by Edna Longley
14-15. Not like a pewit…but like a dove. In Oxford, Thomas compares the beautiful voice of a solo chorister to ‘a dove floating to the windows and away, away’ (O, 9). The birds may represent alternative ways of dealing with neurosis: a regressive resort to nostalgia (‘wailing’ for ‘something…lost’); or progress, however ‘fractional’, towards the grounded selfhood phrased as ‘home and love’.
17-18. There I find my rest…Beauty is there. Framed by the affirmative ‘there’, this resolving couplet completes Thomas’s adaptation of sonnet-structure to therapeutic purposes. The relation between lines 1-7 (four sentences) and 7-16 (a single sentence) parallels that between octet and sestet. In fact, the initial mood does not lift until l.11, when the sentence ‘turns’, as sonnets do, in a different direction. Its very unfolding, through a series of metaphors, enacts a curative process that identifies ‘what yet lives in me’ with creativity. ‘Rest’, inaccessible in Over the Hills, is ‘found’. Thomas notes: ‘Jefferies…says of beauty which only the imagination can hold that it is “an expression of hope…while the heart is absorbed in its contemplation, unconscious but powerful hope is filling the breast”’ (RJ, 280). In its reflexive aspect, ‘beauty’ also covers Thomas’s poetry so far.
Ms: BL. Published text: SP, AANP, LP. Differences from CP1978: 2 child alive child, alive 17 and through as through 18 me. me: Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [JT] rather than SP, AANP, LP.
The Gypsy (58)
22 January 1915
FNB67 contains notes on East Grinstead Fair, 11 December 1913 (Thomas was staying with Vivian Locke Ellis at Selsfield House, East Grinstead):
Gypsies coming in with sham flowers and ‘My lucky gentleman’ ‘You’ve got a lucky face’. But she had a much luckier face in reality. Lots of caravans drawn up between Selsfield and Grinstead – begging money or half pipe of tobacco one caravan on Selsfield Common several down by Tickeridge, others by Hill Farm more at fork to Saint Hill. All beg. One boy and girl I ran away from. One boy playing rapid rascally Bacchanal tune on mouth organ while he drums on a tambourine and stamps feet and workmen grin. A few cart-horses at auction. Cheapjack, little black haired pale man of 30 who asks a man rough simple labourer if he’s married and says ‘You have my sympathy’ and shakes hands and says ‘Dyou love your wife’ Lots of laughing, knives clocks jewellery etc.
17 December. 2 more gypsies with that rascally Bacchic music at Selsfield House door. One has mouth organ, the other drums on tambourine not lacking cymbals – they play ‘Over the hills and far away’ and ‘If I were Mr. Balfour’.
4.15 p.m. How different 2 days ago when I looked from a highish road (? or from railway near Warnham) over a houseless lowish but hollow wooded country, nothing but gradations of inhuman (beginning to get misty at nightfall) dark, as of an underworld and my soul fled over it experiencing the afterdeath – friendless, vacant, hopeless.
In The South Country (265-71) Thomas had already tried to capture fair day: ‘The main part of the fair consists of a double row, a grove, of tents and booths, roundabouts, caravans, traps and tethered ponies…there is a sound of machine-made music, of firing at targets, of shouts and neighs and brays and the hoot of engines…a gypsy woman on a stool, her head on one side, [is] combing her black hair and talking to the children while a puppy catches at the end of her tresses when they come swishing down…stalls full of toys, cheap jewellery and sweets like bedded-out plants, and stout women pattering alongside – bold women, with sleek black or yellow hair and the bearing and countenance of women who have to make their way in the world’ (SC, 266-7). Thomas linked the threat to gypsy culture with that to the true ‘countryman’: ‘Before it is too late, I hope that the Zoological Society will receive a few pairs at their Gardens. With them, or in neighbouring paddocks (or whatever, for the sake of human dignity, they are called), should be some Gypsies’ (TC, 22). ‘[A]gainst the hedge a gypsy family pretend to shelter from the windy rain; the man stands moody, holding the pony, the women crouch with chins upon knees, the children laugh and will not be still. They belong to the little roads that are dying out: they hate the sword-like shelterless road, the booming cars that go straight to the city in the vale below’ (SC, 215). George Borrow’s interest in gypsies was central to Thomas’s interest in Borrow: ‘[The Gypsies] connect Borrow with what is strange, with what is simple, and with what is free…Their mystery is the mystery of nature and life. They keep their language and their tents against the mass of civilisation and length of time. They are foreigners but as native as the birds’ (GB, 237). In October 1914 some gypsies in Wales sparked off the urge to write poetry: ‘I was meditating a poem about the Gypsies by the roadside, their gramophone and cosy lighted tent so near wind and stars, the children searching for coal in the refuse of the old mine, and me faintly envying them. I thought how feeble and aesthetic my admiration of the mountains was, when I knew nothing of life on them’ (letter to Helen, 9 October 1914, NLW).
3-8. ‘My gentleman…can you spare?’ Commenting on the possibility of hearing Thomas’s hexameters as having either four or six stresses or both, Peter Howarth says of the speaker’s conversation with the gypsy: ‘It is quite impossible…to pronounce [l.7] as a six-stress line and not hear him pompous and afraid…The sense demands that the awkward second stress falls heavily on “you” (making the line sound like sarcasm directed at her lack of money) and lengthens the word “sovereign”, as if relishing the sound of the large coin…If we are to believe in the speaker’s good self and allow him four stresses, then [the gypsy] responds in a genuine question [l.8] with a rising tone at the end of the line…But if he is pompous, then her question becomes tired, petulant: her interest is elsewhere’ (British Poetry in the Age of Modernism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 97). The stumble in this transaction resembles a similar effect in May 23 (lines 28-35). It is as if, given the gap between price and value thus exposed, dealings with nomadic people can never be commensurable on both sides.
17. While his mouth-organ changed to a rascally Bacchanal dance. For Thomas and folk music see general note to An Old Song I (166). Here the poem, too, changes its tune or pitch. It builds up to a climax of liberating abandon unique in Thomas’s poetry. The ‘rascally Bacchanal dance’ counterpoints the ‘slow’ melody mimicked by the last quatrain of The Penny Whistle. The Gypsy is third in a series of poems that display Thomas’s versatility with rhyming couplets, and the sensitive ear that shapes his rhythms. As the sentence-sounds of Man and Dog are inflected by its subject’s speech, and those of Beauty by his own speech, so the hexameter couplets of The Gypsy take their cue from folk verses (‘Over the hills and far away’, ‘Simple Simon’) as well as from gypsy idioms. On another structural level, Thomas again nods to the sonnet. He bisects the twenty-eight lines between sister and brother, speaker and musician, and exploits the octet/sestet “turn” differently in each half. By thus hybridising literary and folk forms, Thomas creates a ‘music’ which echoes his wish that ‘English poetry [had] been founded…upon the native ballad instead of upon conceited ceremonious and exotic work’ (FIP, 14).
19-22. Outlasted all the fair, farmer and auctioneer…Romany. Other notes on the fair include: ‘A balloon-seller’; ‘a bulging eyed, bulging cheeked cleanshaven auctioneer’; ‘Drovers hang about with crooked sticks…cattle in High Street at foot of steps, some kneeling down opposite principal butcher’s a cheapjack speaking on table on other pavement’ (FNB67). As these lines give primacy – in memory and as Muse – to the visionary musician, they transmute notebook detail into symbol.
25-8. The gradations of the dark…a crescent moon. In line with the ‘crescent’ moon, this crescendo completes the transformation of Christmas into a pagan festival where Bacchus / Dionysus rules. The baby, the sardonic oxymoron ‘Christmas corpses’, and now a classical ‘underworld’ set up ‘the Gypsy boy’ to redeem ‘the dark’ by non-Christian and artistic means. That his ‘eyes’ surpass those of ‘the kneeling ox’ implies that the poem’s dis
belief exceeds that of Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Oxen’, which can still imagine being invited on Christmas Eve to ‘“see the oxen kneel // “In the lonely barton by yonder coomb / Our childhood used to know”’.
Ms: BC, BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 21 corpses Corpses [misprint in LP and CP1920] Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.
Ambition (59)
23 January 1915
Another day, a wide and windy day, is the jackdaw’s, and he goes straight and swift and high like a joyous rider crying aloud on an endless savannah …Towards the end of March there are six nights of frost giving birth to still mornings of weak sunlight, of an opaque yet not definitely misty air. The sky is of a milky, uncertain pale blue without one cloud. Eastward the hooded sun is warming the slope fields and melting the sparkling frost. In many trees the woodpeckers laugh so often that their cry is a song…
It is not spring yet. Spring is being dreamed, and the dream is more wonderful and more blessed than ever was spring. What the hour of waking will bring forth is not known. Catch at the dreams as they hover in the warm thick air. Up against the grey tiers of beech stems and the mist of the buds and fallen leaves rise two columns of blue smoke from two white cottages among trees; they rise perfectly straight and then expand into a balanced cloud, and thus make and unmake continually two trees of smoke. No sound comes from the cottages. The dreams are over them… With inward voices of persuasion those dreams hover and say that all is to be made new, that all is yet before us, and the lots are not yet drawn out of the urn. (SC, 20-2)
Passages in The Heart of England, linked more closely with Health and The Glory (see notes 227 and 234), also anticipate Ambition. All three poems dramatise the gap between aspiration or desire and its realisation; between the speaker’s capacity and high possibilities symbolised by early morning or early Spring or both. Not confined to Thomas’s personal problems, these poems explore existential and cognitive questions that stem from Romantic ideology. In some respects, they parallel Yeats’s dialogues between Self and Anti-Self. Like Yeats, and in a similar context of war, Thomas engages with the man of action, the Promethean hero: another ‘Other’ (see note on Thomas and Nietzsche, 227).
4-7. Jackdaws began to shout and float and soar…sky. Jackdaws also feature in ‘January Sunshine’ (which ends with the imperative ‘Be beautiful and enjoy and live!’): ‘In the immense crystal spaces of fine windy air…the jackdaws play. They soar, they float, they dance, and they dive and carve sudden magnificent precipices in the air, crying all the time with sharp, joyous cries that are in harmony with the great heights and the dashing wind’ (HE, 156). In Ambition jackdaws stake out a zone of similar extremity. They initiate the poem’s stark contrasts between ‘black’ and ‘white’, heights and depths. ‘Warrior’ (compare Health, l.30) and ‘Challenges and menaces’ add to their distance from Thomas’s modes of self-doubt, banished to the ‘ridiculed’ owl. They may also allude to the war.
14-16. A train…close-knit. ‘There was spring in the smoke lying in a hundred white vertebrae motionless behind the rapid locomotive in the vale’ (RU, 5). ‘The half-moon at the zenith of a serene, frosty night led in a morning of mist that filled up all the hollows of the valley as with snow: each current of smoke from locomotive or cottage lay in solid and enduring vertebrae above the mist’ (IPS, 27-8).
17-22. Time /Was powerless…Omnipotent I was. BL’s ‘I was omnipotent’ is less telling than the inversion. Kirkham writes: ‘This is, surely, a Lucifer’s dream of usurpation, the pride that comes before the fall, the Fall…This Lucifer, besides, is a Romantic poet, blurring distinctions between perception and conception, imagining that his work reproduces the act of Creation. It is not the only passage in Thomas’s poetry to present the Wordsworthian unitary view – mind and object dissolved into each other – as a delusion, and a seductive one for the solitary who seeks compensation for his impotence in the vicarious power exercised through the mastery of words.’ For Kirkham, the pun on ‘rime’ may be Thomas’s critique of his ‘romantic self…half believing that…no contrary reality obstructed free communication between dream and verse’ (MK, 41-2). The ‘white’ aspect of the poem’s colour dynamics brings ‘clouds and rime’, via chimney and train smoke, into ‘pure’ proximity. This portrait of the hubristic artist may be in dialogue with The Gypsy.
23. the end fell like a bell. Internal rhyme heralds the anticlimactic couplet in which ‘Elysium’, together with the interlacing rhyme scheme, finally collapses. Here a Romantic poem, Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, subverts Romantic ideology: ‘Forlorn! The very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!’ The effect also hints at sexual detumescence.
26. ’twas: see note (153).
Ms: BC, BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 25 tell. [LP] tell: [BC, BL] Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 removes the brackets. See Note on Text.
House and Man (60)
3, 4 February 1915
The name of Norgett on a stone called up Oldhurst into my mind, a thatched house built of flints in the middle of oak woods not far off – ancient woods where the leaves of many Autumns whirled and rustled even in June. It was three miles from the hard road, and it used to seem that I had travelled three centuries when at last I emerged from the oaks and came in sight of that little humped gray house and within sound of the pines that shadowed it. It had a face like an owl; it was looking at me. Norgett must have heard me coming from somewhere among the trees, for, as I stepped into the clearing at one side, he was at the other. I thought of Herne the Hunter on catching sight of him. He was a long, lean, gray man with a beard like dead gorse, buried gray eyes, and a step that listened. He hardly talked at all, and only after questions that he could answer quite simply. Speech was an interruption of his thoughts, and never sprang from them; as soon as he had ceased talking they were resumed with much low murmuring and whistling – like that of the pine trees – to himself, which seemed the sound of their probings in the vast of himself and Nature. His was a positive, an active silence. (IPS, 100-1)
The less ‘positive’ wood-dweller in the poem resembles the protagonist of Frost’s ‘An Old Man’s Winter Night’, written after House and Man, and perhaps in response to it. Frost presents a similar triangle of man, house, and encroaching natural forces: ‘All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him/Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars, / That gathers on the pane in empty rooms’. Both poems reverse the human gaze at Nature. In House and Man ‘forest silence and forest murmur’ take on life in proportion as the man loses substance and speech, or becomes a thing (‘half like a beggar’s rag’). This wraith is antithetical to Thomas’s Promethean self-projection in Ambition. The faintly Gothic symbolism hovers between ecological, psychological and cognitive suggestiveness.
1-3. as dim…While I remember him. When a poem by Thomas represents itself as memory-in-process, it moves either towards epiphany or towards its converse. Poetry’s own integrative capacity is also on the line. ‘Dimness’ connects the speaker’s difficulty in stabilising memory (‘a reflection in a rippling brook’) with the man’s difficulty in maintaining selfhood, and the mind’s difficulty in negotiating the natural world. All phenomena seem pulled towards ‘the house darkness’. The poem’s rhythm, notable for syntax that overrides or breaks the couplet, takes on an entropic momentum.
12-13. half / Ghost-like: see note on Thomas’s ‘ghosts’ (202).
20. A magpie like a weathercock in doubt. On 1 February Thomas had noted: ‘magpie in oak tip like weathercock’ (FNB80). The poem ends with the image that ostensibly, and perhaps actually, sparked it off; but the arbitrariness of memory, like the image itself, is not reassuring. Cf. William Morris’s ‘The Message of the March Wind’: ‘And the vane on the spire-top is swinging in doubt’.
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 4 It was ’Twas 8 ‘Lonely!’ ‘Lonely,’ 13 half like a beggar’s hal
f a beggar’s Note: CP1978 follows the version printed in James Guthrie’s magazine [RB 1, 4 (nd)] rather than BL/LP, but the omission of ‘like’ seems an obvious misprint.
Parting (60)
11 February 1915
The parting was from Thomas’s fifteen-year old son Merfyn, who left Steep on that day, en route for America, and with whom his relations were often tense. Two days later Thomas wrote to Bottomley: ‘Merfyn is sailing to America today with the Frosts. I don’t pretend to expect this or that of it but I believe the time had come to let him see what people were who couldn’t make him do things as I can or a schoolmaster can but who nevertheless will expect him to give as well as take’ (LGB, 243-4). Guy Cuthbertson points out that Parting is written in the quatrain (ABBA) of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and that it echoes another poem linked with Tennyson’s grief for Arthur Hallam, ‘The Passing of Arthur’. Here King Arthur leaves for ‘the island valley of Avilion;/ Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,/Nor ever wind blows loudly’ (Notes and Queries 51, 2 [June 2004]).
7. The perished self: see note on Thomas’s ‘ghosts’ (202).
10-12. Remembered joy…sadden the sad. Cf. lines 17-20 of Home (64), to which Parting seems closely related.
12-22. So memory…spiritualised it lay. Here ‘ill’ is sealed off from ‘woe’, and hence from hope of therapeutic transformation. Cf. Philip Larkin, ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’: ‘in the end, surely, we cry / Not only at exclusion, but because / It leaves us free to cry’.
23-4. the perpetual yesterday / That naught can stir or stain like this. R. George Thomas notes that ‘“like this” refers to the poem’ as well as to the speaker’s state (CP1978, 389). The phrase aligns poetry with the ‘suffering’, rather than ‘perished’, self: with the ‘today’ of pain (and life) rather than a ‘yesterday’ that can only offer vain remorse and false transcendence (‘bliss’). Just as the ‘stirred’ emotion cannot be contained, sentences spill over the quatrains in an edgily unexpected way.
