by Edna Longley
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.
After Rain (38)
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.
Interval (39)
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 wo
rd ‘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.
The Other (40)
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 gr
eat 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.
