The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  In from the ivy round the casement thick.

  Of all they saw and heard there they shall keep

  The tale for the old ivy and older brick.

  When I look back I am like moon, sparrow and mouse

  10

  That witnessed what they could never understand

  Or alter or prevent in the dark house.

  One thing remains the same – this my right hand

  Crawling crab-like over the clean white page,

  Resting awhile each morning on the pillow,

  15

  Then once more starting to crawl on towards age.

  The hundred last leaves stream upon the willow.

  The Sheiling

  It stands alone

  Up in a land of stone

  All worn like ancient stairs,

  A land of rocks and trees

  5

  Nourished on wind and stone.

  And all within

  Long delicate has been;

  By arts and kindliness

  Coloured, sweetened, and warmed

  10

  For many years has been.

  Safe resting there

  Men hear in the travelling air

  But music, pictures see

  In the same daily land

  15

  Painted by the wild air.

  One maker’s mind

  Made both, and the house is kind

  To the land that gave it peace,

  And the stone has taken the house

  To its cold heart and is kind.

  The Lane

  Some day, I think, there will be people enough

  In Froxfield to pick all the blackberries

  Out of the hedges of Green Lane, the straight

  Broad lane where now September hides herself

  5

  In bracken and blackberry, harebell and dwarf gorse.

  Today, where yesterday a hundred sheep

  Were nibbling, halcyon bells shake to the sway

  Of waters that no vessel ever sailed…

  It is a kind of spring: the chaffinch tries

  10

  His song. For heat it is like summer too.

  This might be winter’s quiet. While the glint

  Of hollies dark in the swollen hedges lasts –

  One mile – and those bells ring, little I know

  Or heed if time be still the same, until

  15

  The lane ends and once more all is the same.

  Out in the dark

  Out in the dark over the snow

  The fallow fawns invisible go

  With the fallow doe;

  And the winds blow

  5

  Fast as the stars are slow.

  Stealthily the dark haunts round

  And, when a lamp goes, without sound

  At a swifter bound

  Than the swiftest hound,

  10

  Arrives, and all else is drowned;

  And star and I and wind and deer

  Are in the dark together, – near,

  Yet far, – and fear

  Drums on my ear

  15

  In that sage company drear.

  How weak and little is the light,

  All the universe of sight,

  Love and delight,

  Before the might,

  20

  If you love it not, of night.

  The sorrow of true love

  The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow

  And true love parting blackens a bright morrow.

  Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair

  Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear

  5

  Above the storm the heavens wait to be seen.

  But greater sorrow from less love has been

  That can mistake lack of despair for hope

  And knows not tempest nor the perfect scope

  Of summer, but a frozen drizzle perpetual

  10

  Of drops that from remorse and pity fall

  And cannot ever shine in the sun or thaw,

  Removed eternally from the sun’s law.

  NOTES

  Up in the Wind (31)

  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.

  The White Horse

  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 wha
t, 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.

  November (34)

  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 clo
uds 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).