The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  3. Things are strange today on the cliff. Thomas’s deployment of ‘strange’, often in tension with ‘familiar’, resembles Freud’s coupling of ‘unheimlich’ (uncanny, disturbing) and ‘heimlich’ (see note on The Other, 162). Freud also argues that the words are two sides of the same coin: ‘on the one hand [heimlich] means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’ (Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature, Penguin Freud Library 14 [1985], 345). Here sunshine is paradoxically uncanny, prompting the surreal metamorphoses of the grasshopper; while, in the last stanza, ‘lying under that foam’ assumes the domestic aura of a child in bed. The poem may also be “Freudian” in the sense of Oedipal.

  9. Like a green knight: a simile that adds to the Arthurian ethos.

  13-16. Fishes and gulls ring no bells…up in heaven. This alludes to legendary drowned lands and cities off Britain’s south-western coast, like Coed Arian, or Lyonesse between Land’s End and the Scilly Isles, whose church bells can supposedly be heard: ‘Outside, by the window, is the village idiot, with a smile like the sound of bells ascending from a city buried in the sea’ (BW, 98).

  Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: title: Cliffs [LP] Cliff 15 – hark! – [BL, CP1920] – hark. – [LP] Note on title: The title in CP1978 is based on EF, quoted above. But Thomas’s references to poems in letters cannot be seen as definitive [see Note on Text], and the singular, despite l.3, could imply a child climbing a cliff. The LP title, taken together with the EF reference, suggests that the LP editors were following a typescript [probably typed by Farjeon]. In l.15 LP seems to be in error.

  The Bridge (66)

  12 March 1915

  ‘Next day I crossed the river. At first, the water seemed as calm and still as ice. The boats at anchor, and doubled by shadow, were as if by miracle suspended in the water. No ripple was to be seen, though now and then one emitted a sudden transitory flame, reflected from the sun, which dreamed half-way up the sky in a cocoon of cloud. No motion of the tide was visible, though the shadows of the bridge that cleared the river in three long leaps, trembled and were ever about to pass away. The end of the last leap was unseen, for the further shore was lost in mist, and a solitary gull spoke for the mist.’ Thomas proceeds to meditate on a ‘drowned dog’ whose stillness ‘gave me a strange suggestion of power and restraint’, and which evokes ‘the host of all the dead or motionless or dreaming things’ (BW, 110-12).

  Combining progress with suspension, the rhyme scheme of The Bridge is integral to its symbolism. The internal rhymes in the first and third lines of each stanza maintain a forward impetus, checked by the same-rhyming of the last two lines. Other forms of refrain and the long last line enhance the sense of hiatus, as if the poem refuses to move on to any further point but itself remains a ‘bridge’. The Bridge holds in suspended animation key motifs of Thomas’s poetry so far: strangeness; memory; travel; rest; the domains of Past and Future; opposed emotions, experiences and states (‘smile or moan’, ‘kind’/ ‘unkind’, ‘lights / And shades’); alternative ‘lives’; dark depths. R. George Thomas speculates that the ‘“strange bridge”…may well refer to his first half-unconscious decision to enlist’ (CP1978, 391).

  10. dark-lit. This oxymoron, as applied to the ‘stream’ of consciousness, or perhaps to a zone where the conscious mind and the unconscious touch, is among the poem’s ‘bridges’.

  11-15. No traveller…or have been. The benign sense of ‘rest’ or remission here is qualified by the idea that ‘this moment brief between / Two lives’ is suppressing (‘hide’) rather than dismissing an impossible third life, the synthesis of all Thomas’s dialectics: ‘what has never been’.

  Ms: BL. Published text: P.

  Good-night (66)

  16 March 1915

  Thomas grew up in London, but the whole direction of his life and art led away from it. Oxford, The Heart of England and In Pursuit of Spring all begin with a happy departure from city streets: ‘Passing rapidly through London with its roar of causes that have been won, and the suburbs where they have no causes…’ (O, 1). Conversely, his prose contains portraits of unhappily displaced people driven to London by the collapse of the English rural economy: ‘He was a country-bred man with a distinct London accent. Once upon a time, it seems, he had charmed a snake, caught a tench of five pounds and lost a bigger one, and, like Jefferies, heard the song of the redwing in England; now he kept somebody’s accounts and wore the everlasting mourning of clerks’ (TC, 1). Yet Thomas spent much time in London, lodging with his parents, soliciting work from publishers and editors, researching books, seeing literary friends. In Good-night, in The Childhood of Edward Thomas and other autobiographical prose, he salutes his urban – and perhaps creative – origins: ‘the Common…was large enough to provide us with many surprises and discoveries for years’; ‘The streets were a playground almost equal to the Common’ (CET, 39, 41). In moving from ‘down’ to ‘suburb’ to ‘gardens of the town’ (old ‘inner suburbs’), Good-night reverses the course, and complicates the emotion, of a passage near the start of In Pursuit of Spring: ‘Several times two or three children passed beneath the window and chattered in loud, shrill voices, but they were unseen. Far from disturbing the tranquillity, the sounds were steeped in it; the silence and stillness of the twilight saturated and embalmed them. But pleasant as in themselves they were entirely, they were far more so by reason of what they suggested. These voices and this tranquillity spoke of Spring. They told me what an evening it was at home. I knew how the first blackbird was whistling in the broad oak, and, farther away – some very far away – many thrushes were singing in the chill’ (IPS, 19-20).

  Thomas liked the concept behind Richard Jefferies’s After London (1885), which begins with ‘the relapse of England into barbarism, and the loss of everything characteristic of nineteenth-century civilisation’ (RJ, 233). His reaction, like the book itself, belongs to the period when London’s exponential growth was swallowing up formerly rural or semi-rural environments, creating new suburbs and marooning older ones: ‘many suburbans have seen the paradise of their boyhood defaced’ (HS, 103). Thomas was so deeply conditioned by all this as to make his poetry, in its ecological and metaphysical recoil, paradoxically “about” London: ‘London is one of the immense things of the world, like the Alps, the Sahara, the Western Sea; and it has a complexity, a wavering changefulness along with its mere size, which no poets or artists have defined as they have in a sense defined those other things’ (RJ, 106). He became negatively compelled by the puzzle of people ‘living in no ancient way’ (HE, 7), by the fact that ‘we cannot make harmony out of cities’ (TC, 11). He does not so much evade the modern city as insist that it sets poetry a cognitive problem:

  [T]hese streets are the strangest thing in the world. They have never been discovered. They cannot be classified. There is no tradition about them. Poets have not shown how we are to regard them. They are to us as mountains were in the Middle Ages, sublime, difficult, immense; and yet so new that we have inherited no certain attitude towards them, of liking or dislike. They suggest so much that they mean nothing at all…They propose themselves as a problem to the mind, only a little less so at night when their surfaces hand the mind on to the analogies of sea waves or large woods…Once [in a new suburb] I came upon a line of willows above dead reeds that used to stand out by a pond as the first notice to one walking out of London that he was in the country at last; they were unchanged; they welcomed and encouraged once more. The lighted windows in the mist had each a greeting; they were as the windows we strain our eyes for as we descend to them from the hills of Wales or Kent; like those, they had the art of seeming a magical encampment among the trees, brave, cheerful lights which men and women kept going amidst the dense and powerful darkness. The thin, incompleted walls learned a venerable utterance. (HE, 4-6)

  4. the noise of man, beast, and machine prevails. Stillness, for Thomas, is both a key quality of the countryside and a pre-condit
ion of the aesthetic: ‘To one bred in a town this kind of silence and solitariness perhaps always remains impressive. We see no man, no smoke, and hear no voice of man or beast or machinery, and straightway the mind recalls very early mornings when London has lain silent but for the cooing of pigeons’ (IW, 145). While Thomas also imbues natural sounds with ominous force (see note on The Penny Whistle, 174), he invariably hears ‘the roar of towns’ (Roads) as unstructurable pandemonium: ‘In the streets…the roar continued of the inhuman masses of humanity…Between the millions and the one, no agreement was visible’ (IPS, 11). ‘Somewhere far off I could hear an angry murmur broken by frantic metallic clashings. No one sound out of the devilish babble could I disentangle, still less, explain. A myriad noises were violently mixed in one muddy, struggling mass of rumbling and jangling…Above all, the babble was angry and it was inhuman…As I realised that it was the mutter of London, I sighed, being a child, with relief, but could not help listening still for every moment of that roar as of interlaced immortal dragons fighting eternally in a pit’ (HGLM, 226-7).

  6. echo…echoing. This word also appears twice in l.10. Thomas chose for This England William Blake’s ‘The Echoing Green’, which evokes the playground of childhood, and ends: ‘Many sisters and brothers, / Like birds in their nest, / Are ready for rest, / And sport no more seen / On the darkening green’.

  9. the ghost: Thomas as a child. Smith comments: ‘The ghost is one of the commonest tropes in Thomas’s poetry. His English landscapes are in fact peopled primarily by ghosts, usually associated with memory and the return of the past’ (SS, 66). In their psychological aspect, Thomas’s ghosts are projections of the self: the ‘ghosts’ of tears in Tears; ‘the ‘half/Ghost-like’ figure in House and Man; the ‘ghost new-arrived’ in The Gypsy; the ‘perished self’ of Parting who ‘is in shadow-land a shade’. Cf. the ‘ghostly double’ that voices the prose origin of Rain (IW, 280). Thomas takes Hardy’s ‘hauntings’ into new psychic as well as historical zones. When a proposal for a travel book fell through, he expressed his relief thus: ‘I dread the new faces and new ways. I was born to be a ghost’ (JM, 180).

  11-16. homeless…homely…a traveller’s good-night. See general note to Home (197). Good-night revisits the mood, language and imagery of The Bridge in more affirmative terms. Although the speaker remains in transit, this quasi-religious benediction, stronger than ‘blest’ in The Bridge, like his earlier sense of ‘kingship’ amid disparate phenomena, reconciles home and journey, friend and stranger, city and country, ‘familiar’ (heimlich) and ‘strange’ (unheimlich). These reconciliations also ratify Thomas’s success in writing a “city” poem. In Good-night a reflexive sound track takes the speaker-as-poet to where urban ‘noise’ finally drowns birdsong, but the children’s ‘call’ becomes a surrogate aural Muse.

  Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 16 good-night good night Note: Inconsistencies in the spelling of ‘good-night’ have been regularised in this edition. Note on title: Title is given in BL.

  But these things also (67)

  18 March 1915

  This poem’s obliquely combative first line challenges conventions of the ‘Spring’ poem: the BL title is: But these things also. Judy Kendall sees the poem as also contesting Edward Garnett’s criticism that some of Thomas’s poems are ‘petty in incident’ (JK, 31). It may thus encode a long-held aesthetic belief: ‘Anything, however small, may make a poem; nothing, however great, is certain to’ (MM, 28).

  5-8. The shell of a little snail…purest white. As in lines 4-16 of November, Thomas notices what other poets disregard. The ‘minutiae’ in this quatrain (‘little’, ‘chip’, ‘mite’, ‘small’) are kept distinct, and distinctive, by the itemising syntax, by monosyllabic diction, and by consonantal clashes (‘chip of flint’).

  16. And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone. The interpenetration of English seasons is a recurrent focus and symbol in Thomas’s writings: ‘Spring and summer and autumn had come – flowing into one another with that secrecy which, as in the periods of our life, spares us the pain of the irretraceable step’ (HE, 157). But while some poems (October, The Lane) harmonise different seasons, But these things also is left unresolved by the adversative asyndeton that ends its single sentence, and which echoes the earlier spaces between words. The speaker’s reading of misleading or ambiguous (‘dung…purest’) seasonal signs has an implied psychological counterpart. ‘Keep their spirits up in the mist’ prepares for The New House.

  Ms: BL. Published text: LP.

  The New House (68)

  19 March 1915

  The new house was at Wick Green (see general note to Wind and Mist, 209). This lyric doubly anticipates Thomas’s more extended treatment of the same material in Wind and Mist, since it puts prophetically what the later poem examines retrospectively. The speaker/wind ‘remembers the future’.

  4. moan: a verb/noun that also signifies lament in The Penny Whistle (see note, 174) and The Bridge. Suppressed in the latter poem, it now resumes its sway. In August 1916 Frost told Thomas: ‘You are so good at black talk that I believe your record will stand unbroken for years to come. It’s as if somebody should do the hundred yards in five seconds flat’ (RFET, 150).

  13-16. All was foretold me…should be. This quatrain clinches the symbolism of a life or psyche trapped within a predestined narrative that can never become ‘new’. Here the poem adds syntactical refrain to its ominous repetitions and sound-effects. Modal verbs (could, would, should) sweep the speaker from present incapacity to future doom. ‘Should be’ is both future perfect (‘would have been’) and a distant subjunctive that voices necessity.

  Ms: BL. Published text: AANP, LP. Note on title: Title is given in BL.

  The Barn and the Down (68)

  22, 23 March 1915

  See general note to The Barn (196). ‘At end of Charles Street is a big slate-barn – you see the length of it and its ridge is in evening like Down against sky and sometimes I think How straight and firm that ridge, Down – sometimes I mistake a Down (which is also visible from thereabouts) for the barn – sometimes barn is exalted, sometimes Down humbled’ (FNB80).

  9-12. Then the great down…black of night. An alliterative crescendo dramatises the changing perspective and rising sense of menace: ‘great’/‘Grew’, ‘barn’/ ‘black. The next quatrain’s diminuendo begins with a flat repetition of ‘barn’.

  24. So the barn was avenged. The speaker’s pride in ‘new cautiousness’ has gone before a fall. Thomas thought that the poem ‘ought to have been 2 plain verses implying all I’ve had to explain’ (letter to John Freeman, ETFN 38 [January 1998], 12). Yet this parable of perspective or proportion seems subtle enough. It applies both to making mountains out of molehills and to the reverse. Insofar as the down ‘stored full to the ridge’ figures the unconscious, its raids cannot be predicted. Smith comments: ‘as the interchangeability of metaphor suggests, this is not a simple progress from error to enlightenment, but a recurrent confusion, intrinsic to the act of perception. “Critical eyes” develop their own species of error: scepticism can itself be an optical illusion’ (SS, 102).

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: LP. Note: R. George Thomas surmises that the ‘first draft of this poem in the M1 notebook could be as early as 15 December 1914’ [CP1978, 130]. For drafts, see CP1978, Appendix A. Note on title: Title is given in BL.

  Sowing (69)

  23 March 1915

  In this ‘perfect’ lyric about perfection, physical and psychic ease seem one: an effect that recalls the integrated self in the eighth stanza of The Other. The ‘hour’ is ‘tasted’ and also a body that ‘stretches’. Are the ‘safely sown’ seeds, on one level, Thomas ‘early’ poems? Sowing itself completes a sequence of four poems linked more than superficially by their form: quatrains whose line-length varies between two and four beats. Each poem has a distinctive rhythm. Sowing, in which sentence and stanza are co-extensive, counterpoints But these things also (a less positive Spring poem) i
n structure and cadence as well as mood. Its ‘long stretched’ assonances are still more contrary to the ‘moan’ of The New House.

  10-11. Nothing undone / Remained: not identical with ‘Nothing remained undone’.

  13-16. And now, hark…Saying good-night. Smith comments: ‘the synaesthesia is rounded off at the end in the appeal to “hark” (a much more kinetic act than merely hearing) which turns the rain even in its windless lightness into something which touches, as tear and kiss, in a language more intimate than that of speech. The “good-night” here is a kind of tucking-up after the physical satisfactions of labour’ (SS, 144). Thomas was surely right to cut a fifth stanza: ‘A kiss for all the seeds’ /Dry multitude, /A tear at ending this /March interlude’ (BL).

  Ms: BL. Published text: P.

  March the Third (70)

  23 March 1915

  Thomas was born on 3 March 1878. This poem has parallels with Robert Frost’s ‘The Valley’s Singing Day’ which ends with the poet-speaker saying, perhaps to an early-rising wife: ‘I should be willing to say and help you say / That once you had opened the valley’s singing day’. Both poems link a woman and birdsong with their own utterance. In March the Third ‘she’ announces and interprets ‘this singing day’. As a birthday poem written shortly before Easter, March the Third subverts Christian celebration by making ‘wild’ and ‘holy’ interchangeable (cf. ‘godsend’). A draft of lines 15-16 likens the birds’ songs to ‘canticles’. Thomas was dissatisfied with the poem: ‘Perhaps I shall be able to mend March the 3rd. I know it must either be mended or ended’ (EF, 132). His vein of quatrain poems may have worked itself out. The rhyme scheme seems over-emphatic.