linked by December weather and moods, the latter’s aural rather than visual emphasis echoes a passage in The South Country: ‘The wind reigns …in the surging trees…yet in the open there is a strange silence because the roar in my ears as I walk deafens me to all sound…And yet once more the road pierces the dense woodland roar, form and colour buried as it were in sound’ (SC, 217-18).
3. makes way. ‘I mean in “Interval” that the night did postpone her coming a bit for the twilight. Night might have been expected to come down on the end of day and didn’t. “Held off” would have been stricter’ (EF, 110). ‘Makes way’, which suggests that night relinquishes a position already gained, aligns ‘brief twilight’ with unexpected remission in some psychic ‘storm’. Cf. The Ash Grove (l.5), where the word ‘interval’ also has temporal, spatial and psychological aspects.
22. Unwavering. The contrast with ‘Uncountable’ (After Rain, l.24) stakes out the poems’ shared poles of stability and flux.
24. ‘…“under storm’s wing” was not just for the metre’ (EF, 110).
32. This roaring peace. Cf. ‘stormy rest’. The oxymorons of Interval, set off by the poem’s strong beat and short line, complement the tessellated effects of After Rain. For Vernon Scannell: ‘all Edward Thomas’s poems show a deliberate and fruitful opposing of contrasting moods and attitudes and a counterpoising and reconciling of the language in which these attitudes are embodied. They reflect the ceaseless inner conflict and the struggle for peace which never seemed to give him respite. [Interval] shows clearly the way in which Thomas used opposites to create associative tensions which move gradually towards the final reconciliation of “This roaring peace”, the calm which is actually a suspended violence’ (VS, 17-18).
Ms: none. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 1 day: day. 6-8 Mounts and is lost / In the high beech-wood / It shines almost. Mounts beneath pines / To the high beech wood / It almost shines. 15 Above, the cloud pack Above it the rack 29 Die, Die Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [MET] rather than P. At the points of difference, MET seems rhythmically cruder.
December 1914
For date, see general note to After Rain (154). The Other reads like a prophetic microcosm of Thomas’s brief poetic career. Its allegorical landscape – in part, a transposed Wiltshire – spans his poetic habitats, and contains the seeds of later poems. As in The Signpost, but more elaborately, he adapts folk motifs (forest, haunted quest, helpers and frustrators of the questing hero, the Doppelgänger legend, signs and omens) to modern psychodrama. His symbolism of the journey taps into its archetypal sources. The result is what Louis MacNeice, in Varieties of Parable (London: Faber, 1965), calls ‘parable’ or ‘double-level writing’. Thomas’s chosen stanza, tightly rhymed ABABABCB [A in the first stanza] CC, seems well suited to parable. Its octosyllabic line and echo of the ballad-quatrain lend narrative impetus, while the clinching couplet helps to make each stanza a distinct stage in the quest. Yet, at the poem’s meditative climax, the stanza allows ‘Moments of everlastingness’ their necessary syntactical scope.
German Romanticism endowed the notion of a person’s double (Doppelgänger) ‘with tragic and fatal overtones…It may sometimes be our complement but is more often the foe with whom we are lured to fight… In some ancient traditions, meeting one’s double is an unlucky occurrence, and is sometimes even a presage of death’ (Penguin Dictionary of Symbols [1996], 306). For Karl Miller, ‘The double stands at the start of that cultivation of uncertainty by which the literature of the modern world has come to be distinguished’ (Miller, Doubles [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985], vi). “Doubles” intensified as a literary theme in the nineteenth century, with James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Like Henry James in The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Joseph Conrad in The Secret Sharer (1910), Thomas moves beyond quasi-Gothic scenarios towards the concern with the unconscious self that they prefigure. In 1912, he underwent analysis with Godwin Baynes: a charismatic doctor interested in Freud and psychological medicine, later Carl Jung’s chief British disciple. Yet here, as throughout his poetry, Thomas creates his own language for the workings of the psyche. Parable, which can transmute dream and nightmare, is among the structural strategies that enable him to objectify and universalise his problems.
Thomas’s originality as poetic psychoanalyst makes parallels with the ideas of Freud and Jung all the more interesting. In ‘Das Unheimliche’ [‘The Uncanny’] (1919), Freud sees the “double” both as self-critical ‘conscience’ and as ‘incorporating…all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we like to cling in fantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of free will’ (Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature, Penguin Freud Library 14 [1985], 357-8). Hélène Cixous writes of Freud’s essay in terms that might equally fit Thomas’s poem: ‘this search whose movement constitutes the labyrinth which instigates it; the sense of strangeness imposes its secret necessity everywhere’ (quoted in Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003], 16). Thomas’s ‘Other’ also has parallels with Jung’s ‘Shadow’, thus glossed by Jung in 1951: ‘The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognising the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance.’ Anthony Storr notes: ‘The shadow behaves compensatorily to consciousness; hence its effects can be positive as well as negative’ (ed., Anthony Storr, Jung: Selected Writings [London: Fontana, 1983], 91, 422). Thomas himself writes: ‘Probably every man has more or less clearly and more or less constantly before his mind’s eye an ideal self which the real seldom more than approaches. This ideal self may be morally or in other ways inferior, but it remains the standard by which the man judges his acts. Some men prove the existence of this ideal self by announcing now and then that they are misunderstood. Or they do things which they afterwards condemn as irrelevant or uncharacteristic and out of harmony’ (GB, 13-14).
Thomas’s use of opium during his twenties (the initials PO: Persian Opium appear in his diaries) may have precipitated experiences of duality. In autumn 1911 he wrote: ‘I hope it [vegetarianism] will cure my head, which is almost always wrong now – a sort of conspiracy going on in it which leaves me only a joint tenancy and a perpetual scare of the other tenant and wonder what he will do’ (JM, 172). His prose contains many thinly masked self-portraits and alter egos, their conception impelled by the need to understand his neurotic symptoms. Thus the depressive prose origin of Rain is voiced by ‘a ghostly double’ (IW, 280). The most explicit instance is the ‘Other Man’ in In Pursuit of Spring, a book that also fertilised The Other in subsidiary details. Thomas had noted in FNB62 (June 1913): ‘Other Man – wraith – when seen at Salterley I was not sure he had existed before – he avoids a Difficulty in telling truth’. First sighted freeing a caged chaffinch, then sketching a weather-vane, the Other Man surfaces at an inn:
At first I did not grasp the connection between this dripping, indubitably real man and the wraith of the day before. But he was absurdly pleased to recognise me, bowing with a sort of uncomfortable graciousness and a trace of a cockney accent. His expression changed in those few moments from a melancholy and too yielding smile to a pale, thin-lipped rigidity. I did not know whether to be pleased or not with the reincarnation, when he departed to change his clothes. (IPS, 119)
‘I suppose you write books,’ said I. ‘I do,’ said he. ‘What sort of books do you write?’ ‘I wrote one all about this valley of the Frome…But no one knows that it was the Frome I meant. You look surprised. Nevertheless, I got fifty pounds for it.’ ‘That is a lot of money for such a book!’ ‘So my publisher thought.’ ‘And you are lucky to get money for doing what you like.’ ‘What I like!’ he muttered, pushing his bicycle back uphill, past the goats by the ruin, and up the steps between walls that were lovely with humid moneywort, and saxifrage like filigree, and ivy-leaved toadflax. Apparently the effort loosened his tongue. He rambled on and on about himself, his past, his writing, his digestion; his main point being that he did not like writing. He had been attempting the impossible task of reducing undigested notes about all sorts of details to a grammatical, continuous narrative. He abused notebooks violently. He said that they blinded him to nearly everything that would not go into the form of notes; or, at any rate, he could never afterwards reproduce the great effects of Nature and fill in the interstices merely – which was all they were good for – from the notes. The notes – often of things which he would otherwise have forgotten – had to fill the whole canvas. Whereas, if he had taken none, then only the important, what he truly cared for, would have survived in his memory, arranged not perhaps as they were in Nature, but at least according to the tendencies of his own spirit. (IPS, 219-20)
The portrait of the Other Man involves self-irony and self-parody. It satirises Thomas’s literary problems (with a reflexive swipe at In Pursuit of Spring), his love of Nature and traditional things, his diet-fads and clay-pipe smoking, his ‘melancholy’ introversion. The poem reverses the roles of narrator-protagonist and double – insofar as they are distinct. The ‘eager’ narrator becomes the stalker, the greater ‘bore’, while the Other – up to a point – represents a better or better-adjusted Self. Thus his shadower may be the Shadow. At the same time, if psychic health can only be attained through acknowledging the Shadow, the Other is also the defensive ‘ego-personality’. Since the poem’s action takes place inside one head or psyche, Self and Other keep crossing over. See Andrew Motion’s analysis (AM, 37-51).
2-4. To feel the light…the sweet mint. The poem begins with a burst of sense-impressions. The synaesthesia ‘feel the light’ will be picked up by ‘tasted sunlight’ (l.15). Motion notes that ‘clear sight is crucially absent’ (AM, 38). But this blind sensing of the world suggests birth or youth as well as (recurrent) emergence from a dark place in the psyche. It is characteristic of parable to encompass the human life cycle.
17-20. What to do…until myself I knew. Cooke comments: ‘Even the syntax makes him the pursuer of himself’ (WC, 204). Cf. the syntactical mystery tour of lines 89-90. ‘When caught’ cuts both ways, like ‘keep in sight’ (l.102).
21. I tried the inns. ‘An impulse as sick and as profound as the fatigue du nord, or as that which drove Richard Jefferies from inland meadows to the sea, goads some of us to the life of inns. Something, we may think, that overpowers the delicious sense of home, bids us exchange that for an abode that is a truer symbol of our inconstant lodging on the earth’ (HS, 39). Besides ‘inconstant lodging’, inns (as in Aspens) may represent society: Thomas compares an ‘inn door’ to ‘the entrance to a bright cave in the middle of the darkness: the illumination had a kind of blessedness…not without foreignness; and a half-seen man within it belonged to a world, blessed indeed, but far different from this one of mine, dark, soft, and tranquil. I felt that I could walk on thus, sipping the evening silence and solitude, endlessly’ (IPS, 214). Motion detects a contrast between the (rural) ‘inn in the sun’, linked with a ‘happy mood’, and the narrator’s reception in this ‘urban context [where] social harmony has been replaced by isolation’ (AM, 40). But the poem draws on Thomas’s touchiness about all inhospitable inns, as well as his sense of all society as ‘foreign’. He recalls his anger at being churlishly refused a bed in a country village: ‘To be elbowed out at nightfall after a day’s walking by an unconscious conspiracy of a whole village was enough either to produce either a hate of Chiseldon or a belief that the devil or a distinguished relative was organising the opposition’ (IW, 307).
22. a long gabled high-street grey: a trace of Wiltshire (see note on lines 61-80): ‘Marlborough town, with its dormered and gabled High Street, long, wide and discreet, and, though genial, obviously an entity which the visitor can know little of…The downs and Savernake Forest dominate the town. It is but a place at the edge of the forest’ (RJ, 5).
24. weary way: perhaps an echo of Gray’s ‘Elegy’ (‘The ploughman homeward plods his weary way’), but see note on l.87.
29-30. never-foamless shores / Make better friends than those dull boors. A similar declaration to that about ‘man’s ingratitude’ in ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’ (As You Like It, II, vii). Thomas may also allude to ‘the foam / Of perilous seas’ in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, thereby countering social alienation with poetic vocation. Yet ‘dull boors’, a phrase that covers his sensitivity to perceived neglect by ‘friends’, strikes a paranoid note that prepares for the next stanza.
32. Aimed at the unseen moving goal. In its reflexive aspect, this line sums up the empiricist and agnostic metaphysics that make the quest / journey the defining trope of Thomas’s poetry. Cf. ‘some goal / I touched then’ (I never saw that land before); ‘I had not found my goal’ (Some eyes condemn).
37. Desire of desire. ‘Desire’ (like ‘beauty’) is a word that survives from Thomas’s formative exposure to Romantic poetry and his baptism in fin-de-siècle aesthetics. It tends to carry a feverish, erotic charge. Although ‘desire’ also denotes other kinds of lack, including frustrated creativity, at one level the poem has moved from friendship to love (‘kiss’), thus prefiguring themes of Thomas’s love poetry. ‘Remedies / For all desire’ may be any alleviation that entails self-suppression, as when Thomas wonders ‘whether for a person like myself whose most intense moments were those of depression a cure that destroys the depression may not destroy the intensity – a desperate remedy?’ (LGB, 163). Such ‘cures’ aggravate neurosis by inducing ‘Desire of desire’. This vicious spiral takes the narrator ‘beyond control’, and prevents ‘wholeness’.
40. I quite forgot I could forget. Here difficult memory is no longer being evaded or sedated or sublimated.
53-4. To find him out…bore. ‘I don’t like…to meet continually some respectable acquaintance with whom I must stop to bore or be bored’ (SL, 23). ‘Find him out’ rather than ‘find him’ makes ‘confession’, like boredom, a two-way traffic.
61-80. I sought then in solitude…An old inhabitant of earth. On 18 December 1913, when staying with Vivian Locke Ellis at Selsfield House, East Grinstead, Thomas recorded in FNB67: ‘East Grinstead. 4.30 one of those eternal evenings – the wind gone, no one upon the road. I grasp the stile by the holly and look over the ploughland to the near ridge, the crocketed spruces, the dark house mass, and behind them a soft dulling flame-coloured sky where large shapeless soft dull-dark clouds in roughly horizontal lines are massing with one bright star in an interstice – and far behind me an owl calls again and again and somewhere far to one side in a hid hollow a dog barks and nearer, one or two blackbirds chink as they fly along hedges. What does it mean? I feel an old inhabitant of earth at such times. How many hundred times have I seen the same since I was 15’. The note continues: ‘at 5.30 wind moaning and over the west is a mass of cloud like a great hand with a star eastward’. The composite landscape of these stanzas also recalls climactic images of Salisbury Plain in In Pursuit of Spring. As in Lob, Wiltshire provides conditions for revelation: ‘I emerged into the glory and peace of the Plain, of the unbounded Plain and the unbounded sky, and the marriage of sun and wind that was being celebrated upon them’; ‘over the wall [of the Plain] rounded clouds, pure white and sunlit, were heaving up …The late afternoon grew more and more quiet and still, and in the warmth I mistook a distant dog’s bark, and again a cock’s crowing, for the call of a cuckoo, mixed with the blackbird’s singing…already the blackbirds were chinking and shifting places along the hedgerows. And presently it was dark, but for a lamp at an open door, and silent, but for a chained dog barking’ (IPS, 172, 177-8). After the disappointments of social intercourse, ‘solitude’ becomes intrinsic to self-discovery and to the integration projected onto harmony with, and within, Nature. ‘Naked’ implies return to a primal state. The narrator communes with ‘hidden’ and ‘unseen’ things. The ‘Other’ (along with ‘difference’) vanishes from these stanzas, in which the two merge under the sign of ‘one star, one lamp, one peace’.
67. crocketed dark trees. Crockets are Gothic architectural ornaments in the form of buds or curled leaves: this phrase returns them to their natural origins. Thomas describes Steeple Ashton church as ‘bristling with coarse crockets all over, and knobby with coarse gargoyles’ (IPS, 176).
79. solemn quiet mirth. This echoes a phrase in ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), a poem that Thomas quotes in Feminine Influence on the Poets: ‘When a sedate Content the Spirit feels, / And no fierce Light disturbs, whilst it reveals; /…Till the free Soul to a compos’dness charm’d, / Finding the Elements of Rage disarm’d, / O’er all below, a solemn Quiet grown, / Joys in th’inferiour World, and thinks it like her Own’. Thomas comments: ‘[the poem] makes us feel that she has had the magical experience which has only been perfectly expressed by much later poets’ (FIP, 60). ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ may have influenced lines 61-80 more generally, also Liberty (see note, 261).
80. An old inhabitant of earth. See Thomas’s use of this key formulation in the passage from FNB67 quoted above. His praise of George Meredith links it with his favourite Wordsworth quotation (see note, 154): ‘From first to last he wrote as an inhabitant of this earth, where, as Wordsworth says, “we have our happiness or not at all”, just or unjust’ (IPS, 60). In ‘The First Cuckoo’ Thomas analyses our pleasure in recurrent seasonal events: ‘I am not forgetting how much of the thrill may be due to the feeling of a fresh start, combined with that of being an old inhabitant of the earth’ (LS, 60). ‘An old inhabitant of earth’ situates the speaker, healingly, not in the contemporary social world (‘far off from men’, l.86), but in a community defined by an ecological sense of history: ‘[Salisbury Plain] makes us feel the age of the earth, the greatness of Time, Space, and Nature; the littleness of man even in an aeroplane, the fact that the earth does not belong to man, but man to the earth’ (IPS, 150). ‘The Stile’, based on a harmonious walk with a friend, ends at sunset with the narrator – now solitary – saying: ‘Somewhere…I was gathered up with an immortal company, where I and poet and lover and flower and cloud and star were equals, as all the little leaves were equal…And in that company I learned that I am something which no fortune can touch, whether I be soon to die, or long years away…I shall go on, something that is here and there like the wind, something unconquerable, something not to be separated from the dark earth and the light sky, a strong citizen of infinity and eternity’ (LAT, 50-1).
81-7. Once the name…everlastingness. Thomas’s concern with the interpenetration of ‘melancholy’ and ‘happiness’ will reappear in Melancholy and October (see notes, 231, 259). ‘Melancholy’ is indeed the name he gives to his depression in early letters and diaries: ‘I cannot relieve my melancholy today; it is so oppressive that I long to have some physical ill which would swallow it’ (Diary, 4 January 1902, NLW). At that time, he was devoted to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and identifying with De Quincey’s Opium-Eater. ‘When…bowers’ seems to be a self-contained clause that proposes alternative versions of the narrator’s condition: another doubleness. If an understood ‘I’ is the subject of ‘Smiled and enjoyed’, this suppression of the first-person singular and the odd syntax situate him in a psychic orbit where his symptoms change their aspect, perhaps where they are translated into poetry. ‘Powers’ implies resurgent creativity.
87. Moments of everlastingness: an oxymoron, like ‘everlasting lease’ in l.70. Both phrases may allude to the writing of poems. Thomas included Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Retreat’ in his Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air: ‘But felt through all this fleshly dress / Bright shoots of everlastingness’. Another seventeenth-century religious poet may also hover over what is almost a declaration of faith. Coombes notes that The Other ‘curiously recalls in one or two places’ George Herbert’s ‘The Pilgrimage’: e.g., l.24 parallels Herbert’s line, ‘A long it was and weary way’ (HC, 217). Like Thomas’s ‘goal’, Herbert’s ‘gladsome hill’ is always ‘further’. In his introduction to Herbert’s The Temple and A Priest to the Temple (1908) Thomas appreciates the Englishness of Herbert’s Anglicanism, but clearly prefers more visionary religious poetry: ‘he seems most himself when he is most an Anglican…and he rarely soars out of that gracious and well-ordered park’ (xi). Yet Herbert’s ‘afflicted’ mode (as in ‘The Pilgrimage’) is not remote from Thomas’s own sensibility. In Pursuit of Spring visits Bemerton, once Herbert’s parish: ‘The bells, the sunshine after storm, the elm trees, and the memory of that pious poet, put me into what was perhaps an unconscious imitation of a religious humour. And in that humour, repeating [Herbert’s ‘Sunday’] with a not wholly sham unction, I rode away from Bemerton. The Other Man, however, overtook me, and upset the humour.’ He does so by ‘repeating in his turn, with unction exaggerated to an incredibly ridiculous degree, [Herbert’s] sonnet on Sin’ (IPS, 140).
89-90. See note on lines 17-20.
98. under a ban. A ‘ban’ is a curse or interdict that carries supernatural sanction. Coombes says: ‘when the other in the taproom complains that he lives “under a ban” because of the pursuer’s relentlessness, he is stating a condition which is precisely central to the pursuer himself’ (HC, 219).
100. I slipped away. The impulse on each side to evade the Other has its counterpart in how Thomas depicts his reaction to being overtaken in a walking race by ‘the boy who notoriously ran’: ‘I hated being pursued…I began to believe that the running boy was gaining on me. I could not stand it. Turning off the track I threw myself down on the grass on the pretext that I had a stitch’ (CET, 115). The Other’s abuse of the narrator may denote ‘resistance’ (Jung’s word for ‘ban’) to acknowledging one’s Shadow.
101-10. And now…cease. ‘I awoke to hear ducklings squeaking, and a starling in the pine tree imitating the curlew and the owl hunting’ (IPS, 216). This stanza brings the poem full circle and repeats its course in miniaturised form. However, in keeping with overtones of death rather than birth, the repeated elements have become ‘uncanny’, unheimlich. Freud defines the uncanny as a ‘frightening’ effect produced by ‘something repressed which recurs’; also as ‘nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression’ (363-4). The disturbingly imitative starlings contrast with the earlier ‘kestrel and woodpecker’, ‘marshbird’ and ‘blackbird’. The effect resembles the exchange of attributes between birds, fish and human beings in The Hollow Wood (see note, 171). Yet, if this distortion in Nature mirrors the blocked meeting between narrator and Other, further cycles of the journey are anticipated. Perhaps a ‘fortunate’ search, integration or remission, can only be ‘brief’ (lines 88, 91).
104. I steal. Miller glosses ‘steal’ as ‘a furtiveness which courts or desires disclosure…[The narrator] steals towards rather than away – which would have been the more familiar move of the two’ (Miller, Doubles, 27).
Ms: none. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 85 weaknesses weakness [misprint] Note: LP is identical with the only surviving typescript, sent by Thomas to Robert Frost.
December 1914
For date, see general note to After Rain (154). ‘In the dense green coverts of the summer hedgerows nests were difficult to find, but now they show at every turn. The cunning basket-work of the lesser whitethroat, so frail as to seem incapable of holding the smallest egg, is filled with rotting black leaves and haws that have dropped thus early’ (TWL, 91). Chapter 7 of The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans recalls Thomas’s birds-nesting as a boy. W.H. Davies’s elegy for Thomas, ‘Killed in Action’, alludes to later ‘days…When you and I, with thoughtful mind, /Would help a bird to hide her nest,/ For fear of other hands less kind’.
5. no need of eyes to see them with: a paradox that implies Thomas’s high standards for ‘seeing’ natural phenomena, and hence for other forms of perception. Cf. ‘And now I see as I look’ in First known when lost, which has other links with Birds’ Nests.
13. winter nest. P and PTP have ‘winter nests’. Like CP1978, this edition prefers the singular, to which ‘nests’ is altered in several typescripts, and which seems warranted by the specificity of ‘Once’ and ‘there’, and by the following entry in FNB79 among scattered notes for the poem: ‘one – grass and goosegrass and a squirrel’s dined there often’. Thomas’s Wiltshire mentor ‘Dad’ Uzzell showed him a pet dormouse’s ‘empty kernels…bored with a round hole as neatly as if it had been drilled’ (ETFN 46 [January 2002], 8).
Ms: none. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 11 knew them not never found them 12 and squirrels or squirrels 14 into: into; 15 hazel-nuts, hazel nuts; Note: In P lines 1 and 2 end with full stops: probably a misprint since PTP has commas. For this edition’s other departure from P, see note on l.13 above. CP1978 throughout follows a typescript [MET] rather than P.
December 1914
For date, see general note to After Rain (154). Thomas’s prose contains several representations of Welsh chapels:
[Siloh stands] bravely, – at night, it often seems perilously, – at the end of a road, beyond which rise immense mountains and impassable… But Siloh stands firm, and ventures once a week to send up a thin music that avails nothing against the wind; although close to it, threatening it, laughing at it, able to overwhelm it, should the laugh become cruel, is a company of elder trees, which, seen at twilight, are sentinels embossed upon the sky – sentinels of the invisible, patient, unconquerable powers: or (if one is lighter-hearted) they seem the empty homes of what the mines and chapels think they have routed; and at midnight they are not empty, and they love the mountain rain, and at times they summon it and talk with it, while the preacher thunders and the windows of the chapel gleam. (BW, 25-6)
…a little desolate white church and white-walled graveyard, which on December evenings will shine and seem to be the only things at one with the foamy water and the dim sky, before the storm; and when the storm comes the church is gathered up into its breast and is a part of it, so that he who walks in the churchyard is certain that the gods – the gods that grow old and feeble and die – are there still, and with them all those phantoms following phantoms in a phantom land…which make Welsh history, so that to read it is like walking in that place among December leaves…while an ancient wind is ceaselessly remembering ancient things. (BW, 199)
The church, a plain building of harsh stone on the highest ground, was locked, but the grave digger was still at work filling up with bits of limestone the grave of a Morgan or Jones or Jenkins or Evans…The grass grew among the tombs thick and long…when I crossed the brook the rustle of an overhanging aspen deceived me into thinking I heard water run. Between that sound and the rush of water there is not more difference than between the meaning of Penderyn to me and its meaning to an inhabitant. (‘Penderyn’, COE, 26-7)
The poem, like the prose, is tinged by the mystique of desolation and dereliction in which “Celticism” has ‘shrouded’ western landscapes since the publication of James Macpherson’s Ossian in the 1760s. In Beautiful Wales Thomas attacks ‘lovers of the Celt’ as aesthetes and poseurs: ‘Their aim and ideal is to go about the world in a state of self-satisfied dejection, interrupted, and perhaps sustained, by days when they consume strange mixed liquors to the tune of all the fine old Celtic songs which are fashionable…I cannot avoid the opinion that to boast of the Celtic spirit is to confess you have it not’ (see BW, 10-13). Yet his own ‘early feeling for Wales’ had been partly formed by Celticism: ‘[it] culminated in my singing of Moore’s “Minstrel Boy”…I knew only of Welsh harps. I…trembled with a kind of gloomy pleasure in being about to die for Wales’ (Addenda to CET, BC). And, despite now mocking the Ossianic cult of lost battles and lost civilisation (the ‘reader feels that it is a baseness to exist’), Thomas can still write of a Welsh mountain: ‘it is clear, as it is not in a city or in an exuberant English county, that the world is old and troubled…Sometimes comes a thought that it is a huge gravestone…It belongs to the past, to the dead; and the dead, as they are more numerous, so here they are greater than we’ (BW, 149). Similarly, Cornwall’s ‘deserted mines are frozen cries of despair as if they had perished in conflict with the waste’ (SC, 158-9). But if The Mountain Chapel and The Manor Farm appear antithetical as earthly abodes, autobiographical loci or psychic states, the chapel has ‘homely’ aspects, and ‘empty homes’ haunt Thomas’s Hampshire landscapes too. Indeed, Celticism may have influenced the prophetic thrust of his eco-historical vision. The Mountain Chapel prefigures The Mill-Water in being reflexively occupied with natural sounds that overpower the ‘human’.
4-5. The loss of the brook’s voice / Falls like a shadow. This negative synaesthesia reinforces the sense that life has receded.
9-16. saying still…I shall be’. The wind’s speech echoes, although more bleakly, the philosophy that Richard Jefferies puts into the mouth of the wind in Wood Magic: ‘this [prehistoric] man, and all his people…were all buried on the tops of the hills…There I come to them still, and sing through the long dry grass…The sun comes, too, and the rain, but I am here most…I am always here’ (quoted, RJ, 148).
16. Till there is nothing. Possibly an allusion to W.B. Yeats’s play Where There is Nothing, from which Thomas took his epigraph for The South Country. See note on Roads (269).
32-42. a man…This wind was old. The scene may constitute the only chapel where ‘a man’ like Thomas – a post-Darwinian agnostic with an ecocentric vision – can worship (see note on the end of February Afternoon, 274). The speaker looks beyond a Welsh chapel, beyond the pagan (Celtic) gods that its setting conjures up, beyond poetic pantheons, to invoke the wind as the proper object of awe.
Ms: none. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 10 birth birth, 15 came; came: 16/17 no stanza-break stanza break 31 somewhere, somewhere 32-3 off, there’s a man could / Be off there’s some man could / Live 35 dire, dire 37 clearly; clearly, 41 gods Gods Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [JT] [in which ‘Be’ is cancelled for ‘Live’], rather than LP. The basis of the LP text is unknown, but the repetition ‘somewhere…some man’ seems awkward, as does ‘Live happy’.
24 December 1914
Thomas included Haymaking and The Manor Farm in his anthology This England (TE, see general note to Lob, 214) under his pseudonym ‘Edward Eastaway’. Preceded by Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude’ (see note, 263), and numbered I and II, the poems end the section ‘Her Sweet Three Corners’. Like the anthology itself, they seem designed to suggest ‘some of the echoes called up by the name of England’ (TE, ‘Note’), and to counter wartime rhetoric that took England’s name in vain. Thomas’s Summer and Winter scenes, set in long perspectives, aim at a deeper form of cultural resistance. Yet, while Haymaking, written just before Thomas enlisted, ends ambiguously, the climax of The Manor Farm strikes an unusually hyperbolic note, perhaps because it enacts the discovery of an ‘English’ Muse. A process of internal as well as external thaw culminates in epiphany. Years earlier, Thomas had evoked a similar oasis in winter: ‘almost at a farmhouse door, a great yew-tree leans over…On the ancient bricks so dull and brown the yellow blossoms of the jasmine are studded thick, and they creep on to the tiled roof, weather-stained to browns and dingy reds…pied pigeons fluttering among the horses feet’ (TWL, 114-15). ‘Winter Music’, timed at ‘the end of the first warm day in February’, features a house ‘glow[ing] with tiles of olive and ochre and orange’ and ‘the huge, quiet, all-sustaining earth mutely communing with the sun’ (LAT, 69-73). More immediately, the poem is set near Steep: ‘at Prior’s Dean, where the Elizabethan house looks across at the primitive little Norman church and its aged yew’ (WW, 34). In moving from locality to ‘This England’, The Manor Farm overtly follows the structure for thinking about nationality – and for writing poetry – at which Thomas arrives in his essay ‘England’: ‘I believe…that all ideas of England are developed, spun out, from such a centre into something large or infinite, solid or aëry…that England is a system of vast circumferences circling round the minute neighbouring points of home’ (LS, 111).
1-2. The rock-like mud unfroze…road. Hard, stressed consonants unfreeze in ‘unfroze’, giving way to more liquid sounds. Thomas had attempted a similar effect in prose: ‘Down each side of every white road runs a stream that sings and glitters in ripples like innumerable crystal flowers. Water drips and trickles and leaps and gushes and oozes everywhere, and extracts the fragrance of earth and green and flowers under the heat that hastens to undo the work of the snow’ (SC, 41).
8. yew-tree opposite. ‘From historical records and analysis of ring growth and evidence in the landscape it now seems certain that large numbers of churchyard yews are not so much “coeval” with the church as vastly older than it, often pre-dating Christianity itself. Most probably they were the lode-stones round which early, possibly pagan, religious sites grew, which in their turn formed the basis for sites of Christian worship’ (Richard Mabey, Nature Cure [London: Chatto & Windus, 2005], 168).
18. The Winter’s cheek flushed: a risky personification. Elsewhere Thomas intermingles seasons more subtly (see note on But these things also, 203).
22. lain: ‘lurked’ and ‘waited’ are alternatives rejected in BL.
24. This England, Old already, was called Merry. ‘This England’ (‘England’ in BL) quotes John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II (II, i); ‘Merry’ quotes Robert of Gloucester: ‘Already, before Langland, a Gloucester man, Robert of Gloucester, had called England “merry” in his chronicle: – “England is a right merry land, of all on earth it is best, / Set in the end of the world as here, all in the west.” It was the Merry England of the English people, “full of mirth and of game, and men oft-times able to mirth and game, free men of heart and with tongue”’ (‘England’, LS, 101-2). Despite this pedigree and Hazlitt’s essay ‘Merry England’, excerpted in the ‘Merry England’ section of This England, the line takes another stylistic risk. Thomas defended it to W.H. Hudson: ‘But about “Merry” in “The Manor Farm”, I rather think I will stick to it. If one can feel what one has written, and not what one meant. I feel here as if the merry England asleep at Prior’s Dean added to the sleepiness and enriched it somehow’ (SL, 108).
Ms: BL. Published text: TE, P. Differences from CP1978: 9 The church and yew Small church, great yew, Note: CP1978 follows TE rather than P, which is validated by PTP.
25 December 1914
Thomas’s earliest memories were inseparable from song: ‘The songs, first of my mother, then of her younger sister, I can hear not only afar off behind the veil but on this side of it also. I was, I should think, a very still listener whom the music flowed through and filled to the exclusion of all thought and of all sensation except of blissful easy fullness, so that too early or too sudden ceasing would have meant pangs of expectant emptiness’ (CET, 13). ‘[Edward] loved singing – old songs, racy songs, songs that had won the acceptance of a robust democracy as a permanent possession, songs of Tudor fragility and daintiness – but he limited his audience to a family circle… He would perch a small child on his knee, and clasp his clay pipe…and the music that was in him would come forth, wistfully or jauntily’ (LJB, 88). ‘I prefer any country church or chapel to Winchester or Chichester or Canterbury Cathedral, just as I prefer “All round my hat”, or “Somer is icumen in”, to Beethoven’ (SC, 4).
With reference to Thomas’s anthology The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air (1907), R. George Thomas comments: ‘[his] informed interest in folk-music…has almost passed unnoticed by critics of his poetry’ (LGB, 127n.). Jonathan Barker’s essay ‘Edward Thomas and the Folk Tradition’ makes up some of the deficit (JB, 133-46). When compiling the Pocket Book, he sought out the most authentic words and airs from song-collectors like Cecil Sharp, and supplied musical notation, especially for lesser-known songs. Thomas’s division of the Pocket Book into sections (The Invitation, The Start in the Morning, Wayside Rest, Village and Inn, The Footpath, Evening) makes it an embryonic This England constructed as a journey. All this associates him with a movement of indigenous cultural retrieval that had begun in the eighteenth century, with Burns and Wordsworth, and was then renewing itself. Reviewing Sharp’s English Folk-Songs and Francis B. Gummere’s The Popular Ballad, he hoped that folk-melodies might be ‘the foundation of a truly English school of music that may equal those other schools which have grown up where folksong is not only indigenous but alive, beloved and national’ (Daily Chronicle, 23 January 1908). The folksong movement influenced Ralph Vaughan Williams’s music, Thomas’s poetry, Ivor Gurney’s music and poetry. Vaughan Williams and Gurney would later set poems by Thomas.
[O]f all music, the old ballads and folk songs and their airs are richest in the plain, immortal symbols. The best of them seem to be written in a language that should be universal, if only simplicity were truly simple to mankind. Their alphabet is small; their combinations are as the sunlight or the storm, and their words also are symbols. Seldom have they any direct relation to life as the realist believes it to be. They are poor in such detail as reveals a past age or a country not our own. They are in themselves epitomes of whole generations, of a whole countryside. They are the quintessence of many lives and passions made into a sweet cup for posterity…The words, in league with a fair melody, lend themselves to infinite interpretations, according to the listener’s heart. What great literature by known authors enables us to interpret thus by virtue of its subtlety, ballads and their music force us to do by their simplicity. The melody and the story or the song move us suddenly and launch us into an unknown. They are not art, they come to us imploring a new lease of life on the sweet earth, and so we come to give them something which the dull eye sees not in the words and notes themselves, out of our own hearts, as we do when we find a black hearthstone among the nettles…(HE, 226-7)
Perhaps folksong takes Thomas deeper into England than does the ‘Manor Farm’. But, as the Welsh, Scottish and Irish songs in the Pocket Book indicate, he was not only interested in English songs or in songs for England’s sake. By mixing poems with songs he was contributing to the more strictly literary revival that W.B. Yeats highlights in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (London: Oxford University Press, 1936): ‘Folk-song…must, because never declamatory or eloquent, fill the scene. If anybody will turn these pages attending to poets born in the ’fifties, ’sixties, and ’seventies, he will find how successful are their folk-songs and their imitations’ (xiii). In dismissing ‘realists’, Thomas (like Yeats) attaches folksong to symbolist aesthetics. Yet ‘plain, immortal symbols’ obliquely rebukes the privatised obscurity into which symbolist poems can fall (see Introduction, 19). Thomas speculates: ‘I cannot help wondering whether the great work done in the last century and a half towards the recovery of old ballads in their integrity will have any effect beyond the entertainment of a few scientific men and lovers of what is ancient, now that the first effects upon Wordsworth and his contemporaries have died away. Can it possibly give a vigorous impulse to a new school of poetry that shall treat the life of our time and what in past times has most meaning for us as freshly as those ballads did the life of their time?’ (SC, 241).
Evidently Thomas himself received such an ‘impulse’. His two ‘old songs’ signal its pervasive workings in his poetry – as varieties of refrain, for instance – and in January 1915 he wrote The Penny Whistle and The Gypsy: Muse-poems that invoke folk-music’s archetypal sources. Barker maintains that ‘over one third of [his] poems show evidence of the influence of the ballad tradition in adapting the four line ballad stanza pattern’ (JB, 139). For Smith, Thomas’s concern with folksong expresses his attraction to utterance that is social, communal, collective; while, at the same time: ‘What interests [him]…is the moment of separation between individual voice and community’ (see SS, 159-67). Yet Thomas also felt that the historical ‘separation’ between folksong and poetry had both distorted and gendered poetic tradition: ‘Could English poetry have been founded earlier upon the native ballad instead of upon conceited ceremonious and exotic work, it would not have spent two centuries in an almost exclusively masculine world’ (FIP, 14). In An Old Song I and II, as in The Signpost, tradition and the individual talent visibly cross-fertilise. Each ‘old song’ turns into a celebration of Thomas’s new song.
‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ appears in both the Pocket Book and This England. Its imagery of a subversive night-life must have appealed: Richard Jefferies’s The Amateur Poacher, with its ‘spice of illegality and daring’, was a formative book (CET, 134). Thomas easily adapts the song to autobiography, including the ‘moment’ when the speaker is ‘made a man that sings out of his heart’ – ‘made a poet’, perhaps. But if he translates the extraverted tale of ‘me and my companions’ into soliloquy, he also translates psychic tensions into folk-idiom. His main formal deviation from the original is the unrhymed third line of each stanza. After the first stanza, this line sets up the refrain to express reflexive ‘delight’ in ‘singing’ as much as ‘roaming’. The refrain becomes a song – to song – within a song.
13. Since then I’ve thrown away a chance to fight a gamekeeper. Walking in the countryside near Dymock, Gloucestershire, in October 1914, Thomas and Robert Frost met Lord Beauchamp’s gamekeeper who threatened them with a shotgun. The Frosts were then living in The Gallows, a house at Ryton owned by Lord Beauchamp. One reason for the gamekeeper’s behaviour was wartime suspicion of strangers. Frost reacted angrily, and wanted to ‘fight’ the gamekeeper. But when the poets sought him out, he threatened them again. Although Lord Beauchamp reprimanded the gamekeeper, Thomas felt that he had been cowardly; and, as this line may imply, the belief entered his thoughts about enlisting. See Introduction (17) and Sean Street, The Dymock Poets (Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan: Seren Books, 1994), 114-16.
19. to sing or whistle just. ‘As to “sing and whistle first” [sic], I don’t think “to whistle and to sing” which is formally correct is as good. If I am consciously doing anything I am trying to get rid of the last rags of rhetoric and formality which left my prose so often with a dead rhythm only. If I can be honest and am still bad in rhythm it will be because I am bad in rhythm’ (EF, 110).
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Note on title: The next poem was numbered II in a typescript sent to Frost. In PTP its title appears as An Old Song II. Where these successively composed poems are printed together, it seems justifiable to number them.
26 December 1914
See notes on previous poem. ‘[Edward] delighted in sea-songs or shanties’ (LJB, 88). The Pocket Book (see above) contains several. In 1912 he learned others from a neighbour who had been on the Nimrod with Shackleton’s polar expedition (HT, 252). Here he draws on the shanty, perhaps dating from the sixteenth century, usually called ‘A-rovin’’ but also known as ‘Amsterdam’ or ‘The Maid of Amsterdam’. Shortly before writing his first poems, Thomas walked ‘to the Mumbles up to Oystermouth Castle and back chiefly by the sands’, and sang during the walk: ‘I liked walking thus, humming tunes and combining or improvising tunes. I remember how I did it when I was most cheerful at Minsmere – often ribald tunes. I was going to write an essay to be called “In Amsterdam there dwelt a maid”’ (letter to Helen from Swansea, 10 October 1914, NLW). A BL draft includes the lines: ‘the chorus made / The song the best song of the sea’. Stanza five gives the first verse and full chorus. In moving from individual vision to tradition, this Old Song reverses its predecessor’s course. But the same aesthetic logic applies: folksong, as much as a unique ‘light’, can be a ‘bridge’ to poetry. Poem and song themselves are seamlessly bridged by the latter’s gradual infiltration of rhyme scheme and rhythm. This rare seascape (The Child on the Cliffs is Thomas’s only other sea-poem) contains images that figure inspiration in Romantic poetry: sea and mirror, perceptual strangeness (‘shaking’), twilight, a shore or liminal zone, a ‘vacant’ space awaiting inscription, birdsong, the ‘wild charm’ of folksong itself. ‘Wild charm’ also covers the erotic intimations (‘snake of foam’, ‘swollen clouds’) that the song brings to the surface, although Thomas omits its ‘lewder’ verses.
7-12. A light divided…that same sight. This image appears in an early review in which Thomas reflects on the ‘supremacy’ of lyric poetry since the Romantics, and distinguishes between the lyric as ‘homeopathy’ and the lyric as ‘intricacies of form’:
At that…time the lyric was asserting a supremacy which it has never lost…Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and their great contemporaries revealed its adaptability to every mode of thought and emotion…Today at least the place of the lyric seems assured…And its place in poetry is almost equalled by its place in homeopathy. Thousands of the sad people in the streets write lyrics, following Goethe, no doubt, to get rid of their dreams, their debts, and the effect of reading other men’s verse…But we venture to think that for this, and for still nobler reasons, the lyric will prosper, at least so long as individualism makes way in literature. Increasing complexity of thought and emotion will find no such outlet as the myriad-minded lyric, with its intricacies of form as numerous and as exquisite as those of a birch-tree in the wind…The lyric may claim other points of superiority. Contrasted with the drama in couplets or blank verse, how much more truthful it is. As an ejaculation, a volume of laughter or lament, the best lyrics seem to be the poet’s natural speech…The lyric then is self-expression, whether by necessity or by mere malice aforethought. Those that practise the art include men who have spent a laborious life in sounding their own stops, like Shelley or Sidney, and also the men (and women) who mistake the lowest form of vanity for the highest form of art. Everyone must have noticed, standing on the shore, when the sun or moon is over the sea, how the highway of light on the water comes right to his feet, and how those on the right and on the left seem not to be sharing his pleasure, but to be in darkness. In some such way the former class views life. (Daily Chronicle, 27 August 1901)
Ms: BL. Published text: P. Note on title: See textual note on An Old Song I.
30 December 1914
The poem’s ‘combe’ may be the gorge of Ashford Stream, below Thomas’s study on the Shoulder of Mutton Hill, but it also represents ‘the beechen coombes which are characteristic of Hampshire. They are steep-sided bays, running and narrowing far into and up the sides of the chalk hills, and especially of those hills with which the high flinty plateau breaks down to the greensand and the plain. These steep sides are clothed with beeches, thousands of beeches interrupted by the black yews that resemble caverns among the paler trees…emerging from the coombe, whose sides shut out half the heavens’ (SC, 28, 31). The Combe has links with The Chalk-Pit and with Thomas’s essay ‘Chalk Pits’: ‘The old chalk pits, being too steep and rough to be cultivated, soon grow into places as wild as ancient Britain…Once I met a small bear in one of the tangled dells in this neighbourhood. He was curled up in the sun between bushes of gorse, and his master’s head was buried in his fur. If the bear had been alone it might have been a scene in Britain before Caesar’s time, but though it was 1904 the bear looked indigenous. This dell is one of those which may be natural or artificial, or perhaps partly both, a small natural coombe having been convenient for excavation in the chalk…The sides of [the dell] are worn by the rabbits and support little but gaunt elder bushes’ (LS, 33-7). ‘One [dell] is so broken up by the uneven diggings, the roots of trees, and the riot of brambles that a badger is safe in it with a whole pack of children’ (LS, 32). Thomas was drawn to such overgrown hollows with their entanglements of living and dead matter, their human and non-human resonances, their mixed messages of presence and absence: ‘The coombes breed whole families, long genealogical trees, of echoes’ (SC, 29).
3-6. And no one…rabbit holes for steps. Mimetic rhythms underscore the point that the poem, at least, can enter the combe. The internal rhyme ‘bramble’ / ‘scramble’ sparks off a downhill momentum via ‘steps’ of nouns reinforced by alliteration and assonance.
8. Except the missel-thrush. For Smith, the missel-thrush represents ‘the loving and persistent seeker’ who alone can penetrate ‘meanings preserved, out of easy access’, and ‘the bird’s name subtly links it with the Celtic druids who also valued mistletoe’ (SS, 22).
12. That most ancient Briton of English beasts. Here the repeated ‘ancient’ comes to a brilliantly specific climax. In compressing historical layers and labels, this line echoes but subverts the last line of The Manor Farm. It also clinches other oppositions between the poems: the combe’s ‘stopped’ ‘mouth’ denies access to the past; the ‘sun of Winter’ is ‘shut out’; no sleeping English beauty is ‘awakened’. Rather, this scene magnetises an indigenous darkness lately intensified – presumably by war. The badger’s death violates covenants with Nature. It manifests a savagery whose sources go very far back or in very deep. ‘Ancient’ shifts in nuance between ‘primeval’ and ‘primitive’; ‘dark’, between ‘obscure’ and ‘evil’. ‘Ancient Briton’ at once attaches a ‘beast’ to human history and questions that history. By invoking Celtic or pre-Roman Britain, Thomas may also rebuke imperial “Britain”. He calls the Welsh bard Iolo Morganwg, ‘Ned of Glamorgan’: ‘an Ancient Briton, and not the last one: he said once that he always possessed the freedom of his thoughts and the independence of his mind “with an Ancient Briton’s warm pride”’ (HGLM, 188).
Ms: BL. Published text: P.
31 December 1914
Besides a wood in a hollow, which the sun cannot penetrate, ‘hollow wood’ suggests a wood consisting of hollow or dead trees, a ghost-wood emptied of life. The Hollow Wood echoes the unheimlich finale of The Other, and may revisit that poem’s psychic splits. Its imagery has sources in the same prose passages as The Combe, with similar added violence. Cecil Day-Lewis writes: ‘if we venture nearer the heart of this hollow wood, we find it a very disquieting place: the contrast between the goldfinch in the sun outside and the goings-on within is sinister: there is something wrong with a wood “Where birds swim like fish – Fish that laugh and shriek”, and where dead or dying trees are kept evergreen by lichen, ivy, and moss – the hosts given a semblance, a mockery of life, by their parasites. The way he talks about them – “half-flayed and dying”, “the dead trees on their knees” – they might almost be people. What makes this little poem so disturbing is that, from its description of natural processes, there arises a sense of something against nature’ (Essays by Divers Hands, XXVIII, 87-8). In rhyme-scheme and line-length, the stanzas, like other sound-effects in the poem, are almost mirror-images. Doubleness, otherness, shapes the entire structure.
1. the goldfinch flits. The poem’s one ‘bright’ spot is prefigured in ‘Chalk Pits’: ‘Others [dells] are full of all that a goldfinch loves – teasel, musk, thistle and sunshine’; ‘little bands [of green-finches] flitting and twittering’ (LS, 32, 36).
8-9. Lichen, ivy, and moss…trees. ‘Never was ivy more luxuriant under the beeches, nor moss so powerful as where it arrays them from crown to pedestal. The lichens, fine grey-green bushy lichens on the thorns, are as dense as if a tide of them had swept through the coombe’ (SC, 30).
12. dog’s-mercury: ‘the foliage of dog’s mercury, everywhere of equal height, gloomy and cool and tinged with a lemon hue, almost closed over the narrow grassless ribbons of brown earth and dead leaves…the many dead and mossy stems of trees already decayed’ (‘The Maiden’s Wood’, RU, 146-7). Geoffrey Grigson terms dog’s-mercury ‘a gloomy crop-plant of damp woods and leaf mould and dead twigs’. Other names for this poisonous plant are ‘boggart-flower’ and ‘snakeweed’. (See Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora [London: Phoenix House, 1958], 226).
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 12 dog’s-mercury and moss dog’s-mercury, ivy, and moss Note: CP1978 follows BL and a typescript [MET] rather than LP. The repetition of ‘ivy’ as well as ‘moss’ in l.12 seems a less subtle cadence: one that Thomas might well have revised.
1 January 1915
Several of Thomas’s early poems reinvent Wordsworth’s narratives of meeting solitary old men in lonely places. The dialogue between the poet-speaker and such figures becomes more egalitarian and more suggestively compressed. Smith cites the man’s parting comment as an example of how often scraps of conversation in Thomas’s poems are ‘abrupt and perfunctory, and yet suggesting a whole world of unspoken meanings’ (SS, 168). One subtextual element here may be the war.
3-14. I could not tell…like a tortoise’s. Wordsworth’s ‘leech-gatherer’ in ‘Resolution and Independence’ is similarly linked with animals and inanimate objects. He is said to resemble ‘a huge stone’, itself ‘like a sea-beast’, while ‘His body was bent double, feet and head / Coming together in life’s pilgrimage’. Here ‘strange tripod’, along with the triad of ages to which the poem alludes, brings the image still closer to the Sphinx’s riddle.
8. wheel-barrow…like a pig. This simile, which first appears in the prose version of Up in the Wind (see 144), compounds the perceptual confusion amid ‘stormy’ conditions. Later ‘the trees’ roar’ causes auditory confusion too. The whole riddling effect continues the ominous imagery in the last stanza of The Other, in The Combe and The Hollow Wood.
12. Fly-the-garter. A memory from the time when Thomas was ‘sent to a day school…in Battersea’ (presumably High-cockolorum is another name for the same game):
The playground was asphalt; again there were no organised games, but a dozen groups playing leap frog, fly the garter, or tops, or chasing one another, or simply messing about. ‘Fly the garter’ – if that is its right name – was a grand game to see played by a dozen of the biggest boys. I forget how it came about, but by degrees at length there were four or five boys bent double, forming a continuous line of backs. Each grasped the one in front of him and the first of them had his head, protected by his hands, against the playground wall. From half-way across the playground a big boy ran at a gallop, his ironshod heels pounding the asphalt, towards this line of boys who could see him approaching between their legs. Reaching the line and putting his hands upon the first back to help him leap he leaped forward into the air. A brilliant leaper would use only one hand for the take off: the other gave a sonorous smack on the right place in passing. With legs outspread he flew along the line of backs, and alighted upon the fourth or fifth of them. The lighter his weight, the more fortunate was the steed thus accidentally mounted: the heavier, the greater was the chance that both together crashed to the ground. Then, I think, the leaper added another to the line of backs and set the next leaper an impossible task. The last stayer had a good double row of admirers, silent during the run and the leap, uproarious at the alighting. (CET, 79-80)
19. In BL the poem ends here.
Ms: BL. Published text: LP.
4 January 1915
The BL title is ‘The Source of the Ouse at Selsfield’. Thomas’s friend Vivian Locke Ellis lived at Selsfield House, East Grinstead. In Autumn 1912, and occasionally later on, Thomas stayed there as a paying guest. ‘Next day the north-east wind began to prevail, making a noise as if the earth were hollow and rumbling all through the bright night, and all day a rhythmless and steady roar. The earth was being scoured like a pot’ (IPS, 23). With its strong aural dimension, the poem’s symbolism combines powerful natural forces, psychological turbulence, and utterance (‘voices’, ‘speaks’). This may identify personal integration with (poetic) articulation. When ‘forth the dumb source of the river breaks’, ‘two voices’ become one. Here the splitting and inversion of ‘breaks forth’ helps to suggest a dam bursting. But if poetry overcomes or mediates inner ‘rain and wind’, these also partly constitute its ‘source’. The conflict between ‘wild air’ and ‘earth’ resembles the psychic storm in Wind and Mist.
7. wild air: a phrase that also occurs in Melancholy and The Sheiling.
Ms: BL. Published text: AANP, LP.
5 January 1915
See general note to An Old Song I (166). On 5 December 1913 Thomas noted (‘blue’ provides a context for ‘kingfisher’, l.10): ‘3.30 pm charcoal burner by blue hut piping slowly a bright old country tune and making it melancholy and birdlike in the hollow deep valley’ (FNB67). Like The Source, this poem derives from observations at East Grinstead.
1. hangs like an ivory bugle. Thomas quotes Richard Jefferies: ‘The curved moon hung on the sky as the hunter’s horn on the wall’ (RJ, 200).
3. ghylls: deep rocky clefts, usually wooded, and following the course of a stream. The word was ‘gill’ until Wordsworth romanticised its spelling. Thomas originally wrote ‘gullies’ (BL).
5-8. The brooks…are roaring with black hollow voices / Betwixt rage and a moan. This effect condenses words and images from previous poems. Thomas again blends the natural with the psychological: ‘rage’ and ‘moan’ define manic-depressive poles. After the death of the deranged visionary David Morgan, in The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, the narrator can ‘hear the dark hills convulsed with a hollow roaring as of an endless explosion’ (HGLM, 108). ‘Roar’ recurs obsessively in Thomas’s poetry. Its mostly negative connotations derive both from windy tree-country and from ‘the roar of towns’ (Roads). ‘This roaring peace’ (Interval) is a positive exception.
9-11. caravan-hut…charcoal-burners. See Up in the Wind (lines 53, 73-5) and a sentence in ‘The White Horse’ (144). For a description of English charcoal-burners, see Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons (1930), Chapter 13. Charcoal-burning, the oldest chemical process, made metal-smelting (and Bronze Age Europe) possible. Wood and other organic materials were slowly burned under an earth-clamp to produce pure carbon. Charcoal-burners constructed makeshift cabins in woodland clearings so that they could watch their fires. By 1900, metal kilns had made traditional charcoal-burning a vanishing way of life. ‘Mossed old hearths’ implies the antiquity of the practice.
16. that crescent fine. This phrase, along with the folk music, relates the climax of The Penny Whistle to that of The Gypsy. The ‘old’ and ‘new’ images, the conjunction of moon, ‘melody’ and text (the girl’s letter), suggest that Thomas is again tapping creative sources which might transmute ‘black…voices’ into art: ‘Says far more than I am saying’.
Ms: BL. Published text: P. Note: In CP1928 and CP1944 ‘olden’ [P], l.19, is altered to ‘old’, perhaps because of its risky – if deliberate – archaism.
6, 7 January 1915 and later
BL contains two drafts:
A labouring man lies hid in that bright coffin
Who slept out many a frosty night and kept
Good drinkers and bedmen tickled with his scoffing:
‘At Mrs Greenland’s Hawthorn Bush I slept.’
The labouring man here lying slept out of doors
Many a frosty night, and merrily
Answered good drinkers and bedmen and all bores:
‘At Mrs Greenland’s Hawthorn Bush’ said he,
‘I slept.’ None knew which bush. Above the town,
Beyond ‘The Drover’ a hundred spot the down.
Thomas probably alludes to these drafts, and to the poem’s original inspiration, in a letter to Eleanor Farjeon (24 January): ‘I haven’t thrown away anything, even the worse version of “Old Dick”’ (EF, 114). The rhyme ‘coffin’ / ‘scoffing’ may make the first draft the ‘worse’.
A Private evidently took time to acquire its Great War dimension. In August 1915, when Gordon Bottomley wanted the poem for AANP, Thomas mentions ‘The Mrs Greenland’s Hawthorn Bush lines’, but this could still refer to a draft (LGB, 254-5). The final version first appeared in SP (1916). When R. George Thomas rules out A Private as ‘Old Dick’ (CP1978, xxx), he ignores the possibility that its evolution – from an elegy for an old man – reflects Thomas’s developing sense of the war’s impact on rural England. The outcome strangely echoes ‘Providence’, a poem he wrote in 1901, presumably for a Boer-war casualty (Diary, 18 August 1901, NLW):
(i)
The veteran smoked in the twilight tender,
And life to him was an old, old jest;
So old, so good, he would not surrender
(Except for Heaven) his place of rest –
(ii)
A trumpet on the sea was blown;
The veteran sailed to a strange country;
The foes were driven and beaten and strown;
(But) He rests for ever far over the sea.
Like In Memoriam (Easter, 1915), A Private is a suitably elusive memorial to the missing. Just as the ‘ploughman’ pretends that ‘Mrs Greenland’s Hawthorn Bush’ is an inn like ‘The Drover’, so the poem works as an ironical catch or riddle: ‘sleeps more sound’ is not consolatory; the ploughman’s new ‘privacy’ is not his old ‘secrecy’.
4. Mrs Greenland: a personification that prefigures “Gaia”. Thomas may also elegise the ploughman’s easy connection with the earth, in all its weathers, which war has severed and travestied.
Ms: BL. Published text: SP, AANP, LP. Note: In l.2 LP, CP1920 etc print ‘frozen’ rather than ‘frosty’: the text in AANP and other extant sources. The lilt ‘many’ / ‘frosty’ / ‘merrily’ seems to fit the ploughman’s character.
7 January 1915
‘If snow fell, there was no more of it in the valleys than if a white bird had been plucked by a sparrow-hawk’ (IPS, 23). The idea is traditional, as in the riddle of the snow and the sun, which begins: ‘White bird featherless / Flew from Paradise’. The ‘December: Christmass’ section of John Clare’s Shepherds’ Calendar contains this picture of children:
And some to view the winter weathers
Climb up the window seat wi glee
Likening the snow to falling feathers
In fancy’s infant extacy
Laughing wi superstitious love
Oer visions wild that youth supplyes
Of people pulling geese above
And keeping christmass in the skyes
In Snow oxymorons (‘gloom of whiteness’, ‘dusky brightness’) and elegiac cadences darken the metaphor.
3. A child. See note on Old Man, l.10 (151).
8. the bird of the snow. A version of this in BL is ‘the dying of the snow’.
Ms: BL. Published text: AANP, LP.
8 January 1915
Adlestrop is a village in Gloucestershire, near the River Evenlode, a few miles east of Stow-on-the-Wold and west of Chipping Norton (Oxfordshire). Adlestrop station was on the main Great Western Railway line from London to Oxford, Worcester and Malvern. A victim of Dr Beeching’s cuts, the station was finally closed to passengers on 3 January 1966. But, as Anne Harvey shows in Adlestrop Revisited (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Henry Sutton, 1999), the poem had already superseded its occasion, and made the Adlestrop poem a sub-genre of the “Edward Thomas poem” (see Introduction, 11). John Loveday’s ‘The Imaginative Franchise’ begins: ‘Does it matter, whether Yeats really stood / Among schoolchildren?’ and ends: ‘Does it have to be true? Suppose the train did not pull / Up at Adlestrop at all…’ In fact, FNB75 proves that it did; but also indicates that Thomas conflated details from different stops:
24th [June 1914] a glorious day from 4.20 a.m. and at 10 tiers above tiers of white cloud with dirtied grey bars above the sea of slate and dull brick by Battersea Park – then at Oxford tiers of pure white with loose large masses above and gaps of dark clear blue above haymaking and elms
Then we stopped at Adlestrop, through the willows could be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12.45 and one thrush and no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam.
Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willowherb and meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel – looking out on grey dry stones between metals and the shining metals and over it all the elms willows and long grass – one man clears his throat – a greater than rustic silence. No house in view Stop only for a minute till signal is up.
Another stop like this outside Colwell on 27th with thrush singing on hillside above on road.
On 23 June Edward and Helen Thomas attended the Russian ballet in London. They set off next day to visit the Frosts in Ledbury, Herefordshire, and seek summer holiday lodgings there (see general note to The sun used to shine, 296). Around the time of the poem’s composition, as if memory had surfaced and sent him to his earlier notes, Thomas wrote in FNB80: ‘Train stopping outside station at Adlestrop June 1914’.
Thomas’s prose sketch ‘A Third-Class Carriage’ pivots on a moment when ‘the train stopped at the edge of a wood where a thrush was singing, calling out very loud, clear things in his language over and over again’, and ends: ‘The train whistled, frightening the thrush, and moved on again’ (LS, 49-50). In ‘Death by Misadventure’, a train kills a man: ‘There was not a sound except the hissing of the steam, until the guilty train began to grunt forward again…’ (CC, 115). The poem more indirectly sets the ‘express’ train’s modernity against the perspective, and aesthetic, opened up by what Thomas’s note calls ‘extraordinary silence’. Adlestrop has inspired homages, imitations and parodies. It remains a model not only for the “train-window” poem, such as Philip Larkin’s ‘I Remember, I Remember’, but also for the translation of memory into poetic epiphany – including the negative epiphany of ‘I Remember, I Remember’: ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’. A model, too, for art that conceals art, Adlestrop knows exactly what it is doing. The remembered scene alludes to the lyric it will engender: ‘Someone cleared his throat’; ‘And for that minute a blackbird sang’.
4. Unwontedly. BL drafts have ‘drew up / There unexpectedly’, then ‘drew up there / Against its custom’. ‘Unwontedly’ suggests a train juddering to a halt. Its first two syllables link ‘one’ and ‘June’; its last two syllables belong to a sequence of sounds that embed ‘Adlestrop’ in a complex assonantal texture: late / left /platform/whit less / and lonely / cloudlets. The adverb’s stresses and texture contrast with the four monosyllables that follow – perhaps one reason for the change from ‘’Twas June’ in Thomas’s first BL draft (see note, 153).
8-16. only the name…Gloucestershire. See note on Thomas and place names (285). ‘Adlestrop’ is most often pronounced so that its first two syllables rhyme with ‘paddle’ rather than ‘ladle’. It has been spelled ‘Addlestrop’, and other variants over the centuries are Titlestrop, Tattlest(h)rop, Attlesthorpe, and Adelsthrope: ‘there can be little doubt that the original form of the name was Tat(e)les-thorp; the…form Attle, Adle-, etc. arises from wrong analysis of phrases like “at Tatlesthrop”…i.e. Taetel’s dependent farmstead’ (Harvey, Adlestrop Revisited, 28). Yet ‘only the name’ invokes neither etymology nor the cognitive anxieties of Old Man (contrast ‘Only an avenue…nameless’). The poem obliquely affirms the associative nexus between word and thing, and its constant reweaving by life and poetry. ‘Adlestrop’ serves as conduit to the recovery or creation of a unique moment. Strategically placed, ‘only the name’ launches the spiralling syntax and rhythm of the last two stanzas, and the little cosmos they encompass. More strictly and subtly than in The Manor Farm, the structure corresponds to Thomas’s conception of England as ‘a system of vast circumferences circling round…minute neighbouring points’ (see note, 165). The double off-rhyme ‘mistier’ / ‘Gloucestershire’, the repeated ‘farther’ and ‘shire’, make the poem’s echoes linger beyond its last words.
9. willow-herb: not Rosebay willow herb, common today, but ‘Great willow-herb, nicknamed Codlins-and-Cream’ (Harvey, Adlestrop Revisited, 12).
12. high cloudlets. In BL this replaces ‘high cloud tiers’ (see extracts above from FNB75).
Ms: BL. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 1 Yes. Yes, Note: CP1978 follows BL rather than P. A full-stop appears in PTP. Note on title: Title is given in BL.
8 January 1915
Like Adlestrop, Tears represents itself as translating memory into epiphany. Once again, sun, silence and solitude are intrinsic to the process. Yet these juxtaposed “English” scenes sit less peacefully in the speaker’s consciousness. Neither ‘still’ nor stills, they force him to probe the meaning of their traces in memory and now poetry. History, absent from Adlestrop, has returned. Cooke and Smith comment on disturbingly unresolved effects: ‘despite their superficial splendour, both hounds and soldiers also suggest a less attractive reality. The hounds are out to kill (“Upon the scent”) and merge into one menacing animal – “a great dragon”; the troops have lost some of their individuality by being “in line” and “in white tunics”, while it is a martial air that “pierces” the silence. The profound ambiguity of the poem’s basic emotion is caught in that astonishing paradox “rage of gladness”’ (WC, 222). ‘The gulf opened up between “English countrymen” and ‘British Grenadiers” is like that…in “The Combe”. The former are innocent in their pastoral pathos; the latter carries the burden of an imperial ideology and the exultant violence which sustains it. The two concepts define the gap in Englishness where allegiance founders…The charm, it may be, is that of a hypnotic ideological magic, seducing both young men and poet to an unnecessary and pointless death. Allegiance to such images may be misplaced…If [the speaker] is emotionally bankrupt, unable any more to respond spontaneously to the traditional symbols, the fault, though he refuses to admit it, may lie with those symbols, not with the self’ (SS, 118).
3-4. twenty hounds…rage of gladness. It was the human element in foxhunting that Thomas disliked: ‘Run hard hounds, and drown the jackdaws’ calling with your concerted voices. It is good to see your long swift train across the meadow …Run hard, fox, and may you escape, for it would not be well to die on such a day unless you could perchance first set your fair teeth in the throats of the foolish ones who now break through the hedge on great horses and pursue you’ (HE, 155-6). ‘I like to see fine horses running at full speed. To see this sight, or hounds running on a good scent, or children dancing, is to me the same as music, and therefore, I suppose, as full of mortality and beauty’ (IW, 104). ‘Backwards and forwards galloped the scarlet before the right crossing of the railway was taken. The fox died in obscurity two miles away. How warm and sweet the sun was can be imagined when I say that it made one music of the horn-blowing, the lambs’ bleating, the larks’ singing’ (IPS, 92).
6. Blooming Meadow. From May 1904 to late 1906 the Thomases lived at Elses Farm in the Weald of Kent. Helen Thomas recalls: ‘hay-making on the lovely slope of Blooming meadow was a festival for us all at the farm’ (HT, 104). The name both attracts and irradiates all the poem’s effects of vigour, fertility, and colour.
8. double-shadowed Tower: the Tower of London. ‘Double-shadowed’, which throws the ‘stirring’ images into relief, may also imply the speaker’s interior state, and interpret his susceptibility to ‘charm’.
15. ‘The British Grenadiers’. ‘I don’t think I could alter “Tears” to make it marketable. I feel that the correction you want made is only essential if the whole point is in the British Grenadiers as might be expected in these times’ (LEG, 25). ‘White tunics’ marks the soldiers’ pre-war ceremonial role as custodians of the Tower, but another role seems latent in the image. Guy Cuthbertson calls attention to a passage that Thomas quotes from Richard Jefferies’s The Story of My Heart: ‘So subtle is the chord of life that sometimes to watch troops marching in rhythmic order, undulating along the column as the feet are lifted, brings tears in my eyes’ (RJ, 182; GC, 159).
18. And have forgotten since their beauty passed. Tears poses questions about the proximity of violence to ‘beauty’, about the need for violence to defend beauty, about their conjoined power to kick-start feeling. Each scene is ‘pierced’ by an emotion (ironically deprecated as the ‘ghosts’ of tears) alien to previous sunlit epiphanies. A homoerotic charge runs between ‘stirring’, ‘charm’, the soldiers’ physicality, and ‘piercing’. As Smith points out, enlistment seems to be a subtext. In saying he has ‘forgotten’ what the poem makes so vividly present, the speaker parallels Thomas’s self-reproach for lack of true patriotism in his essay ‘This England’ (see notes on The sun used to shine and This is no case of petty right or wrong): ‘it seemed to me that either I had never loved England, or I had loved it foolishly, aesthetically, like a slave’ (LS, 221). To enjoy English ‘beauty’ (as in Adlestrop, perhaps) without regard to underlying ‘truths’ – truths that attach the individual to community – is to behave like Thomas’s dreaded alter ego the aesthetic spectator (see note, 290). The interplay of ‘dreamed’, ‘truths’ and ‘beauty’ implicates Keats and Romantic poetry in this scenario where responsibilities are being obliquely deliberated. Thomas placed Tears early in P, close to four other poems associated with the war: The Trumpet, The Manor Farm, The Owl and As the team’s head-brass.
Ms: BL. Published text: P. Note: P omits the comma after ‘guard’ [l.12], present in PTP.
9 January 1915
Although the title given to this poem in LP has been retained, it is the most questionable of the instances listed in the Note on Text. As John Pikoulis observes: ‘the poem mentions no hills, only a single “horizon ridge”’ (JP, 54). Yet ‘over the hills’ occurs in a passage (about ‘August’) from Beautiful Wales, which is possibly linked with the poem: ‘[A] mountain stream, which many stones tore to ribbons, was with me for miles, and to the left and to the right many paths over the hills ran with alluring courses for half a mile, like happy thoughts or lively fancies, and ended suddenly. The mountains increased in height as the sun sank…And in the end of the afternoon I came to a village I knew…From the inn I could see the whole village…Six bells that rang three miles off and some white downs of cloud on the horizon were in harmony. It was a time when the whole universe strove to speak a universal speech…But, as it seemed, owing to my fault, the effort was unsuccessful’ (BW, 176-7). If the poem echoes that passage, this does not necessarily make its landscape “Welsh”. Alun John points out that Thomas’s depictions of ‘romantic North Wales’ (not then known to him) ‘were culled almost entirely from the notes he had previously made of the countryside of England’ (quoted, Sally Roberts Jones, ‘Edward Thomas and Wales’, JB, 79).
Over the Hills is another poem that represents itself as a process of remembering – or of remembering remembering. But here epiphany proves elusive. While the ‘path’ can be retraced, it figures a psychic loop-tape rather than therapeutic retrieval. As if again puncturing the unities of Adlestrop, Thomas sets ‘saw it all’ against ‘Recall /Was vain’. Another line breaks on the adversative asyndeton: ‘all were kind, / All were strangers’. Some hinted problem, whether in the original experience or in the speaker, makes ‘loss’ the poem’s pivotal word. BL has ‘I forgot my loss’: the change to ‘I did not know my loss’ deepens the interior drama.
5. pack of scarlet clouds: a strange echo of the hunting image in Tears.
15-19. no more…rush and stone. An image from the mountain scene serves as a bridge back to it. The rhythmical dynamic, which culminates in this intricately rhymed poem’s only couplet, runs counter to the impossibility that the lines assert. As often in Thomas, the poem gets further than the speaker. Like Jungian therapy, it pushes back towards a source. Metaphors of the body sustain the analogy between the brook and a ‘restless’ spirit seeking repose. Over the Hills has parallels with Frost’s ‘The Mountain’, which similarly circles around a point of origin: ‘There’s a brook/That starts up on it somewhere – I’ve heard say / Right on the top’.
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Note on title: See general note above. CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 removes the brackets. See Note on Text.
10 January 1915
The Lofty Sky begins where Over the Hills leaves off. Here psychic obstacles are symbolically overcome by rhythms that make ‘The desire of the eye’ kinetic. Reviewing a book on punctuation, Thomas writes: ‘We know the beauty…of a complex sentence in which the stops are as valuable as the division of a stanza of verse into lines, or as the hedges and littered crags and out-cropping rock by which the eye travels up a mountain to the clouds’ (Academy, 23 September 1905). ‘Sky’ rarely prevails over ‘earth’ in Thomas’s poetry. Yet the transcendental urge instilled by his youthful passion for Shelley is never wholly exorcised, and may here be affirmed. In l.1 he changed ‘hills’ (BL) to ‘sky’. ‘They are no more /Than weeds upon this floor /Of the river of air’, like ‘dark surge’ in Two Pewits, echoes Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’. The Lofty Sky also echoes Walter de la Mare’s ‘Nobody Knows’ (Peacock Pie, 1913), which contrasts the wind’s freedom (‘Just a great wave of the air’) with earthly conditions: ‘And so we live under deep water, / All of us, beasts and men’.
19-34. I am like a fish…where the lilies are. Another Romantic poet may be on the poem’s mind. Thomas describes looking out of the window after reading Keats: ‘outside, the trees and barns and shed were quiet and dim, and as much submerged and hidden from the air in which I had been living as the green streets of motionless lily and weed at the bottom of some lonely pool where carp and tench go slowly’ (HE, 161). Also in The Heart of England, Thomas compares a rare moment to the ‘old tale’ in which people see ‘an anchor let out of the clouds and rooted in the ground’ and then a man climbing down a rope to free the anchor and ‘dying at last, as if he had been drowned in the air which they breathed easily’ (HE, 112-13). ‘Where the lilies are’ is a wonderful image for the direction of Romantic desire. Michael Kirkham reads lines 32-4, with their echo of Yeats’s ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’, as ‘self-parody’ (MK, 41). But perhaps the whole conceit consciously dramatises the human and artistic need to press beyond limits.
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Note on title: Apart from LP, title’s only surviving source is RB 2, 2 [December 1917].
15 January 1915
In ‘An Old Farm’ Thomas refers to ‘the palpitating, groaning shout of the shepherd, Ho! ho! ho! ho! ho!’ (HE, 72). The same passage fed Haymaking and Cock-Crow (see notes, 248, 256). This is unique among Thomas’s poems in being a dramatic monologue spoken by a woman. He lays out a mnemonic paradox: the widow’s inability to hear the cuckoo brings a human voice into elegiac presence.
Ms: BL. Published text: AANP, LP. Differences from CP1978: 9 ‘There it is!’ [BL] ‘There it is’ [AANP] Note: To match ‘Ho! Ho!’, and to sharpen this miniature drama, an exclamation-mark seems to be required. Note on title: Title is given in BL.
15 January 1915
‘I wonder if I can touch “Swedes”. It is one of the least like myself I fancy’ (LGB, 247). But actual and verbal colour is more common in Thomas’s poems than it might appear. The Path surprises us with tints of moss (‘gold, olive, and emerald’), Health with a Yeatsian litany of proper names. Thomas’s deceptively muted style masks its rhetorical depth-charges – like fine tweed, which in close-up reveals brilliant flecks. Swedes itself certainly achieves Wordsworth’s objective in Lyrical Ballads: ‘to choose incidents from common life…and…to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way’. In ‘The Mangel-Bury’ Ivor Gurney, for whom Thomas was both model and muse, continues the process by using Swedes to bring the Great War home to rural England:
It was after war; Edward Thomas had fallen at Arras –
I was walking by Gloucester musing on such things
As fill his verse with goodness; it was February; the long house
Straw-thatched of the mangels stretched two wide wings;
And looked as part of the earth heaped up by dead soldiers
In the most fitting place – along the hedge’s yet-bare lines.
West spring breathed there early…
1-4. They have taken the gable…Unsunned. Clamping is a traditional way of storing root-vegetables during Winter. A pyramid of vegetables, which extends above ground, is built in a straw-strewn trench. This is covered with more straw and then earth. ‘A cart goes by all a-gleam with a load of crimson-sprouting swedes and yellow-sprouting mangolds that seem to be burning through the net of snow above them’ (SC, 40-1).
4. more tender-gorgeous. This oxymoronic compound initiates the switch from vibrantly familiar to coldly exotic. It also makes ‘sight’ empathetic rather than spectatorial. In The Icknield Way Thomas less happily calls rain-soaked primrose petals ‘tender-blubbering’ (IW, 12).
7-10. A boy crawls down…Blue pottery, alabaster, and gold. The items in l.10 refer back to the colours in l.3. At the end of ‘Leaving Town’ (HE, 1-18) Thomas compares entering a ‘shadowed wood’ at dawn to finding an Egyptian tomb:
Suddenly my mind went back to the high dark cliffs of Westminster Abbey, the blank doors and windows of endless streets, the devouring river, the cold gloom before dawn, and then with a shudder forgot them and saw the flowers and heard the birds with such a joy as when the ships from Tarshish, after three blank years, again unloaded apes and peacocks and ivory, and men upon the quay looked on; or as, when a man has mined in the dead desert for many days, he suddenly enters an old tomb, and making a light, sees before him vases of alabaster, furniture adorned with gold and blue enamel and the figures of gods, a chariot of gold, and a silence perfected through many ages in the company of death and of the desire of immortality. (HE, 18)
The pyramidal shape of ‘the long swede pile’, a construction that itself figures the unconscious, may have reactivated Thomas’s Egyptian imagery.
8-9. Christian men…God and monkey: post-Darwinian irony.
11. Amen-hotep: the name of several eighteenth-dynasty pharaohs. The tomb of Amenhotep II, in the Valley of the Tombs of Kings, was excavated in 1898. Before the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, this was the only known tomb where a mummified pharaoh still lay in his own sarcophagus. The tomb had been much robbed, and the single object in Swedes that corresponds to its contents is ‘blue pottery’ or ‘faience’ (which appears in a BL draft). The passage in The Heart of England, and hence the poem, may involve ‘snatches of memory of more than one discovery in the Valley of the Kings during the early years of the twentieth century’; the tomb of Tuthmosis IV contained fragments of animals, an alabaster face, and the dashboard of a war chariot. (See T.H.G. James, ‘A Poetic Puzzle’, Hommages à Jean Leclant, vol. 4 [Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1994], 147-51.) David and Caroline Gill cite an excavation reported in 1906: ‘a boy was sent in [and finds included a] chariot, the…wheel rims of which shone through the darkness golden and scarlet’ (Notes and Queries 53 [September 2003], 325).
11-12. But dreamless…sweet as Spring. This antithesis, the climax of dialectically poised sentences that resist sonnet-form, underlines the poem’s status as an ars poetica. In contrasting the dead pharaoh’s panoply with seasonal processes, and linking the latter with ‘dream’, Thomas prefers a biocentric, inner-directed aesthetic to an 1890s aesthetic of stylised display (see Introduction, 16). He attacks Walter Pater’s prose for its ‘exquisite unnaturalness’, for making language seem to be as hard and inhuman a material as marble’, for ‘embalm[ing] choice things, seen at choice moments, in choice words’ (WP, 220, 101, 108). Similarly, he compares the anthology Des Imagistes to ‘a tall marble monument’, in which the better poems ‘are the green ivy beginning to climb the tall marble monument, and may well outlast it’ (New Weekly, 9 May 1914).
Ms: BL. Published text: P. Note on title: Title is given in BL.
17 January 1915
‘The strange bird lá-la-lá’ (FNB80, early January 1915). In The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans Mr Torrance remembers:
Only one bird sang in [the cypress tree], and that was a small, sad bird which I do not know the name of. It sang there every month of the year, it might be early or it might be late, on the topmost point of the plume. It never sang for long, but frequently, and always suddenly. It was black against the sky, and I saw it nowhere else. The song was monotonous and dispirited, so that I fancied it wanted us to go because it did not like the cheerful garden, and my father’s loud laugh, and my mother’s tripping step: I fancied it was up there watching the clouds and very distant things in hope of a change; but nothing came, and it sang again, and waited, ever in vain. I laughed at it, and was not at all sorry to see it there, for it had stood on that perch in all the happy days before, and so long as it remained the days would be happy. My father did not like the bird, but he was often looking at it, and noted its absence as I did. The day after my sister died he threw a stone at it – the one time I saw him angry – and killed it. But a week later came another, and when he heard it he burst into tears, and after that he never spoke of it but just looked up to see if it was there when he went in or out of the porch. (HGLM, 146-7)
16-17. I told / The naturalists. ‘[T]he way in which scientific people & their followers are satisfied with data in appalling English disgusts me, & is moreover wrong’ (LGB, 140); ‘natural history, which is so often in danger of falling into the hands of mere takers of notes’ (RJ, 118). The unclassifiable bird marks the point at which “Nature” takes on aesthetic meaning. Thomas salutes W.H. Hudson as ‘the substantial miracle of a naturalist and an imaginative artist in one and in harmony’ (IPS, 245). Many birds are named in his poetry (see note, 240), but this bird-Muse, like his equally elusive female Unknown, has no name. 21. that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet. Like Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s lark-Muses, the bird’s call focuses strains between body and spirit, heaviness and lightness, perhaps prose and poetry. An aural counterpart to the ‘desire of the eye’ in The Lofty Sky, it pulls the poem towards Romantic transcendence: ‘As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world’, ‘beyond my shore’. This otherworldly summons also parallels the unique ‘light’ in An Old Song II. Both images represent poetic vocation as a form of mysterious election: ‘I alone could hear him’.
22-5. Sad more than joyful…taste it. These lines skirt self-parody with their convoluted insistence on the psychological, sensory and aesthetic mot juste.
Ms: BC, BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 18 me, [LP] me [RB 2, 4 (June 1918)] Note on title: Title is given in BL.
18 January 1915
‘The stream going helpless and fast between high banks is gloomy until it is turned to bright, airy foam and hanging crystal by the mill; over the restless pool below hangs a hawthorn all white and fragrant and murmurous with bloom …Over the green grass walks the farmer’s daughter in a white dress…She is a Lady May, careless, proud, at ease’ (HE, 181-4); [of a ‘ruined flock-mill’ near a weir] ‘we could see its white wall of foam half a mile higher up the river, which was concealed by alders beyond’ (HE, 219).
15. A girl came out. After the girl’s appearance, the poem’s ominously intense (perhaps erotically charged) sounds and images might seem to collapse into sentimental anti-climax rather than consummate themselves in a bursting ‘storm’. In A Dream and The Mill-Water, written at the time of Thomas’s enlistment, similar effects will find their full occasion. Yet if The Mill-Pond somehow fails to be either a war poem or a love poem, ‘teased the foam’ and ‘crouched /To shelter’ may know this. The reader is left to speculate why the speaker should ‘now’ remember that, all his senses absorbed in the moment, he had to be warned to take dangers seriously.
Ms: BC, BL. Published text: P. Note on title: Title [unhyphenated] is given in BL.
20 January 1915
Heightened reportage is a mode of Thomas’s early poetry that fades away later on. In May 1915 he wrote: ‘I had got past poetical prose and my new feeling is that here [in poetry] I can use my experience and what I am and what I know with less hindrance than in prose, less gross notebook stuff and mere description and explanation’ (SL, 111). His friends had often told him, and he had told himself, to stop keeping notebooks. The ‘Other Man’ in In Pursuit of Spring is a notebook-victim (see note, 158). Man and Dog epitomises the initial alchemy whereby Thomas turns ‘notebook stuff’ into poetry. FNB79 contains this entry for 21 November 1914:
Going up Stoner in cold strong N.E. wind but a fine and cloudy sky at 3, overtook short stiff oldish man taking short quick strides – carrying flag basket and brolly and old coat on back and with a green ash stick in hand. Says it’s a fine day and as I passed (agreeing) he decides to ask me for – I don’t know, I stopped his request with questions, found him a 6d. He had a little bitch brown with spots of grey reminding me of a Welsh sheep dog – not much use, but company. He says the mother was almost pure (blue) Welsh. Hunts in Hangers, nearly got one this morning ‘he would and he wouldn’t, ’twas like that.’ ‘They say those Welsh bitches will breed with foxes. He knew one the other side of Guildford and she had her litter of seven in a rabbit-hole. He had one. It [?]liked to bite anything it killed so hard it was useless: red mouth like a fox.’ He has come from Childgrove where he’s done two halfdays dock picking this week: is going to Alton and hopes for a lift from one of Crowley’s men to Longmoor to look for a job. But perhaps he won’t reach Alton – rheumatism in one leg – rubs oil they sell at harness makers and ‘supples’ it a bit – round face with white bristles all over and eyes with red rims. Has worked a lot at Southampton docks, navvying, but likes farm work best, has promises of flint picking when sheep are out of field, but can’t hang about – comes from Christchurch in the New Forest – did a year’s soldiering in ’74 in Berkshires. – has 3 sons at Front, one just come from Bombay had really finished his 8 years with the colours, one son a marine. If he can’t reach Alton, will get a shakedown from a farmer.
Talked about the soldiers just coming to billet in Petersfield – he thought 2 or 3 thousand – 20, or so, in kilts – might be a Border Regiment.
A rustic, burring, rather monotonous speech, head a little hung down, but hardly a stoop, as he keeps on at his stiff quick short steps among crisp dry scurrying leaves up to Ludcombe Corner where I turned off.
He was thinking about soldiers in France – terrible affair – in cold weather, supposing they would be ‘marching after the enemy’ and surely not lying in trenches in this winter weather.
Farther behind the poem are passages in Thomas’s prose, also based on note-taking, such as his depiction of an itinerant ‘Umbrella Man’: ‘He was of middle height and build, the crookedest of men, yet upright, like a branch of oak which comes straight with all its twistings…He was a labourer’s son, and he had already had a long life of hoeing and reaping and fagging when he enlisted at Chatham … He had lost his youth in battle, for a bullet went through his knee… He showed his gnarled knee to explain his crookedness…Labourer, soldier, labourer, tinker, umbrella man, he had always wandered, and knew the South Country between Fordingbridge and Dover, as a man knows his garden’ (SC, 188-92). Archetypal aspects of the ‘Umbrella Man’ contribute to Lob (see note, 213). But in Man and Dog, as in Up in the Wind, the primary focus is social history compressed into an individual life-story. The man’s career as casual labourer spans rural and industrial work amid the advance of modernity and the advent of war. This time frame, however, also sits within a longer eco-historical narrative implied by his relation to the land.
Man and Dog, which adapts oral history to couplets and vice versa, is a poetic apotheosis of the social portraiture for which Thomas admired The Bettesworth Book (1901) by ‘George Bourne’ (George Sturt):
At first the book may seem tame, a piece of reporting which leaves the reader not unaware of the notebooks consulted by the author. But in the end comes a picture out of the whole, painfully, dubiously emerging, truthful undoubtedly…which raises George Bourne to a high place among observers…Bettesworth had fought in the Crimea, and during sixty years had been active unceasingly over a broad space of English country – Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire – always out of doors. His memory was good, his eye for men and trades a vivid one, and his gift of speech unusual…so that a picture of rural England during the latter half of the nineteenth century, by one born in the earlier half and really belonging to it, is the result. The portrait of an unlettered pagan English peasant is fascinating. (IPS, 85-6)
7. flag-basket: a basket made of reeds.
8-9. The equidistant Alton and Chilgrove (a village on the road from Chichester to Petersfield) are in east Hampshire and west Sussex. ‘Stoner’ [Hill] in Thomas’s notebook identifies the poem’s setting as Steep. The man is walking cross-country by an old route.
10-24. ’Twere best…to another world I’d fall’. Thomas’s acute ear, transmuted into his hidden editorial presence, enables a seamless flow between direct speech, reported speech inflected by the man’s ‘mind…running’, and the narrator’s voice. For ‘’twere’ etc., see note (153).
10. ‘a money-box’: savings. BC, less idiomatically, has ‘the capital’.
12. flint-picking: removing stones to enable cultivation.
19. couch: couch-grass, a weed with creeping root-stalks.
28. He kept sheep in Wales. ‘He’ is the bitch’s ‘foxy Welsh grandfather’. Her pedigree adds to the ecological, historical and geographical ramifications of the poem.
38. shakedown: a makeshift bed, usually of straw.
39-40. Many a man sleeps worse…‘In the trenches’. Apparently casual allusions to the war (together with the man’s ‘year of soldiering’) assimilate it to a continuum of labour and pain.
46. the leaf-coloured robin. On 23 November Thomas had noted: ‘Robin is colour of twilight at 4.30 as soon as he leaves the ground and is seen in grey air among bare boughs over dead leaves and is invisible – you only know something moves, till he alights and is leaf-coloured’ (FNB79).
46-8. They passed…the twilight of the wood. This valedictory finale resembles the ‘disappearances’ of ‘Lob’ and of ‘Jack Noman’ in May 23, although its point seems more purely historical. A nomadic way of life, which the poem values for its closeness to the countryside if not for its hardships, is ‘passing’. Yet, as at the end of As the team’s head-brass, elegiac cadences open up further vistas of obsolescence. The symbolic ‘twilight of the wood’ extends to current environmental fears.
Ms: BC, BL. Published text: LP. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.
21 January 1915
This brief psychodrama exemplifies how a poem’s speaker can switch between the roles of patient and analyst (see Introduction, 14). It also explicitly juxtaposes neurosis and art: the word ‘beauty’ survives from Thomas’s youthful aestheticism to connect art with Nature and both with therapy. The neurotic symptoms set out in lines 1-10 correspond to Helen Thomas’s accounts of her husband’s black moods, and to his accounts of himself: ‘there were terrible days when I did not know where he was; or, if he was at home, days of silence and brooding despair…often when he came in I was terrified by the haggard greyness of his face, and the weary droop of his body, as he flung himself into his study chair, not speaking or looking at me. Once, in one of these fits, after being needlessly angry with one of the children who cried and ran away from him, he rummaged in a drawer…where I knew there was…a revolver’ (HT, 113; see note on Rain, 268). In October 1907 Thomas recorded: ‘I sat thinking about ways of killing myself… Then I went out and thought what effects my suicide would have. I don’t think I mind them. My acquaintances – I no longer have friends – would talk in a day or two (when they met) and try to explain and of course see suggestions in the past: W.H. Davies would suffer a little; Helen and the children – less in reality than they do now, from my accursed tempers and moodiness…I have no vitality, no originality, no love’ (SL, 44). On 30 March 1908 he told Gordon Bottomley: ‘An east wind or a wind from underground has swept over everything. Friends, Nature, books are like London pavements when an east wind has made them dry and harsh & pitiless. There is no joy in them. They are more dead than if they were in a Museum correctly labelled. And this is true not only this morning, but every morning, every afternoon & every night. I am now uniformly low spirited, listless, almost unable to work, & physically incapable. I have no idea what it means, but I crawl along on the very edge of life, wondering why I don’t get over the edge’ (LGB, 160). At that time, Thomas’s condition was aggravated by the ban on his relationship with a young girl, Hope Webb (see notes, 238, 279). On 9 April he reported: ‘I am now physically stronger, but as soon as my thoughts stray back to myself the same East wind blows. On the other hand the hour of sunset on Tuesday when I was walking back from Selborne through a steep valley with oaks…and no one about and the wind quite gone – that kept me quite unconscious and entranced’ (LWD).
Beauty reads like a modern digest of Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’: ‘I know so well the “grief without a pang” described with some flattery in Coleridge’s “Dejection”, so often had griefs not without a pang appeared to me almost delights by comparison, so often had I looked at things…as the poet was doing when he said “I see them all so excellently fair, / I see, not feel, how beautiful they are”’ (‘Ecstasy’, unpublished essay, BC).
7-8. like a river / At fall of evening. Cf. a letter from Shelley to Mary Godwin quoted by Thomas: ‘my mind, without yours, is as dead and cold as the dark midnight river when the moon is down’ (FIP, 41). Beauty may be, in part, a hidden love poem or poem of frustrated desire.
10. Cross breezes cut the surface to a file. The criss-cross patterns on a file’s blade add a metallic image of torment to the imagery of water and wind.
13. misting, dim-lit, quiet vale. Thomas quotes from Keats’s notes on Paradise Lost: ‘There is a cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The English word is of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with the very utter affection and yearning of a great poet’ (K, 15).
14-15. Not like a pewit…but like a dove. In Oxford, Thomas compares the beautiful voice of a solo chorister to ‘a dove floating to the windows and away, away’ (O, 9). The birds may represent alternative ways of dealing with neurosis: a regressive resort to nostalgia (‘wailing’ for ‘something…lost’); or progress, however ‘fractional’, towards the grounded selfhood phrased as ‘home and love’.
17-18. There I find my rest…Beauty is there. Framed by the affirmative ‘there’, this resolving couplet completes Thomas’s adaptation of sonnet-structure to therapeutic purposes. The relation between lines 1-7 (four sentences) and 7-16 (a single sentence) parallels that between octet and sestet. In fact, the initial mood does not lift until l.11, when the sentence ‘turns’, as sonnets do, in a different direction. Its very unfolding, through a series of metaphors, enacts a curative process that identifies ‘what yet lives in me’ with creativity. ‘Rest’, inaccessible in Over the Hills, is ‘found’. Thomas notes: ‘Jefferies…says of beauty which only the imagination can hold that it is “an expression of hope…while the heart is absorbed in its contemplation, unconscious but powerful hope is filling the breast”’ (RJ, 280). In its reflexive aspect, ‘beauty’ also covers Thomas’s poetry so far.
Ms: BL. Published text: SP, AANP, LP. Differences from CP1978: 2 child alive child, alive 17 and through as through 18 me. me: Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [JT] rather than SP, AANP, LP.
22 January 1915
FNB67 contains notes on East Grinstead Fair, 11 December 1913 (Thomas was staying with Vivian Locke Ellis at Selsfield House, East Grinstead):
Gypsies coming in with sham flowers and ‘My lucky gentleman’ ‘You’ve got a lucky face’. But she had a much luckier face in reality. Lots of caravans drawn up between Selsfield and Grinstead – begging money or half pipe of tobacco one caravan on Selsfield Common several down by Tickeridge, others by Hill Farm more at fork to Saint Hill. All beg. One boy and girl I ran away from. One boy playing rapid rascally Bacchanal tune on mouth organ while he drums on a tambourine and stamps feet and workmen grin. A few cart-horses at auction. Cheapjack, little black haired pale man of 30 who asks a man rough simple labourer if he’s married and says ‘You have my sympathy’ and shakes hands and says ‘Dyou love your wife’ Lots of laughing, knives clocks jewellery etc.
17 December. 2 more gypsies with that rascally Bacchic music at Selsfield House door. One has mouth organ, the other drums on tambourine not lacking cymbals – they play ‘Over the hills and far away’ and ‘If I were Mr. Balfour’.
4.15 p.m. How different 2 days ago when I looked from a highish road (? or from railway near Warnham) over a houseless lowish but hollow wooded country, nothing but gradations of inhuman (beginning to get misty at nightfall) dark, as of an underworld and my soul fled over it experiencing the afterdeath – friendless, vacant, hopeless.
In The South Country (265-71) Thomas had already tried to capture fair day: ‘The main part of the fair consists of a double row, a grove, of tents and booths, roundabouts, caravans, traps and tethered ponies…there is a sound of machine-made music, of firing at targets, of shouts and neighs and brays and the hoot of engines…a gypsy woman on a stool, her head on one side, [is] combing her black hair and talking to the children while a puppy catches at the end of her tresses when they come swishing down…stalls full of toys, cheap jewellery and sweets like bedded-out plants, and stout women pattering alongside – bold women, with sleek black or yellow hair and the bearing and countenance of women who have to make their way in the world’ (SC, 266-7). Thomas linked the threat to gypsy culture with that to the true ‘countryman’: ‘Before it is too late, I hope that the Zoological Society will receive a few pairs at their Gardens. With them, or in neighbouring paddocks (or whatever, for the sake of human dignity, they are called), should be some Gypsies’ (TC, 22). ‘[A]gainst the hedge a gypsy family pretend to shelter from the windy rain; the man stands moody, holding the pony, the women crouch with chins upon knees, the children laugh and will not be still. They belong to the little roads that are dying out: they hate the sword-like shelterless road, the booming cars that go straight to the city in the vale below’ (SC, 215). George Borrow’s interest in gypsies was central to Thomas’s interest in Borrow: ‘[The Gypsies] connect Borrow with what is strange, with what is simple, and with what is free…Their mystery is the mystery of nature and life. They keep their language and their tents against the mass of civilisation and length of time. They are foreigners but as native as the birds’ (GB, 237). In October 1914 some gypsies in Wales sparked off the urge to write poetry: ‘I was meditating a poem about the Gypsies by the roadside, their gramophone and cosy lighted tent so near wind and stars, the children searching for coal in the refuse of the old mine, and me faintly envying them. I thought how feeble and aesthetic my admiration of the mountains was, when I knew nothing of life on them’ (letter to Helen, 9 October 1914, NLW).
3-8. ‘My gentleman…can you spare?’ Commenting on the possibility of hearing Thomas’s hexameters as having either four or six stresses or both, Peter Howarth says of the speaker’s conversation with the gypsy: ‘It is quite impossible…to pronounce [l.7] as a six-stress line and not hear him pompous and afraid…The sense demands that the awkward second stress falls heavily on “you” (making the line sound like sarcasm directed at her lack of money) and lengthens the word “sovereign”, as if relishing the sound of the large coin…If we are to believe in the speaker’s good self and allow him four stresses, then [the gypsy] responds in a genuine question [l.8] with a rising tone at the end of the line…But if he is pompous, then her question becomes tired, petulant: her interest is elsewhere’ (British Poetry in the Age of Modernism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 97). The stumble in this transaction resembles a similar effect in May 23 (lines 28-35). It is as if, given the gap between price and value thus exposed, dealings with nomadic people can never be commensurable on both sides.
17. While his mouth-organ changed to a rascally Bacchanal dance. For Thomas and folk music see general note to An Old Song I (166). Here the poem, too, changes its tune or pitch. It builds up to a climax of liberating abandon unique in Thomas’s poetry. The ‘rascally Bacchanal dance’ counterpoints the ‘slow’ melody mimicked by the last quatrain of The Penny Whistle. The Gypsy is third in a series of poems that display Thomas’s versatility with rhyming couplets, and the sensitive ear that shapes his rhythms. As the sentence-sounds of Man and Dog are inflected by its subject’s speech, and those of Beauty by his own speech, so the hexameter couplets of The Gypsy take their cue from folk verses (‘Over the hills and far away’, ‘Simple Simon’) as well as from gypsy idioms. On another structural level, Thomas again nods to the sonnet. He bisects the twenty-eight lines between sister and brother, speaker and musician, and exploits the octet/sestet “turn” differently in each half. By thus hybridising literary and folk forms, Thomas creates a ‘music’ which echoes his wish that ‘English poetry [had] been founded…upon the native ballad instead of upon conceited ceremonious and exotic work’ (FIP, 14).
19-22. Outlasted all the fair, farmer and auctioneer…Romany. Other notes on the fair include: ‘A balloon-seller’; ‘a bulging eyed, bulging cheeked cleanshaven auctioneer’; ‘Drovers hang about with crooked sticks…cattle in High Street at foot of steps, some kneeling down opposite principal butcher’s a cheapjack speaking on table on other pavement’ (FNB67). As these lines give primacy – in memory and as Muse – to the visionary musician, they transmute notebook detail into symbol.
25-8. The gradations of the dark…a crescent moon. In line with the ‘crescent’ moon, this crescendo completes the transformation of Christmas into a pagan festival where Bacchus / Dionysus rules. The baby, the sardonic oxymoron ‘Christmas corpses’, and now a classical ‘underworld’ set up ‘the Gypsy boy’ to redeem ‘the dark’ by non-Christian and artistic means. That his ‘eyes’ surpass those of ‘the kneeling ox’ implies that the poem’s disbelief exceeds that of Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Oxen’, which can still imagine being invited on Christmas Eve to ‘“see the oxen kneel // “In the lonely barton by yonder coomb / Our childhood used to know”’.
Ms: BC, BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 21 corpses Corpses [misprint in LP and CP1920] Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.
23 January 1915
Another day, a wide and windy day, is the jackdaw’s, and he goes straight and swift and high like a joyous rider crying aloud on an endless savannah …Towards the end of March there are six nights of frost giving birth to still mornings of weak sunlight, of an opaque yet not definitely misty air. The sky is of a milky, uncertain pale blue without one cloud. Eastward the hooded sun is warming the slope fields and melting the sparkling frost. In many trees the woodpeckers laugh so often that their cry is a song…
It is not spring yet. Spring is being dreamed, and the dream is more wonderful and more blessed than ever was spring. What the hour of waking will bring forth is not known. Catch at the dreams as they hover in the warm thick air. Up against the grey tiers of beech stems and the mist of the buds and fallen leaves rise two columns of blue smoke from two white cottages among trees; they rise perfectly straight and then expand into a balanced cloud, and thus make and unmake continually two trees of smoke. No sound comes from the cottages. The dreams are over them… With inward voices of persuasion those dreams hover and say that all is to be made new, that all is yet before us, and the lots are not yet drawn out of the urn. (SC, 20-2)
Passages in The Heart of England, linked more closely with Health and The Glory (see notes 227 and 234), also anticipate Ambition. All three poems dramatise the gap between aspiration or desire and its realisation; between the speaker’s capacity and high possibilities symbolised by early morning or early Spring or both. Not confined to Thomas’s personal problems, these poems explore existential and cognitive questions that stem from Romantic ideology. In some respects, they parallel Yeats’s dialogues between Self and Anti-Self. Like Yeats, and in a similar context of war, Thomas engages with the man of action, the Promethean hero: another ‘Other’ (see note on Thomas and Nietzsche, 227).
4-7. Jackdaws began to shout and float and soar…sky. Jackdaws also feature in ‘January Sunshine’ (which ends with the imperative ‘Be beautiful and enjoy and live!’): ‘In the immense crystal spaces of fine windy air…the jackdaws play. They soar, they float, they dance, and they dive and carve sudden magnificent precipices in the air, crying all the time with sharp, joyous cries that are in harmony with the great heights and the dashing wind’ (HE, 156). In Ambition jackdaws stake out a zone of similar extremity. They initiate the poem’s stark contrasts between ‘black’ and ‘white’, heights and depths. ‘Warrior’ (compare Health, l.30) and ‘Challenges and menaces’ add to their distance from Thomas’s modes of self-doubt, banished to the ‘ridiculed’ owl. They may also allude to the war.
14-16. A train…close-knit. ‘There was spring in the smoke lying in a hundred white vertebrae motionless behind the rapid locomotive in the vale’ (RU, 5). ‘The half-moon at the zenith of a serene, frosty night led in a morning of mist that filled up all the hollows of the valley as with snow: each current of smoke from locomotive or cottage lay in solid and enduring vertebrae above the mist’ (IPS, 27-8).
17-22. Time /Was powerless…Omnipotent I was. BL’s ‘I was omnipotent’ is less telling than the inversion. Kirkham writes: ‘This is, surely, a Lucifer’s dream of usurpation, the pride that comes before the fall, the Fall…This Lucifer, besides, is a Romantic poet, blurring distinctions between perception and conception, imagining that his work reproduces the act of Creation. It is not the only passage in Thomas’s poetry to present the Wordsworthian unitary view – mind and object dissolved into each other – as a delusion, and a seductive one for the solitary who seeks compensation for his impotence in the vicarious power exercised through the mastery of words.’ For Kirkham, the pun on ‘rime’ may be Thomas’s critique of his ‘romantic self…half believing that…no contrary reality obstructed free communication between dream and verse’ (MK, 41-2). The ‘white’ aspect of the poem’s colour dynamics brings ‘clouds and rime’, via chimney and train smoke, into ‘pure’ proximity. This portrait of the hubristic artist may be in dialogue with The Gypsy.
23. the end fell like a bell. Internal rhyme heralds the anticlimactic couplet in which ‘Elysium’, together with the interlacing rhyme scheme, finally collapses. Here a Romantic poem, Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, subverts Romantic ideology: ‘Forlorn! The very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!’ The effect also hints at sexual detumescence.
26. ’twas: see note (153).
Ms: BC, BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 25 tell. [LP] tell: [BC, BL] Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 removes the brackets. See Note on Text.
3, 4 February 1915
The name of Norgett on a stone called up Oldhurst into my mind, a thatched house built of flints in the middle of oak woods not far off – ancient woods where the leaves of many Autumns whirled and rustled even in June. It was three miles from the hard road, and it used to seem that I had travelled three centuries when at last I emerged from the oaks and came in sight of that little humped gray house and within sound of the pines that shadowed it. It had a face like an owl; it was looking at me. Norgett must have heard me coming from somewhere among the trees, for, as I stepped into the clearing at one side, he was at the other. I thought of Herne the Hunter on catching sight of him. He was a long, lean, gray man with a beard like dead gorse, buried gray eyes, and a step that listened. He hardly talked at all, and only after questions that he could answer quite simply. Speech was an interruption of his thoughts, and never sprang from them; as soon as he had ceased talking they were resumed with much low murmuring and whistling – like that of the pine trees – to himself, which seemed the sound of their probings in the vast of himself and Nature. His was a positive, an active silence. (IPS, 100-1)
The less ‘positive’ wood-dweller in the poem resembles the protagonist of Frost’s ‘An Old Man’s Winter Night’, written after House and Man, and perhaps in response to it. Frost presents a similar triangle of man, house, and encroaching natural forces: ‘All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him/Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars, / That gathers on the pane in empty rooms’. Both poems reverse the human gaze at Nature. In House and Man ‘forest silence and forest murmur’ take on life in proportion as the man loses substance and speech, or becomes a thing (‘half like a beggar’s rag’). This wraith is antithetical to Thomas’s Promethean self-projection in Ambition. The faintly Gothic symbolism hovers between ecological, psychological and cognitive suggestiveness.
1-3. as dim…While I remember him. When a poem by Thomas represents itself as memory-in-process, it moves either towards epiphany or towards its converse. Poetry’s own integrative capacity is also on the line. ‘Dimness’ connects the speaker’s difficulty in stabilising memory (‘a reflection in a rippling brook’) with the man’s difficulty in maintaining selfhood, and the mind’s difficulty in negotiating the natural world. All phenomena seem pulled towards ‘the house darkness’. The poem’s rhythm, notable for syntax that overrides or breaks the couplet, takes on an entropic momentum.
12-13. half / Ghost-like: see note on Thomas’s ‘ghosts’ (202).
20. A magpie like a weathercock in doubt. On 1 February Thomas had noted: ‘magpie in oak tip like weathercock’ (FNB80). The poem ends with the image that ostensibly, and perhaps actually, sparked it off; but the arbitrariness of memory, like the image itself, is not reassuring. Cf. William Morris’s ‘The Message of the March Wind’: ‘And the vane on the spire-top is swinging in doubt’.
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 4 It was ’Twas 8 ‘Lonely!’ ‘Lonely,’ 13 half like a beggar’s half a beggar’s Note: CP1978 follows the version printed in James Guthrie’s magazine [RB 1, 4 (nd)] rather than BL/LP, but the omission of ‘like’ seems an obvious misprint.
11 February 1915
The parting was from Thomas’s fifteen-year old son Merfyn, who left Steep on that day, en route for America, and with whom his relations were often tense. Two days later Thomas wrote to Bottomley: ‘Merfyn is sailing to America today with the Frosts. I don’t pretend to expect this or that of it but I believe the time had come to let him see what people were who couldn’t make him do things as I can or a schoolmaster can but who nevertheless will expect him to give as well as take’ (LGB, 243-4). Guy Cuthbertson points out that Parting is written in the quatrain (ABBA) of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and that it echoes another poem linked with Tennyson’s grief for Arthur Hallam, ‘The Passing of Arthur’. Here King Arthur leaves for ‘the island valley of Avilion;/ Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,/Nor ever wind blows loudly’ (Notes and Queries 51, 2 [June 2004]).
7. The perished self: see note on Thomas’s ‘ghosts’ (202).
10-12. Remembered joy…sadden the sad. Cf. lines 17-20 of Home (64), to which Parting seems closely related.
12-22. So memory…spiritualised it lay. Here ‘ill’ is sealed off from ‘woe’, and hence from hope of therapeutic transformation. Cf. Philip Larkin, ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’: ‘in the end, surely, we cry / Not only at exclusion, but because / It leaves us free to cry’.
23-4. the perpetual yesterday / That naught can stir or stain like this. R. George Thomas notes that ‘“like this” refers to the poem’ as well as to the speaker’s state (CP1978, 389). The phrase aligns poetry with the ‘suffering’, rather than ‘perished’, self: with the ‘today’ of pain (and life) rather than a ‘yesterday’ that can only offer vain remorse and false transcendence (‘bliss’). Just as the ‘stirred’ emotion cannot be contained, sentences spill over the quatrains in an edgily unexpected way.
Ms: BL. Published text: LP Differences from CP1978: 24 stain [LP] stain, [BL] Note: CP1944 has ‘strain’: perhaps a misprint, although it is possible that Thomas considered this verb as an alternative. But it does not appear in BL or LP, the only extant sources. Note on title: Title is given in BL.
11 February 1915
In BL the title appears as: First known when lost. Written in the same quatrain, though with different tones and rhythms, this poem can be read as a redemptive coda to Parting. Abrupt time-shifts invade the sealed-off past of Parting, and make ‘the narrow copse’ paradoxically present in absence. These shifts possibly led the LP editors to “tidy up” the sequence of tenses (see textual note).
12. as if flowers they had been. The LP editors (see textual note) could have understood this as a pluperfect (hence, ‘made’), not as primarily a subjunctive form equivalent to ‘as if they were flowers’. The usage may not only be for reasons of rhyme: the latent pluperfect makes ‘faggot ends / Of hazel’ continuous with, as well as analogous to, the copse’s flowers.
14. And now I see as I look. Thomas sets high standards for ‘seeing’ (see note on a cognate poem, Birds’ Nests, 163). Perhaps the retrospective insight here has further remedial implications (cf. ‘amends’, l.11) for the absence that Parting mourns. In juxtaposing something paradoxically ‘hidden…near’ with ‘small winding brook’ and a ‘rising’ rhythm, the last quatrain figures access to sources in the psyche.
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 5 overgrown o’ergrown 16 tributary, tributary Note: LP has ‘was’ for ‘is’ [BL] in l.8; ‘made’ for ‘make’ [BL] in l.11. CP1944 has ‘is’ and ‘made’; CP1978 ‘is’ and ‘make’. It seems likely that the present tense always follows ‘now’. Some intermediate typescript probably accounts for other differences between BL and LP. CP1978 follows BL throughout.
15 February 1915
1-10. There never was a finer day…luck to endure. ‘The Artist’ (LAT, 130-9) anticipates the weather of May 23 and Haymaking:
This, said Adams to himself, staring strangely at the dry brushes and blank paper before him, this was the fairest day of the whole year, the youngest child of a long family of days, each fairer than its elder. First, there were two days following suddenly, hot and cloudless, upon weeks of storm, of sullenness, and of restless wind and rain vexing the new leaves and scattering the blossoms; and at the end of the second a thunderstorm out of the east ascended lightly and travelled rapidly away without silencing the birds…Adams found himself waiting day after day for the end and crown of this energy and change.
There came a lustrous morning early assailed from all quarters of the sky in turn, as if the heavens were besieging the earth, by thunder and after long, brooding intervals, thunder again and again, now with cannonading and now one boom or blast followed by no sound except its echo and the challenge of the pheasants. The lark in the sky, the blackbird in the isolated meadow elms, the nightingale in the hazel and bluebell thickets, sang on; and before the last of the assault Adams set out, inwardly confident in the day’s future. (130-2)
12-27. Old Jack Noman…cress in his basket. According to Helen Thomas, Jack Noman’s original was ‘a tramp who used to call asking for left-off clothes and selling watercress. He used to disappear for long periods, and then appear again as jaunty as ever. We thought his disappearances were spent in prison, for we knew he stole. But we liked him, and if Edward had a particularly warm but outworn garment – especially one he really had liked – he saved it until Jack came again’ (Thomas, Selected Poems [London: Hutchinson, 1962], 112n.). At the beginning of The Heart of England (1906) a child in a London street views a ‘Watercress Man’ as the harbinger of romance and the countryside. Thomas’s prose contains several other portraits of a watercress-seller/tramp under such names as Jackalone, Jack Runaway and Jack Horseman: ‘close by stood the tall old watercress-man Jack Horseman, patiently waiting for the right moment to touch his cap. His Indian complexion had come back to the old soldier, he was slightly tipsy, and he had a bunch of cowslips in his hat’ (HGLM, 176). ‘What dreams are there for that aged child [Jackalone] who goes tottering and reeling up the lane at mid-day? He carries a basket of watercress on his back. He has sold two-pennyworth, and he is tipsy, grinning through the bruises of a tipsy fall, and shifting his cold pipe from one side of his mouth to the other. Though hardly sixty he is very old, worn and thin and wrinkled, and bent sideways and forward at the waist and the shoulders. Yet he is very young. He is just what he was forty years ago when the thatcher found him lying on his back in the sun instead of combing out the straw and sprinkling it with water for his use. He laid no plans as a youth; he had only a few transparent tricks and easy lies. Never has he thought of the day after tomorrow’ (SC, 25).
‘Jack’ arrives in the poem like the spirit of May, like Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, combining in his appearance the freshness and heat of the season. He is related to ‘Lob’ by his name, earthiness and proverbial wisdom, by his roguery and generosity. But he personifies primal vitality rather than cultural evolution. The couplets of Lob have a different tune. Different again are those that characterise and historicise the ‘old man’ in Man and Dog.
25-34. Fairer flowers…I say. In saying ‘Wait till next time’ (for the speaker to give him ‘something’), Jack retreats from the ordinary exchange and barter that he tentatively proposes in l.32, and thus fully matches his deed to the abundant day. John Lucas comments: ‘The lovely anapaestic ripple of [lines 25-32] provides a kind of licensed gaiety of conversation, one that plays up the largesse of giving as opposed to selling, and which is reinforced by “Take them and these flowers, too, free”. To honour that line’s rhythmic movement you have to stress the surely unimportant word “and”. In doing so, you realise how important it is: Jack Noman takes and gives flowers free because they come from “no man’s gardens”’ (Lucas, Starting to Explain [Nottingham: Trent Books, 2003], 116).
36. roll-walk-run. The elements of this compound function as verbs rather than nouns. The headlong rhythm epitomises how the poem’s mainly four-stress line, with its mixed anapaests and iambics, fits its ‘jaunty’ subject.
37-8. Oakshott rill…Wheatham hill. Oakshott Stream and the hanger Wheatham Hill are north of Steep. Watercress flourishes in chalk streams, and English watercress production still centres on Hampshire: ‘now there are only patches of the cress gone to weed in the Ashford and Oakshott Streams. Cowslips too have become rarer on the hangers’ (WW, 28).
39-44. ’Twas the first day…like hops. These packed lines consummate the rich textures and unusually intense happiness of the poem, which survive the shadow, mysterious rather than mournful, thrown into the sunlight by its final couplet. All phenomena acquire an equal sensuous value, relished by the assonance ‘midges-bit-dust-sad-hid-ruts-seeds’. It is rarely that Spring, or any other season, can ‘do nothing to make [Thomas] sad’.
45-6. BL ends less mysteriously: ‘A fine day was May the 20th, / The day of old Jack Noman’s death.’ Criticism from W.H. Hudson seems to have precipitated the change: ‘I must think about the sensation at the end of “May 20”. I think perhaps it must come out’ (letter to Hudson, SL, 108).
Ms: BL. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: In punctuating lines 43-4, CP1978 follows P [copse. / hops,] not CP1920 [copse, / hops,]. The latter seems preferable, since the former [also in PTP] may be an inconsistent punctuation resulting from the change to the last couplet: see note above [BL has copse. / hops.]. Note on title: May 23 is the title in P, CP1920, CP1928 and CP1978; May the Twenty-third in CP1944.
22 February 1915
The Barn may involve a suppressed dialogue. It seems to merge the voice of an old (l.3) countryman or farm-labourer with that of an implied poet-listener. The first voice underlies the speaker’s attitude to ‘they’; his knowledge of the farm and its history; aspects of his idiom and mode of address: ‘’Twould not [BL ‘’Twouldn’t’] pay to pull down’ (see note on The Signpost, 153). Expressions like ‘no other antiquity’ and the account of the starlings are uttered in something closer to Thomas’s ‘own’ voice. In The Icknield Way he writes about ‘Lone Barn’, near Wayland’s Smithy on the Ridgeway, and tells the story of a deranged philosopher and his family who squatted there in miserable conditions. This ‘black barn’ contributes to both The Barn and The Barn and the Down: ‘[it] lies unexpectedly in a small hollow at one of the highest points of the downs, three miles from the nearest hamlet. It had long been deserted. The farmhouse was ruinous…An old plum tree, planted when barn and house were built, and now dead and barkless, stood against one end…The last of its doors lay just outside in the dead embers of the tramps’ fire. Thus open on both sides to the snow-light and the air the barn looked the work rather of nature rather than of man. The old thatch was grooved, riddled, and gapped, and resembled a grassy bank that has been under a flood the winter through; covered now in snow, it had the outlines in miniature of the hill on which it was built’ (IW, 237-40). In ‘Earth Children’, an old couple inhabit ‘part of a farmhouse, the rest having fallen to ruin, and from human hands to the starlings, the sparrows, and the rats’ (HE, 141).
18. Making a spiky beard: a characteristically brilliant piece of bird-observation. On 4 February Thomas had noted: ‘starlings perch singly in hedge and talk and chatter and whistle with heads up, making a sort of spiky beard under beaks, bubbling throat’ (FNB80).
23. It’s the turn of lesser things, I suppose. The speaker traces, and seems to approve, a form of biodegradation whereby creatures take over, and Nature reclaims, an artefact.
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Note on title: Title is given in BL.
23 February 1915
Thomas’s first “home” poem is a metaphysical parable. He would write two other poems with this title: Home, which explores earthly dwelling, and ‘Home’, which explores ‘fellowship’ and nationality. But the quest for home always governs poetic travels that already span the dubiously ‘homely’ White Horse pub; ‘powers / Coming like exiles home again’ in The Other; the ‘empty home’ of The Mountain Chapel; the dove’s ideal ‘home and love’ in Beauty. The dialectics of home in Thomas’s poetry cross over between psychology and culture. ‘Aurelius, the Superfluous Man’ (Thomas took the concept from Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man, 1850) is a relevant self-portrait: ‘The superfluous are those who cannot find society with which they are in some sort of harmony. The magic circle drawn round us all at birth surrounds these in such a way that it will never overlap, far less become concentric with, the circles of any other in the whirling multitudes’ (HGLM, 49-50). For Smith, Thomas’s ‘Superfluous Man’ is ‘the dispossessed rightful inheritor, equivocally retained by a civilisation guiltily unable to abolish him totally’ (SS, 46). But, like Turgenev’s diarist, Thomas tends to represent his psychic separateness as preceding and underlying other forms of alienation: ‘with me, social intercourse is only an intense form of solitude’ (LGB, 53). More positively, as in the case of Aurelius, he associates the ‘superfluous’ with visionary powers.
In ‘A Note on Nostalgia’ (Scrutiny 1 [1932], 8-19) D.W. Harding, cites Home when he charges Thomas with failure to ‘probe his unhappiness’ and with implying ‘that its causes were remoter, less tangible and more inevitable, than in fact they were’: ‘The poem almost certainly springs from nostalgic feelings, but…Thomas gives them a much larger significance, larger than they deserve.’ Cooke counters this critique by arguing that Thomas’s poetry incorporates adequate ‘resistance’ to the regressive impulses it manifests (WC, 225-31). In Home, as in Beauty and Parting, the speaker ultimately refuses a regressive journey, perceiving its illusive nature. Whereas in Parting the ‘strange land’ of ‘the Past’ is disembodied, ‘That land, / My home’ remains un-embodied. Despite ‘go back’, it belongs to the future or the mind. Home may be less an expression of nostalgia – ‘the ache for home’ – than a poem about nostalgia and its limits.
1. Not the end: but there’s nothing more. This elliptical opening marks an existential limbo between here and the hereafter, where life has no more ‘meanings’ to disclose.
2-4. rude…solitude. Thomas also rhymes these words in The Other and Melancholy.
6. all that they mean I know. Cf. the second quatrain of Hardy’s ‘To Life’: ‘I know what thou would’st tell / Of Death, Time, Destiny – / I have known it long, and know, too, well / What it all means for me.’
11-13. No traveller tells of it…And could I discover it. Direct allusion to Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy (‘The undiscovered country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns’) exposes its presence in the poem. From the first line, ‘the ache for home’ has shown its other face as the death wish. ‘I suppose every man thinks that Hamlet was written for him, but I know he was written for me’ (EF, 12).
13-16. And could I…things that were. Cf. The Signpost, lines 20-30, and Liberty, lines 24-7; also Hamlet: ‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come’. Thomas’s personae veer between desire for a condition free from suffering and re-attachment to the complex living moment.
17-20. Remembering ills…what was well. Cf. Parting, lines 10-12. Links between Parting and Home include Thomas’s use of the quatrain. The move from an ABBA rhyme scheme to ABCB, with its greater potential to suggest progress, reflects the move from a speaker contemplating ‘perpetual yesterday’ to a speaker who builds on the earlier poem’s recoil from sterile retrospect (‘irremediable’ picks up ‘Not as what had been remedied’ in Parting). Yet, unlike Parting, Home consists of end-stopped stanzas, and the speaker’s ultimate decision ‘to be’, although more positive than his initial claim that life can yield no further ‘meanings’, projects stoicism rather than agency: ‘I must wait’. Cf. Hamlet: ‘And makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of’.
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Note on title: Title is given in BL.
24 February 1915
The carefully balanced triads of the first six lines, together with the equally careful discrimination between degrees of discomfort, prepare for the moral distinctions that the poem will establish. Later, ‘telling me plain’ defines the aesthetic of what proves to be a “war poem”. His sense of ‘what I escaped / And others could not’ was a factor in Thomas’s enlistment. Here the Hamlet of Home meets Fortinbras.
8-9. cry/ / Shaken out. The cross-stanza enjambment gives ‘Shaken’ a pivotal resonance.
10. No merry note: a reference to Winter’s song ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ (Love’s Labours Lost V, ii) which also features in Lob (lines 96-8): ‘Tu-whit, Tu-who, a merry note’. The owl’s cry, as inner ‘voice’, is no longer being ‘ridiculed’ (see Ambition, l.9).
13. salted. Scannell observes: ‘It is the repeated word, salted, which is at once ambiguous yet absolutely right for [Thomas’s] purposes. The owl grieves, lonely in the cold night, and the poet pities those who don’t share the warmth and comfort that he is privileged to enjoy; but he is too honest to deny that, while his sympathy for the “soldiers and poor” is authentic, his awareness of their privation adds to his own pleasure and contentment while at the same time it awakens the sense of guilt…the word salted certainly means flavoured or spiced, but at the same time less comfortable connotations are invoked: the harshness of salt, the salt in the wound, the taste of bitterness, and of tears’ (VS, 19-20).
Ms: BL. Published text: P. Note on title: Title is given in BL.
11 March 1915
Thomas spent childhood summer holidays in western Wales. In ‘Edward Thomas and Wales’ Sally Roberts Jones notes that ‘the child in “The Child on the Cliffs” seems to be sitting on a Gower cliff, looking out over the drowned Coed Arian [Silver Wood] to the Devon coast’ (JB, 81).
Westward, for men of this island, lies the sea; westward are the great hills. In a mere map the west of Britain is fascinating. The great features of that map, which make it something more than a picture to be imperfectly copied by laborious childhood pens, are the great promontories of Caernarvon, of Pembroke, of Gower and of Cornwall, jutting out into the western sea, like the features of a grim large face, such a face as is carved on a ship’s prow. These protruding features, even on a small-scale map, thrill the mind with a sense of purpose and spirit. They yearn, they peer ever out to the sea, as if using eyes and nostrils to savour the utmost scent of it, as if themselves calling back to the call of the waves. (SC, 9)
Although ‘sea-blue-eyed’ like ‘Lob’, Thomas usually presents his ‘land face’. His most extended prose meditation on the sea depicts it as ‘unearthly’ and unhistorical: ‘a monster that has lain unmoved by time’, ‘that cold fatal element’, ‘a type of the waste where everything is unknown or uncertain except death’ (SC, 162). Hence, perhaps, the darker orientation of this poem as compared with The Child in the Orchard, whose similar form suggests that Thomas’s sea-child and land-child are complementary. In The Child on the Cliffs the boy’s perceptions seem to license indulgence of the death wish resisted in Home. The morbidly erotic scenario, which resembles certain Victorian images of childhood, includes a beckoning ‘Belle Dame sans Merci’ (in BL the phrase is ‘white beseeching arm’). Thomas told Eleanor Farjeon: ‘I like the Child on the Cliff. It is a memory between one of my young brothers and myself which he reminded me of lately. He was most of the child and I have been truthful. I think I can expect some allowances for the “strangeness” of the day’ (EF, 127-8).
3. Things are strange today on the cliff. Thomas’s deployment of ‘strange’, often in tension with ‘familiar’, resembles Freud’s coupling of ‘unheimlich’ (uncanny, disturbing) and ‘heimlich’ (see note on The Other, 162). Freud also argues that the words are two sides of the same coin: ‘on the one hand [heimlich] means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’ (Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature, Penguin Freud Library 14 [1985], 345). Here sunshine is paradoxically uncanny, prompting the surreal metamorphoses of the grasshopper; while, in the last stanza, ‘lying under that foam’ assumes the domestic aura of a child in bed. The poem may also be “Freudian” in the sense of Oedipal.
9. Like a green knight: a simile that adds to the Arthurian ethos.
13-16. Fishes and gulls ring no bells…up in heaven. This alludes to legendary drowned lands and cities off Britain’s south-western coast, like Coed Arian, or Lyonesse between Land’s End and the Scilly Isles, whose church bells can supposedly be heard: ‘Outside, by the window, is the village idiot, with a smile like the sound of bells ascending from a city buried in the sea’ (BW, 98).
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: title: Cliffs [LP] Cliff 15 – hark! – [BL, CP1920] – hark. – [LP] Note on title: The title in CP1978 is based on EF, quoted above. But Thomas’s references to poems in letters cannot be seen as definitive [see Note on Text], and the singular, despite l.3, could imply a child climbing a cliff. The LP title, taken together with the EF reference, suggests that the LP editors were following a typescript [probably typed by Farjeon]. In l.15 LP seems to be in error.
12 March 1915
‘Next day I crossed the river. At first, the water seemed as calm and still as ice. The boats at anchor, and doubled by shadow, were as if by miracle suspended in the water. No ripple was to be seen, though now and then one emitted a sudden transitory flame, reflected from the sun, which dreamed half-way up the sky in a cocoon of cloud. No motion of the tide was visible, though the shadows of the bridge that cleared the river in three long leaps, trembled and were ever about to pass away. The end of the last leap was unseen, for the further shore was lost in mist, and a solitary gull spoke for the mist.’ Thomas proceeds to meditate on a ‘drowned dog’ whose stillness ‘gave me a strange suggestion of power and restraint’, and which evokes ‘the host of all the dead or motionless or dreaming things’ (BW, 110-12).
Combining progress with suspension, the rhyme scheme of The Bridge is integral to its symbolism. The internal rhymes in the first and third lines of each stanza maintain a forward impetus, checked by the same-rhyming of the last two lines. Other forms of refrain and the long last line enhance the sense of hiatus, as if the poem refuses to move on to any further point but itself remains a ‘bridge’. The Bridge holds in suspended animation key motifs of Thomas’s poetry so far: strangeness; memory; travel; rest; the domains of Past and Future; opposed emotions, experiences and states (‘smile or moan’, ‘kind’/ ‘unkind’, ‘lights / And shades’); alternative ‘lives’; dark depths. R. George Thomas speculates that the ‘“strange bridge”…may well refer to his first half-unconscious decision to enlist’ (CP1978, 391).
10. dark-lit. This oxymoron, as applied to the ‘stream’ of consciousness, or perhaps to a zone where the conscious mind and the unconscious touch, is among the poem’s ‘bridges’.
11-15. No traveller…or have been. The benign sense of ‘rest’ or remission here is qualified by the idea that ‘this moment brief between / Two lives’ is suppressing (‘hide’) rather than dismissing an impossible third life, the synthesis of all Thomas’s dialectics: ‘what has never been’.
Ms: BL. Published text: P.
16 March 1915
Thomas grew up in London, but the whole direction of his life and art led away from it. Oxford, The Heart of England and In Pursuit of Spring all begin with a happy departure from city streets: ‘Passing rapidly through London with its roar of causes that have been won, and the suburbs where they have no causes…’ (O, 1). Conversely, his prose contains portraits of unhappily displaced people driven to London by the collapse of the English rural economy: ‘He was a country-bred man with a distinct London accent. Once upon a time, it seems, he had charmed a snake, caught a tench of five pounds and lost a bigger one, and, like Jefferies, heard the song of the redwing in England; now he kept somebody’s accounts and wore the everlasting mourning of clerks’ (TC, 1). Yet Thomas spent much time in London, lodging with his parents, soliciting work from publishers and editors, researching books, seeing literary friends. In Good-night, in The Childhood of Edward Thomas and other autobiographical prose, he salutes his urban – and perhaps creative – origins: ‘the Common…was large enough to provide us with many surprises and discoveries for years’; ‘The streets were a playground almost equal to the Common’ (CET, 39, 41). In moving from ‘down’ to ‘suburb’ to ‘gardens of the town’ (old ‘inner suburbs’), Good-night reverses the course, and complicates the emotion, of a passage near the start of In Pursuit of Spring: ‘Several times two or three children passed beneath the window and chattered in loud, shrill voices, but they were unseen. Far from disturbing the tranquillity, the sounds were steeped in it; the silence and stillness of the twilight saturated and embalmed them. But pleasant as in themselves they were entirely, they were far more so by reason of what they suggested. These voices and this tranquillity spoke of Spring. They told me what an evening it was at home. I knew how the first blackbird was whistling in the broad oak, and, farther away – some very far away – many thrushes were singing in the chill’ (IPS, 19-20).
Thomas liked the concept behind Richard Jefferies’s After London (1885), which begins with ‘the relapse of England into barbarism, and the loss of everything characteristic of nineteenth-century civilisation’ (RJ, 233). His reaction, like the book itself, belongs to the period when London’s exponential growth was swallowing up formerly rural or semi-rural environments, creating new suburbs and marooning older ones: ‘many suburbans have seen the paradise of their boyhood defaced’ (HS, 103). Thomas was so deeply conditioned by all this as to make his poetry, in its ecological and metaphysical recoil, paradoxically “about” London: ‘London is one of the immense things of the world, like the Alps, the Sahara, the Western Sea; and it has a complexity, a wavering changefulness along with its mere size, which no poets or artists have defined as they have in a sense defined those other things’ (RJ, 106). He became negatively compelled by the puzzle of people ‘living in no ancient way’ (HE, 7), by the fact that ‘we cannot make harmony out of cities’ (TC, 11). He does not so much evade the modern city as insist that it sets poetry a cognitive problem:
[T]hese streets are the strangest thing in the world. They have never been discovered. They cannot be classified. There is no tradition about them. Poets have not shown how we are to regard them. They are to us as mountains were in the Middle Ages, sublime, difficult, immense; and yet so new that we have inherited no certain attitude towards them, of liking or dislike. They suggest so much that they mean nothing at all…They propose themselves as a problem to the mind, only a little less so at night when their surfaces hand the mind on to the analogies of sea waves or large woods…Once [in a new suburb] I came upon a line of willows above dead reeds that used to stand out by a pond as the first notice to one walking out of London that he was in the country at last; they were unchanged; they welcomed and encouraged once more. The lighted windows in the mist had each a greeting; they were as the windows we strain our eyes for as we descend to them from the hills of Wales or Kent; like those, they had the art of seeming a magical encampment among the trees, brave, cheerful lights which men and women kept going amidst the dense and powerful darkness. The thin, incompleted walls learned a venerable utterance. (HE, 4-6)
4. the noise of man, beast, and machine prevails. Stillness, for Thomas, is both a key quality of the countryside and a pre-condition of the aesthetic: ‘To one bred in a town this kind of silence and solitariness perhaps always remains impressive. We see no man, no smoke, and hear no voice of man or beast or machinery, and straightway the mind recalls very early mornings when London has lain silent but for the cooing of pigeons’ (IW, 145). While Thomas also imbues natural sounds with ominous force (see note on The Penny Whistle, 174), he invariably hears ‘the roar of towns’ (Roads) as unstructurable pandemonium: ‘In the streets…the roar continued of the inhuman masses of humanity…Between the millions and the one, no agreement was visible’ (IPS, 11). ‘Somewhere far off I could hear an angry murmur broken by frantic metallic clashings. No one sound out of the devilish babble could I disentangle, still less, explain. A myriad noises were violently mixed in one muddy, struggling mass of rumbling and jangling…Above all, the babble was angry and it was inhuman…As I realised that it was the mutter of London, I sighed, being a child, with relief, but could not help listening still for every moment of that roar as of interlaced immortal dragons fighting eternally in a pit’ (HGLM, 226-7).
6. echo…echoing. This word also appears twice in l.10. Thomas chose for This England William Blake’s ‘The Echoing Green’, which evokes the playground of childhood, and ends: ‘Many sisters and brothers, / Like birds in their nest, / Are ready for rest, / And sport no more seen / On the darkening green’.
9. the ghost: Thomas as a child. Smith comments: ‘The ghost is one of the commonest tropes in Thomas’s poetry. His English landscapes are in fact peopled primarily by ghosts, usually associated with memory and the return of the past’ (SS, 66). In their psychological aspect, Thomas’s ghosts are projections of the self: the ‘ghosts’ of tears in Tears; ‘the ‘half/Ghost-like’ figure in House and Man; the ‘ghost new-arrived’ in The Gypsy; the ‘perished self’ of Parting who ‘is in shadow-land a shade’. Cf. the ‘ghostly double’ that voices the prose origin of Rain (IW, 280). Thomas takes Hardy’s ‘hauntings’ into new psychic as well as historical zones. When a proposal for a travel book fell through, he expressed his relief thus: ‘I dread the new faces and new ways. I was born to be a ghost’ (JM, 180).
11-16. homeless…homely…a traveller’s good-night. See general note to Home (197). Good-night revisits the mood, language and imagery of The Bridge in more affirmative terms. Although the speaker remains in transit, this quasi-religious benediction, stronger than ‘blest’ in The Bridge, like his earlier sense of ‘kingship’ amid disparate phenomena, reconciles home and journey, friend and stranger, city and country, ‘familiar’ (heimlich) and ‘strange’ (unheimlich). These reconciliations also ratify Thomas’s success in writing a “city” poem. In Good-night a reflexive sound track takes the speaker-as-poet to where urban ‘noise’ finally drowns birdsong, but the children’s ‘call’ becomes a surrogate aural Muse.
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 16 good-night good night Note: Inconsistencies in the spelling of ‘good-night’ have been regularised in this edition. Note on title: Title is given in BL.