by Edna Longley
4. more tender-gorgeous. This oxymoronic compound initiates the switch from vibrantly familiar to coldly exotic. It also makes ‘sight’ empathetic rather than spectatorial. In The Icknield Way Thomas less happily calls rain-soaked primrose petals ‘tender-blubbering’ (IW, 12).
7-10. A boy crawls down…Blue pottery, alabaster, and gold. The items in l.10 refer back to the colours in l.3. At the end of ‘Leaving Town’ (HE, 1-18) Thomas compares entering a ‘shadowed wood’ at dawn to finding an Egyptian tomb:
Suddenly my mind went back to the high dark cliffs of Westminster Abbey, the blank doors and windows of endless streets, the devouring river, the cold gloom before dawn, and then with a shudder forgot them and saw the flowers and heard the birds with such a joy as when the ships from Tarshish, after three blank years, again unloaded apes and peacocks and ivory, and men upon the quay looked on; or as, when a man has mined in the dead desert for many days, he suddenly enters an old tomb, and making a light, sees before him vases of alabaster, furniture adorned with gold and blue enamel and the figures of gods, a chariot of gold, and a silence perfected through many ages in the company of death and of the desire of immortality. (HE, 18)
The pyramidal shape of ‘the long swede pile’, a construction that itself figures the unconscious, may have reactivated Thomas’s Egyptian imagery.
8-9. Christian men…God and monkey: post-Darwinian irony.
11. Amen-hotep: the name of several eighteenth-dynasty pharaohs. The tomb of Amenhotep II, in the Valley of the Tombs of Kings, was excavated in 1898. Before the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, this was the only known tomb where a mummified pharaoh still lay in his own sarcophagus. The tomb had been much robbed, and the single object in Swedes that corresponds to its contents is ‘blue pottery’ or ‘faience’ (which appears in a BL draft). The passage in The Heart of England, and hence the poem, may involve ‘snatches of memory of more than one discovery in the Valley of the Kings during the early years of the twentieth century’; the tomb of Tuthmosis IV contained fragments of animals, an alabaster face, and the dashboard of a war chariot. (See T.H.G. James, ‘A Poetic Puzzle’, Hommages à Jean Leclant, vol. 4 [Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1994], 147-51.) David and Caroline Gill cite an excavation reported in 1906: ‘a boy was sent in [and finds included a] chariot, the…wheel rims of which shone through the darkness golden and scarlet’ (Notes and Queries 53 [September 2003], 325).
11-12. But dreamless…sweet as Spring. This antithesis, the climax of dialectically poised sentences that resist sonnet-form, underlines the poem’s status as an ars poetica. In contrasting the dead pharaoh’s panoply with seasonal processes, and linking the latter with ‘dream’, Thomas prefers a biocentric, inner-directed aesthetic to an 1890s aesthetic of stylised display (see Introduction, 16). He attacks Walter Pater’s prose for its ‘exquisite unnaturalness’, for making language seem to be as hard and inhuman a material as marble’, for ‘embalm[ing] choice things, seen at choice moments, in choice words’ (WP, 220, 101, 108). Similarly, he compares the anthology Des Imagistes to ‘a tall marble monument’, in which the better poems ‘are the green ivy beginning to climb the tall marble monument, and may well outlast it’ (New Weekly, 9 May 1914).
Ms: BL. Published text: P. Note on title: Title is given in BL.
The Unknown Bird (55)
17 January 1915
‘The strange bird lá-la-lá’ (FNB80, early January 1915). In The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans Mr Torrance remembers:
Only one bird sang in [the cypress tree], and that was a small, sad bird which I do not know the name of. It sang there every month of the year, it might be early or it might be late, on the topmost point of the plume. It never sang for long, but frequently, and always suddenly. It was black against the sky, and I saw it nowhere else. The song was monotonous and dispirited, so that I fancied it wanted us to go because it did not like the cheerful garden, and my father’s loud laugh, and my mother’s tripping step: I fancied it was up there watching the clouds and very distant things in hope of a change; but nothing came, and it sang again, and waited, ever in vain. I laughed at it, and was not at all sorry to see it there, for it had stood on that perch in all the happy days before, and so long as it remained the days would be happy. My father did not like the bird, but he was often looking at it, and noted its absence as I did. The day after my sister died he threw a stone at it – the one time I saw him angry – and killed it. But a week later came another, and when he heard it he burst into tears, and after that he never spoke of it but just looked up to see if it was there when he went in or out of the porch. (HGLM, 146-7)
16-17. I told / The naturalists. ‘[T]he way in which scientific people & their followers are satisfied with data in appalling English disgusts me, & is moreover wrong’ (LGB, 140); ‘natural history, which is so often in danger of falling into the hands of mere takers of notes’ (RJ, 118). The unclassifiable bird marks the point at which “Nature” takes on aesthetic meaning. Thomas salutes W.H. Hudson as ‘the substantial miracle of a naturalist and an imaginative artist in one and in harmony’ (IPS, 245). Many birds are named in his poetry (see note, 240), but this bird-Muse, like his equally elusive female Unknown, has no name. 21. that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet. Like Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s lark-Muses, the bird’s call focuses strains between body and spirit, heaviness and lightness, perhaps prose and poetry. An aural counterpart to the ‘desire of the eye’ in The Lofty Sky, it pulls the poem towards Romantic transcendence: ‘As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world’, ‘beyond my shore’. This otherworldly summons also parallels the unique ‘light’ in An Old Song II. Both images represent poetic vocation as a form of mysterious election: ‘I alone could hear him’.
22-5. Sad more than joyful…taste it. These lines skirt self-parody with their convoluted insistence on the psychological, sensory and aesthetic mot juste.
Ms: BC, BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 18 me, [LP] me [RB 2, 4 (June 1918)] Note on title: Title is given in BL.
The Mill-Pond (56)
18 January 1915
‘The stream going helpless and fast between high banks is gloomy until it is turned to bright, airy foam and hanging crystal by the mill; over the restless pool below hangs a hawthorn all white and fragrant and murmurous with bloom …Over the green grass walks the farmer’s daughter in a white dress…She is a Lady May, careless, proud, at ease’ (HE, 181-4); [of a ‘ruined flock-mill’ near a weir] ‘we could see its white wall of foam half a mile higher up the river, which was concealed by alders beyond’ (HE, 219).
15. A girl came out. After the girl’s appearance, the poem’s ominously intense (perhaps erotically charged) sounds and images might seem to collapse into sentimental anti-climax rather than consummate themselves in a bursting ‘storm’. In A Dream and The Mill-Water, written at the time of Thomas’s enlistment, similar effects will find their full occasion. Yet if The Mill-Pond somehow fails to be either a war poem or a love poem, ‘teased the foam’ and ‘crouched /To shelter’ may know this. The reader is left to speculate why the speaker should ‘now’ remember that, all his senses absorbed in the moment, he had to be warned to take dangers seriously.
Ms: BC, BL. Published text: P. Note on title: Title [unhyphenated] is given in BL.
Man and Dog (56)
20 January 1915
Heightened reportage is a mode of Thomas’s early poetry that fades away later on. In May 1915 he wrote: ‘I had got past poetical prose and my new feeling is that here [in poetry] I can use my experience and what I am and what I know with less hindrance than in prose, less gross notebook stuff and mere description and explanation’ (SL, 111). His friends had often told him, and he had told himself, to stop keeping notebooks. The ‘Other Man’ in In Pursuit of Spring is a notebook-victim (see note, 158). Man and Dog epitomises the initial alchemy whereby Thomas turns ‘notebook stuff’ into poetry. FNB79 contains this entry for 21 November 1914:
Going up Stoner in cold s
trong N.E. wind but a fine and cloudy sky at 3, overtook short stiff oldish man taking short quick strides – carrying flag basket and brolly and old coat on back and with a green ash stick in hand. Says it’s a fine day and as I passed (agreeing) he decides to ask me for – I don’t know, I stopped his request with questions, found him a 6d. He had a little bitch brown with spots of grey reminding me of a Welsh sheep dog – not much use, but company. He says the mother was almost pure (blue) Welsh. Hunts in Hangers, nearly got one this morning ‘he would and he wouldn’t, ’twas like that.’ ‘They say those Welsh bitches will breed with foxes. He knew one the other side of Guildford and she had her litter of seven in a rabbit-hole. He had one. It [?]liked to bite anything it killed so hard it was useless: red mouth like a fox.’ He has come from Childgrove where he’s done two halfdays dock picking this week: is going to Alton and hopes for a lift from one of Crowley’s men to Longmoor to look for a job. But perhaps he won’t reach Alton – rheumatism in one leg – rubs oil they sell at harness makers and ‘supples’ it a bit – round face with white bristles all over and eyes with red rims. Has worked a lot at Southampton docks, navvying, but likes farm work best, has promises of flint picking when sheep are out of field, but can’t hang about – comes from Christchurch in the New Forest – did a year’s soldiering in ’74 in Berkshires. – has 3 sons at Front, one just come from Bombay had really finished his 8 years with the colours, one son a marine. If he can’t reach Alton, will get a shakedown from a farmer.
Talked about the soldiers just coming to billet in Petersfield – he thought 2 or 3 thousand – 20, or so, in kilts – might be a Border Regiment.
A rustic, burring, rather monotonous speech, head a little hung down, but hardly a stoop, as he keeps on at his stiff quick short steps among crisp dry scurrying leaves up to Ludcombe Corner where I turned off.
He was thinking about soldiers in France – terrible affair – in cold weather, supposing they would be ‘marching after the enemy’ and surely not lying in trenches in this winter weather.
Farther behind the poem are passages in Thomas’s prose, also based on note-taking, such as his depiction of an itinerant ‘Umbrella Man’: ‘He was of middle height and build, the crookedest of men, yet upright, like a branch of oak which comes straight with all its twistings…He was a labourer’s son, and he had already had a long life of hoeing and reaping and fagging when he enlisted at Chatham … He had lost his youth in battle, for a bullet went through his knee… He showed his gnarled knee to explain his crookedness…Labourer, soldier, labourer, tinker, umbrella man, he had always wandered, and knew the South Country between Fordingbridge and Dover, as a man knows his garden’ (SC, 188-92). Archetypal aspects of the ‘Umbrella Man’ contribute to Lob (see note, 213). But in Man and Dog, as in Up in the Wind, the primary focus is social history compressed into an individual life-story. The man’s career as casual labourer spans rural and industrial work amid the advance of modernity and the advent of war. This time frame, however, also sits within a longer eco-historical narrative implied by his relation to the land.
Man and Dog, which adapts oral history to couplets and vice versa, is a poetic apotheosis of the social portraiture for which Thomas admired The Bettesworth Book (1901) by ‘George Bourne’ (George Sturt):
At first the book may seem tame, a piece of reporting which leaves the reader not unaware of the notebooks consulted by the author. But in the end comes a picture out of the whole, painfully, dubiously emerging, truthful undoubtedly…which raises George Bourne to a high place among observers…Bettesworth had fought in the Crimea, and during sixty years had been active unceasingly over a broad space of English country – Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire – always out of doors. His memory was good, his eye for men and trades a vivid one, and his gift of speech unusual…so that a picture of rural England during the latter half of the nineteenth century, by one born in the earlier half and really belonging to it, is the result. The portrait of an unlettered pagan English peasant is fascinating. (IPS, 85-6)
7. flag-basket: a basket made of reeds.
8-9. The equidistant Alton and Chilgrove (a village on the road from Chichester to Petersfield) are in east Hampshire and west Sussex. ‘Stoner’ [Hill] in Thomas’s notebook identifies the poem’s setting as Steep. The man is walking cross-country by an old route.
10-24. ’Twere best…to another world I’d fall’. Thomas’s acute ear, transmuted into his hidden editorial presence, enables a seamless flow between direct speech, reported speech inflected by the man’s ‘mind…running’, and the narrator’s voice. For ‘’twere’ etc., see note (153).
10. ‘a money-box’: savings. BC, less idiomatically, has ‘the capital’.
12. flint-picking: removing stones to enable cultivation.
19. couch: couch-grass, a weed with creeping root-stalks.
28. He kept sheep in Wales. ‘He’ is the bitch’s ‘foxy Welsh grandfather’. Her pedigree adds to the ecological, historical and geographical ramifications of the poem.
38. shakedown: a makeshift bed, usually of straw.
39-40. Many a man sleeps worse…‘In the trenches’. Apparently casual allusions to the war (together with the man’s ‘year of soldiering’) assimilate it to a continuum of labour and pain.
46. the leaf-coloured robin. On 23 November Thomas had noted: ‘Robin is colour of twilight at 4.30 as soon as he leaves the ground and is seen in grey air among bare boughs over dead leaves and is invisible – you only know something moves, till he alights and is leaf-coloured’ (FNB79).
46-8. They passed…the twilight of the wood. This valedictory finale resembles the ‘disappearances’ of ‘Lob’ and of ‘Jack Noman’ in May 23, although its point seems more purely historical. A nomadic way of life, which the poem values for its closeness to the countryside if not for its hardships, is ‘passing’. Yet, as at the end of As the team’s head-brass, elegiac cadences open up further vistas of obsolescence. The symbolic ‘twilight of the wood’ extends to current environmental fears.
Ms: BC, BL. Published text: LP. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.
Beauty (58)
21 January 1915
This brief psychodrama exemplifies how a poem’s speaker can switch between the roles of patient and analyst (see Introduction, 14). It also explicitly juxtaposes neurosis and art: the word ‘beauty’ survives from Thomas’s youthful aestheticism to connect art with Nature and both with therapy. The neurotic symptoms set out in lines 1-10 correspond to Helen Thomas’s accounts of her husband’s black moods, and to his accounts of himself: ‘there were terrible days when I did not know where he was; or, if he was at home, days of silence and brooding despair…often when he came in I was terrified by the haggard greyness of his face, and the weary droop of his body, as he flung himself into his study chair, not speaking or looking at me. Once, in one of these fits, after being needlessly angry with one of the children who cried and ran away from him, he rummaged in a drawer…where I knew there was…a revolver’ (HT, 113; see note on Rain, 268). In October 1907 Thomas recorded: ‘I sat thinking about ways of killing myself… Then I went out and thought what effects my suicide would have. I don’t think I mind them. My acquaintances – I no longer have friends – would talk in a day or two (when they met) and try to explain and of course see suggestions in the past: W.H. Davies would suffer a little; Helen and the children – less in reality than they do now, from my accursed tempers and moodiness…I have no vitality, no originality, no love’ (SL, 44). On 30 March 1908 he told Gordon Bottomley: ‘An east wind or a wind from underground has swept over everything. Friends, Nature, books are like London pavements when an east wind has made them dry and harsh & pitiless. There is no joy in them. They are more dead than if they were in a Museum correctly labelled. And this is true not only this morning, but every morning, every afternoon & every night. I am now uniformly low spirited, listless, almost unable to work, & physically incapable. I have no idea what it means, but
I crawl along on the very edge of life, wondering why I don’t get over the edge’ (LGB, 160). At that time, Thomas’s condition was aggravated by the ban on his relationship with a young girl, Hope Webb (see notes, 238, 279). On 9 April he reported: ‘I am now physically stronger, but as soon as my thoughts stray back to myself the same East wind blows. On the other hand the hour of sunset on Tuesday when I was walking back from Selborne through a steep valley with oaks…and no one about and the wind quite gone – that kept me quite unconscious and entranced’ (LWD).
Beauty reads like a modern digest of Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’: ‘I know so well the “grief without a pang” described with some flattery in Coleridge’s “Dejection”, so often had griefs not without a pang appeared to me almost delights by comparison, so often had I looked at things…as the poet was doing when he said “I see them all so excellently fair, / I see, not feel, how beautiful they are”’ (‘Ecstasy’, unpublished essay, BC).
7-8. like a river / At fall of evening. Cf. a letter from Shelley to Mary Godwin quoted by Thomas: ‘my mind, without yours, is as dead and cold as the dark midnight river when the moon is down’ (FIP, 41). Beauty may be, in part, a hidden love poem or poem of frustrated desire.
10. Cross breezes cut the surface to a file. The criss-cross patterns on a file’s blade add a metallic image of torment to the imagery of water and wind.
13. misting, dim-lit, quiet vale. Thomas quotes from Keats’s notes on Paradise Lost: ‘There is a cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The English word is of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with the very utter affection and yearning of a great poet’ (K, 15).
