by Edna Longley
Ms: BL. Published text: P. Note on title: See textual note on An Old Song I.
The Combe (48)
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.
The Hollow Wood (48)
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.
The New Year (49)
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 ha
nds, 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.
The Source (49)
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.
The Penny Whistle (50)
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.
A Private (50)
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.
Snow (51)
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.
Adlestrop (51)
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:
