by Edna Longley
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’.
The Manor Farm (45)
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.
An Old Song I (46)
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 Will
iams’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.
An Old Song II (47)
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 contemp
oraries 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)
