by Edna Longley
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.
March (35)
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.
Old Man (36)
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.
Old Man’s Beard
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 pla
nt’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.
The Signpost (37)
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 accept
ed 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.
