by Edna Longley
Ms: BL. Published text: LP Differences from CP1978: 24 stain [LP] stain, [BL] Note: CP1944 has ‘strain’: perhaps a misprint, although it is possible that Thomas considered this verb as an alternative. But it does not appear in BL or LP, the only extant sources. Note on title: Title is given in BL.
First known when lost (61)
11 February 1915
In BL the title appears as: First known when lost. Written in the same quatrain, though with different tones and rhythms, this poem can be read as a redemptive coda to Parting. Abrupt time-shifts invade the sealed-off past of Parting, and make ‘the narrow copse’ paradoxically present in absence. These shifts possibly led the LP editors to “tidy up” the sequence of tenses (see textual note).
4. bill: bill-hook.
12. as if flowers they had been. The LP editors (see textual note) could have understood this as a pluperfect (hence, ‘made’), not as primarily a subjunctive form equivalent to ‘as if they were flowers’. The usage may not only be for reasons of rhyme: the latent pluperfect makes ‘faggot ends / Of hazel’ continuous with, as well as analogous to, the copse’s flowers.
14. And now I see as I look. Thomas sets high standards for ‘seeing’ (see note on a cognate poem, Birds’ Nests, 163). Perhaps the retrospective insight here has further remedial implications (cf. ‘amends’, l.11) for the absence that Parting mourns. In juxtaposing something paradoxically ‘hidden…near’ with ‘small winding brook’ and a ‘rising’ rhythm, the last quatrain figures access to sources in the psyche.
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 5 overgrown o’ergrown 16 tributary, tributary Note: LP has ‘was’ for ‘is’ [BL] in l.8; ‘made’ for ‘make’ [BL] in l.11. CP1944 has ‘is’ and ‘made’; CP1978 ‘is’ and ‘make’. It seems likely that the present tense always follows ‘now’. Some intermediate typescript probably accounts for other differences between BL and LP. CP1978 follows BL throughout.
May 23 (62)
15 February 1915
1-10. There never was a finer day…luck to endure. ‘The Artist’ (LAT, 130-9) anticipates the weather of May 23 and Haymaking:
This, said Adams to himself, staring strangely at the dry brushes and blank paper before him, this was the fairest day of the whole year, the youngest child of a long family of days, each fairer than its elder. First, there were two days following suddenly, hot and cloudless, upon weeks of storm, of sullenness, and of restless wind and rain vexing the new leaves and scattering the blossoms; and at the end of the second a thunderstorm out of the east ascended lightly and travelled rapidly away without silencing the birds…Adams found himself waiting day after day for the end and crown of this energy and change.
There came a lustrous morning early assailed from all quarters of the sky in turn, as if the heavens were besieging the earth, by thunder and after long, brooding intervals, thunder again and again, now with cannonading and now one boom or blast followed by no sound except its echo and the challenge of the pheasants. The lark in the sky, the blackbird in the isolated meadow elms, the nightingale in the hazel and bluebell thickets, sang on; and before the last of the assault Adams set out, inwardly confident in the day’s future. (130-2)
12-27. Old Jack Noman…cress in his basket. According to Helen Thomas, Jack Noman’s original was ‘a tramp who used to call asking for left-off clothes and selling watercress. He used to disappear for long periods, and then appear again as jaunty as ever. We thought his disappearances were spent in prison, for we knew he stole. But we liked him, and if Edward had a particularly warm but outworn garment – especially one he really had liked – he saved it until Jack came again’ (Thomas, Selected Poems [London: Hutchinson, 1962], 112n.). At the beginning of The Heart of England (1906) a child in a London street views a ‘Watercress Man’ as the harbinger of romance and the countryside. Thomas’s prose contains several other portraits of a watercress-seller/tramp under such names as Jackalone, Jack Runaway and Jack Horseman: ‘close by stood the tall old watercress-man Jack Horseman, patiently waiting for the right moment to touch his cap. His Indian complexion had come back to the old soldier, he was slightly tipsy, and he had a bunch of cowslips in his hat’ (HGLM, 176). ‘What dreams are there for that aged child [Jackalone] who goes tottering and reeling up the lane at mid-day? He carries a basket of watercress on his back. He has sold two-pennyworth, and he is tipsy, grinning through the bruises of a tipsy fall, and shifting his cold pipe from one side of his mouth to the other. Though hardly sixty he is very old, worn and thin and wrinkled, and bent sideways and forward at the waist and the shoulders. Yet he is very young. He is just what he was forty years ago when the thatcher found him lying on his back in the sun instead of combing out the straw and sprinkling it with water for his use. He laid no plans as a youth; he had only a few transparent tricks and easy lies. Never has he thought of the day after tomorrow’ (SC, 25).
‘Jack’ arrives in the poem like the spirit of May, like Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, combining in his appearance the freshness and heat of the season. He is related to ‘Lob’ by his name, earthiness and proverbial wisdom, by his roguery and generosity. But he personifies primal vitality rather than cultural evolution. The couplets of Lob have a different tune. Different again are those that characterise and historicise the ‘old man’ in Man and Dog.
25-34. Fairer flowers…I say. In saying ‘Wait till next time’ (for the speaker to give him ‘something’), Jack retreats from the ordinary exchange and barter that he tentatively proposes in l.32, and thus fully matches his deed to the abundant day. John Lucas comments: ‘The lovely anapaestic ripple of [lines 25-32] provides a kind of licensed gaiety of conversation, one that plays up the largesse of giving as opposed to selling, and which is reinforced by “Take them and these flowers, too, free”. To honour that line’s rhythmic movement you have to stress the surely unimportant word “and”. In doing so, you realise how important it is: Jack Noman takes and gives flowers free because they come from “no man’s gardens”’ (Lucas, Starting to Explain [Nottingham: Trent Books, 2003], 116).
36. roll-walk-run. The elements of this compound function as verbs rather than nouns. The headlong rhythm epitomises how the poem’s mainly four-stress line, with its mixed anapaests and iambics, fits its ‘jaunty’ subject.
37-8. Oakshott rill…Wheatham hill. Oakshott Stream and the hanger Wheatham Hill are north of Steep. Watercress flourishes in chalk streams, and English watercress production still centres on Hampshire: ‘now there are only patches of the cress gone to weed in the Ashford and Oakshott Streams. Cowslips too have become rarer on the hangers’ (WW, 28).
39-44. ’Twas the first day…like hops. These packed lines consummate the rich textures and unusually intense happiness of the poem, which survive the shadow, mysterious rather than mournful, thrown into the sunlight by its final couplet. All phenomena acquire an equal sensuous value, relished by the assonance ‘midges-bit-dust-sad-hid-ruts-seeds’. It is rarely that Spring, or any other season, can ‘do nothing to make [Thomas] sad’.
45-6. BL ends less mysteriously: ‘A fine day was May the 20th, / The day of old Jack Noman’s death.’ Criticism from W.H. Hudson seems to have precipitated the change: ‘I must think about the sensation at the end of “May 20”. I think perhaps it must come out’ (letter to Hudson, SL, 108).
Ms: BL. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: In punctuating lines 43-4, CP1978 follows P [copse. / hops,] not CP1920 [copse, / hops,]. The latter seems preferable, since the former [also in PTP] may be an inconsistent punctuation resulting from the change to the last couplet: see note above [BL has copse. / hops.]. Note on title: May 23 is the title in P, CP1920, CP1928 and CP1978; May the Twenty-third in CP1944.
The Barn (63)
22 February 1915
The Barn may involve a suppressed dialogue. It seems to merge the voice of an old (l.3) countryman or farm-labourer with that of an implied poet-listener. The first voice underlies the speaker’s attitude to ‘they’; his knowledge of t
he farm and its history; aspects of his idiom and mode of address: ‘’Twould not [BL ‘’Twouldn’t’] pay to pull down’ (see note on The Signpost, 153). Expressions like ‘no other antiquity’ and the account of the starlings are uttered in something closer to Thomas’s ‘own’ voice. In The Icknield Way he writes about ‘Lone Barn’, near Wayland’s Smithy on the Ridgeway, and tells the story of a deranged philosopher and his family who squatted there in miserable conditions. This ‘black barn’ contributes to both The Barn and The Barn and the Down: ‘[it] lies unexpectedly in a small hollow at one of the highest points of the downs, three miles from the nearest hamlet. It had long been deserted. The farmhouse was ruinous…An old plum tree, planted when barn and house were built, and now dead and barkless, stood against one end…The last of its doors lay just outside in the dead embers of the tramps’ fire. Thus open on both sides to the snow-light and the air the barn looked the work rather of nature rather than of man. The old thatch was grooved, riddled, and gapped, and resembled a grassy bank that has been under a flood the winter through; covered now in snow, it had the outlines in miniature of the hill on which it was built’ (IW, 237-40). In ‘Earth Children’, an old couple inhabit ‘part of a farmhouse, the rest having fallen to ruin, and from human hands to the starlings, the sparrows, and the rats’ (HE, 141).
18. Making a spiky beard: a characteristically brilliant piece of bird-observation. On 4 February Thomas had noted: ‘starlings perch singly in hedge and talk and chatter and whistle with heads up, making a sort of spiky beard under beaks, bubbling throat’ (FNB80).
23. It’s the turn of lesser things, I suppose. The speaker traces, and seems to approve, a form of biodegradation whereby creatures take over, and Nature reclaims, an artefact.
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Note on title: Title is given in BL.
Home (64)
23 February 1915
Thomas’s first “home” poem is a metaphysical parable. He would write two other poems with this title: Home, which explores earthly dwelling, and ‘Home’, which explores ‘fellowship’ and nationality. But the quest for home always governs poetic travels that already span the dubiously ‘homely’ White Horse pub; ‘powers / Coming like exiles home again’ in The Other; the ‘empty home’ of The Mountain Chapel; the dove’s ideal ‘home and love’ in Beauty. The dialectics of home in Thomas’s poetry cross over between psychology and culture. ‘Aurelius, the Superfluous Man’ (Thomas took the concept from Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man, 1850) is a relevant self-portrait: ‘The superfluous are those who cannot find society with which they are in some sort of harmony. The magic circle drawn round us all at birth surrounds these in such a way that it will never overlap, far less become concentric with, the circles of any other in the whirling multitudes’ (HGLM, 49-50). For Smith, Thomas’s ‘Superfluous Man’ is ‘the dispossessed rightful inheritor, equivocally retained by a civilisation guiltily unable to abolish him totally’ (SS, 46). But, like Turgenev’s diarist, Thomas tends to represent his psychic separateness as preceding and underlying other forms of alienation: ‘with me, social intercourse is only an intense form of solitude’ (LGB, 53). More positively, as in the case of Aurelius, he associates the ‘superfluous’ with visionary powers.
In ‘A Note on Nostalgia’ (Scrutiny 1 [1932], 8-19) D.W. Harding, cites Home when he charges Thomas with failure to ‘probe his unhappiness’ and with implying ‘that its causes were remoter, less tangible and more inevitable, than in fact they were’: ‘The poem almost certainly springs from nostalgic feelings, but…Thomas gives them a much larger significance, larger than they deserve.’ Cooke counters this critique by arguing that Thomas’s poetry incorporates adequate ‘resistance’ to the regressive impulses it manifests (WC, 225-31). In Home, as in Beauty and Parting, the speaker ultimately refuses a regressive journey, perceiving its illusive nature. Whereas in Parting the ‘strange land’ of ‘the Past’ is disembodied, ‘That land, / My home’ remains un-embodied. Despite ‘go back’, it belongs to the future or the mind. Home may be less an expression of nostalgia – ‘the ache for home’ – than a poem about nostalgia and its limits.
1. Not the end: but there’s nothing more. This elliptical opening marks an existential limbo between here and the hereafter, where life has no more ‘meanings’ to disclose.
2-4. rude…solitude. Thomas also rhymes these words in The Other and Melancholy.
6. all that they mean I know. Cf. the second quatrain of Hardy’s ‘To Life’: ‘I know what thou would’st tell / Of Death, Time, Destiny – / I have known it long, and know, too, well / What it all means for me.’
11-13. No traveller tells of it…And could I discover it. Direct allusion to Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy (‘The undiscovered country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns’) exposes its presence in the poem. From the first line, ‘the ache for home’ has shown its other face as the death wish. ‘I suppose every man thinks that Hamlet was written for him, but I know he was written for me’ (EF, 12).
13-16. And could I…things that were. Cf. The Signpost, lines 20-30, and Liberty, lines 24-7; also Hamlet: ‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come’. Thomas’s personae veer between desire for a condition free from suffering and re-attachment to the complex living moment.
17-20. Remembering ills…what was well. Cf. Parting, lines 10-12. Links between Parting and Home include Thomas’s use of the quatrain. The move from an ABBA rhyme scheme to ABCB, with its greater potential to suggest progress, reflects the move from a speaker contemplating ‘perpetual yesterday’ to a speaker who builds on the earlier poem’s recoil from sterile retrospect (‘irremediable’ picks up ‘Not as what had been remedied’ in Parting). Yet, unlike Parting, Home consists of end-stopped stanzas, and the speaker’s ultimate decision ‘to be’, although more positive than his initial claim that life can yield no further ‘meanings’, projects stoicism rather than agency: ‘I must wait’. Cf. Hamlet: ‘And makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of’.
Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Note on title: Title is given in BL.
The Owl (64)
24 February 1915
The carefully balanced triads of the first six lines, together with the equally careful discrimination between degrees of discomfort, prepare for the moral distinctions that the poem will establish. Later, ‘telling me plain’ defines the aesthetic of what proves to be a “war poem”. His sense of ‘what I escaped / And others could not’ was a factor in Thomas’s enlistment. Here the Hamlet of Home meets Fortinbras.
8-9. cry/ / Shaken out. The cross-stanza enjambment gives ‘Shaken’ a pivotal resonance.
10. No merry note: a reference to Winter’s song ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ (Love’s Labours Lost V, ii) which also features in Lob (lines 96-8): ‘Tu-whit, Tu-who, a merry note’. The owl’s cry, as inner ‘voice’, is no longer being ‘ridiculed’ (see Ambition, l.9).
13. salted. Scannell observes: ‘It is the repeated word, salted, which is at once ambiguous yet absolutely right for [Thomas’s] purposes. The owl grieves, lonely in the cold night, and the poet pities those who don’t share the warmth and comfort that he is privileged to enjoy; but he is too honest to deny that, while his sympathy for the “soldiers and poor” is authentic, his awareness of their privation adds to his own pleasure and contentment while at the same time it awakens the sense of guilt…the word salted certainly means flavoured or spiced, but at the same time less comfortable connotations are invoked: the harshness of salt, the salt in the wound, the taste of bitterness, and of tears’ (VS, 19-20).
Ms: BL. Published text: P. Note on title: Title is given in BL.
The Child on the Cliffs (65)
11 March 1915
Thomas spent childhood summer holidays in western Wales. In ‘Edward Thomas and Wales’ Sally Roberts Jones notes that ‘the child in “The Child on the Cliffs” seems to be sitting on a Gower cliff, looking out over the drowned Coed Arian [Silver Wood] to the
Devon coast’ (JB, 81).
Westward, for men of this island, lies the sea; westward are the great hills. In a mere map the west of Britain is fascinating. The great features of that map, which make it something more than a picture to be imperfectly copied by laborious childhood pens, are the great promontories of Caernarvon, of Pembroke, of Gower and of Cornwall, jutting out into the western sea, like the features of a grim large face, such a face as is carved on a ship’s prow. These protruding features, even on a small-scale map, thrill the mind with a sense of purpose and spirit. They yearn, they peer ever out to the sea, as if using eyes and nostrils to savour the utmost scent of it, as if themselves calling back to the call of the waves. (SC, 9)
Although ‘sea-blue-eyed’ like ‘Lob’, Thomas usually presents his ‘land face’. His most extended prose meditation on the sea depicts it as ‘unearthly’ and unhistorical: ‘a monster that has lain unmoved by time’, ‘that cold fatal element’, ‘a type of the waste where everything is unknown or uncertain except death’ (SC, 162). Hence, perhaps, the darker orientation of this poem as compared with The Child in the Orchard, whose similar form suggests that Thomas’s sea-child and land-child are complementary. In The Child on the Cliffs the boy’s perceptions seem to license indulgence of the death wish resisted in Home. The morbidly erotic scenario, which resembles certain Victorian images of childhood, includes a beckoning ‘Belle Dame sans Merci’ (in BL the phrase is ‘white beseeching arm’). Thomas told Eleanor Farjeon: ‘I like the Child on the Cliff. It is a memory between one of my young brothers and myself which he reminded me of lately. He was most of the child and I have been truthful. I think I can expect some allowances for the “strangeness” of the day’ (EF, 127-8).
