The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  Thomas writes of the chiffchaff: ‘Nothing so convinces me, year after year, that Spring has come and cannot be repulsed, though checked it may be, as this least of songs. In the blasting or dripping weather which may ensue, the chiffchaff is probably unheard; but he is not silenced. I heard him on March 19 when I was fifteen, and I believe not a year has passed without my hearing him within a day or two of that date. I always expect him and always hear him’ (IPS, 91). ‘At the lower margin of the wood the overhanging branches form blue caves, and out of these emerge the songs of many hidden birds…All are blent into one seething stream of song. It is one song, not many. It is one spirit that sings’ (SC, 21-2).

  Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: title: March the Third March the 3rd 3-4 half-past [BL] half past [Farjeon typescript, LP] 6-8 When the birds do. I think they blend/Now better than they will when passed/ Is this unnamed, unmarked godsend. With the birds’ songs. I think they blend / Better than in the same fair days / That shall pronounce the Winter’s end. 9 Or do all Do men 13 And when When 20 Because Since now Note: CP1978 follows an Eleanor Farjeon typescript with ms. alterations [though with the title March the Third] rather than BL/LP. This edition prefers BL/LP, partly on aesthetic grounds; partly because, as in other cases, the possibility that Thomas re-thought his ‘mending’ of the poem [see general note above] cannot be discounted.

  Two Pewits (70)

  24 March 1915, revised 4 May 1915

  According to Thomas, Two Pewits ‘had to be as clear as glass’ (EF, 134). His drafts (see CP1978, Appendix A) show how hard he worked at the poem – perhaps retuning his ear after March the Third. Clarity or apparent simplicity conceals complex art. With its single rhyme-sound and multiple refrains, Two Pewits displays a technical virtuosity to match that of the birds. ‘Why? oh why’, a yearning early love poem to Helen, mainly uses the same rhyme sound. It begins: ‘O! dewy leaf that noddest high/ ’Twixt the sod and Summer sky’ (NLW, MS 22914C). Thomas’s fascination with the aerial ballet of pewits (peewits/ lapwings) emerged as early as The Woodland Life: ‘It is a beautiful sight to watch their facile turns of flight as each strives to surmount his rival. Now a couple seem as one bird, and again they part to soar and twist in opposite directions. As they race, the sun gleams on their crests and greenish bars, and the peewit swings in the air with his prowess of flight. In a straight steady motion, rare indeed with a peewit, their wings are soundless, but in the whirling dashes from side to side in combat or amorous display a strange wind-like rush is made as if their joints were stiff. Under a strong sun, when it is dazzling to look up, this rushing sound betrays the bird as it passes overhead’ (TWL, 16).

  The bird-artists, in their present-tense continuum, symbolise the liberation of creativity as realised through form. Fusing sound and movement, they differentiate Thomas-as-poet from his perplexed self: ‘the ghost who wonders why’, as he did in that youthful poem (see note on Thomas’s ‘ghosts’, 202). For John F. Danby, Two Pewits is ‘an exemplary instance of Thomas’s polarised world…The birds sporting and crying midway between the moonlit sky and darkened earth intensify the light and darkness they reflect. In them, as if by their closer juxtaposition, the opposites are raised to a higher tension – a vivid, troubled, chequered activity against the discrete rest that sky or earth separately represent’ (‘Edward Thomas’, Critical Quarterly 1 [1959], 309).

  4. dark surge: ‘black surf’ in M1 and BL drafts. Cf. ‘thine aery surge’, Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’.

  11. ghost: ‘walker’, then ‘traveller’ in the M1 drafts.

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: P.

  Will you come? (71)

  25 March 1915

  Most immediately, Will you come? is a love-song. Barker places it among those poems by Thomas that ‘adapt the short song line and exploit its simplicity of cadence to good effect’ (JB, 140). Yet, to quote John Pikoulis, the poem may equally be ‘a direct and passionate appeal to the Muse’ (‘Edward Thomas as War Poet’, JB, 123), and thus concern poetry’s ‘late’ or reluctant advent as much as belated or frustrated love (see note on Thomas’s love poems, 279). As a poem about poetry, or the inability to write it, Will you come? upsets the dynamic balance of Two Pewits. The poems are linked by the verb ‘ride’ and by chiaroscuro imagery; but the former, aligned with creative control, has ceased to govern the latter. The vocative case splits the double act of Two Pewits, and opposites no longer attract. The repeated ‘come’, the fruitless shifts of tense and time-setting, and the increasingly conditional mood dramatise an impasse. The reflexive dialectics between Two Pewits and Will you come? imply that form, like other kinds of integration, must be constantly renegotiated.

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 25 come, [BL] come [P, PTP] The omission of the comma seems to be an error.

  The Path (72)

  26 March 1915

  From Wick Green, Merfyn and Bronwen Thomas ‘went daily to the junior school [of Bedales], walking and running down the steep Old Stoner Hill’ by the path represented in the poem (MT, 13). In The South Country Thomas proposes ‘a history of England written from the point of view of one parish, or town, or great house’. This would include ‘the histories of roads’:

  Every traveller in Hampshire remembers the road that sways with airy motion and bird-like curves down from the high land of clay and flint through the chalk to the sand and the river. It doubles round the head of a coombe, and the whole descent is through beech woods uninterrupted and all but impenetrable to the eye above or below except where once or twice it looks through an arrow [?a narrow] slit to the blue vale and the castled promontory of Chanctonbury twenty miles south-east. As the road is a mere ledge on the side of a very steep hill the woods below it hurry down to a precipitous pit full of the glimmering, trembling and murmuring of innumerable leaves and no sight or sound of men. It is said to have been made more than half a century ago to take the place of the rash straight coach road which now enters it near its base. (SC, 148-9)

  1-3. Running along a bank…there is a path. As Thomas returns to blank verse and to the trope of the journey, he mimetically heightens the interplay between syntax and metre. The poem is itself a tricky ‘path’. It begins by laying down fractal structures that will replicate themselves along the way, especially inversions of expected order: the first draft in M1 begins more conventionally: ‘I know a path running along a bank, / A parapet that divides the level road / From the precipitous wood below’. Other structures initiated here are run-on lines; subordinate clauses placed in the foreground; an abrupt full stop. On one level, The Path presents a textual problem. The speaker, trying to make sense of it, stands in for both poet and reader.

  3-15. It serves / Children…year after year. Motion says: ‘Thomas clearly admires [the children’s] youthful impatience with the second-hand, but he is careful to point out its vulnerability… [The] use of terms appropriate to military action [‘parapet’’, ‘invaded’]…intensifies the menace of the surrounding wood. But having stressed this danger, Thomas goes on to insist that the children are more than a match for its encroachments…and are so closely identified with their path that they “wear it” as if they not only pressed it down but actually assumed it, like clothing’ (AM, 160). For Smith: ‘The aureate language with which the poet describes the path (“like silver”, “gold, olive, and emerald”, “silvered”) suggests that he has travelled it and shares the children’s values. They “wear” the path, but they have not “polished” it into insignificance; rather they have “silvered” it…endowing it with more not less value. Nevertheless, there is a hint of dispossession here too, for “the eye / Has but the road, the wood that overhangs / And underyawns it, and the path…”’ (SS, 119-20).

  17. the eye. In this visually oriented poem, the ‘eye’ that writes or reads must also negotiate an inner path between ‘level road’ and ‘precipitous wood’. But it is hard to tell genuine vision (perhaps linked with the children’s perspective) from mere
appearance: the path only ‘looks/As if it led on to some legendary/ Or fancied place’. The reflexively ‘sudden’ ending leaves us with the riddle of ‘where’ the poem has actually ‘led’.

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: P.

  The Wasp Trap (72)

  27 March 1915

  On 25 March Thomas had noted: ‘Beautiful moonlight and in hedge glistens bottle put there long ago for wasps – old tins – old crockery opposite cottages – far [lakes] ponds etc.’ (FNB80). A wasp trap is a sticky bottle or jam-jar that contains water to drown the wasps.

  13-16. For wasps meant…So glistening. The ‘loveliness’ conferred by moonlight or imagination or the poem itself, like ‘some legendary / Or fancied place’ in The Path, may deceive (or we may want it to do so): the jar/star has been a death trap. ‘Glistening’ is not a wholly comfortable word, and ‘From the dead apple-bough’ anticipates a dark refrain in The Gallows.

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: LP. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.

  A Tale (73)

  28 March 1915

  The note that formed the basis of The Wasp Trap continues: ‘Outside the [old] ruined cottage is periwinkle and when that is not flowering there is some blue and white china [?]peering/peeping among the leaves’ (FNB80). In BL the poem as printed in this edition is cancelled, and the following version, dated 31 March, written below:

  Here once flint walls,

  Pump, orchard and wood pile stood.

  Blue periwinkle crawls

  From the lost garden down into the wood.

  The flowerless hours

  Of Winter cannot prevail

  To blight [?]those/these other flowers,

  Blue china fragments scattered, that tell the tale.

  CP1978 prints both versions. That the cancelled version appears in LP suggests that Thomas had third thoughts. This edition prefers the cancelled version, which seems to have come quickly as a first draft in M1 before he began tinkering with the poem. Such a preference is supported by LP and by the only surviving typescript (MET). It also has an aesthetic basis. In the first two lines of the revised version, more is less: detail dissipates what ‘ruined cottage’ concentrates. Similarly, ‘Blue periwinkle’ is tautological (and pre-empts the adjective’s later surprise), ‘lost garden’ superfluous. Conversely, omission of ‘With flowers in its hair’ removes a metaphor that, along with ‘crawl’, evokes the place’s ghosts. In the revised second quatrain ‘Of Winter’ limits the scope of ‘flowerless hours’, while ‘scattered’ and the awkward ‘cannot prevail / To blight’ are also over-explanatory.

  A Tale complements the aesthetic paradox of The Wasp Trap by posing questions about memory, art and Nature. The poem as commemorative ‘tale’ belongs to a series of traces left by the cottage and its inhabitants: ‘the things are forgotten, and it is an aspect of them, a recreation of them, a finer development of them, which endures in the written words’ (RJ, 298). Even so, the poem’s ‘endurance’ is implicated in its dialectics. Thomas sets ‘everlasting flowers’ (not a wholly positive oxymoron) and, by analogy, poetic ‘fragments’ against the rooting periwinkle. The plant may be heading in the right or inevitable direction: ‘into the wood’.

  7. everlasting: a word that occurs only here and in The Other (see note, 161).

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: see general note above.

  Wind and Mist (73)

  1 April 1915

  In December 1909 the Thomases moved into a house (see The New House, 68, and notes) designed and built for them by Geoffrey Lupton, a young exponent of ‘arts and crafts’ principles. The house, in which they lived until August 1913, was at Wick (also Week or Wyke) Green on the Froxfield ridge above Steep. In the 1920s it acquired the name ‘Red House’. The poem’s autobiographical elements include the birth of Myfanwy Thomas (August 1910) and Thomas’s breakdown in September 1911. He often complained about the house’s position on top of the hangers: ‘I am back again with the intolerable swishing of the trees in rain & wind which I have had ever since I came here last Christmas’ (LGB, 206). Helen Thomas writes: ‘somehow we could not love the house. The heavy oak was raw and new, and seemed to resent its servitude in beam and door, and with loud cracks would try to wrench itself free. There was nothing in that exposed position to protect us from the wind, which roared and shrieked in the wide chimneys, nor have I ever heard such furious rain as dashed vindictively against our windows…Often a thick mist enveloped us, and the house seemed to be standing on the edge of the world, with an infinity of white rolling vapour below us. There was no kindness or warmth or welcome about that house’ (HT, 129). Helen’s account may be coloured by Edward’s writings, but Wick Green evidently became inseparable from the subjectivities of their time there. It shaped Thomas’s depiction of Niflheim, cloud-world of the Nordic gods, in Norse Tales, and the myth may add resonance to the poem: ‘The rain up here is incredible. It is like living before the creation, like the Niflheim that men ultimately emerged from: – when will they come?’ (LGB, 226-7). In Norse Tales King Gangler ‘remembers’ an experience that helps him to understand Niflheim:

  He had just stepped out of his house after a night of rain and wind…Below him was the steep hill on the top of which stood his house, but the hill was blotted out by mist. Through the mist he could see mountains which he had never seen before, but either they, or he and his house, were moving…Then as he stood still thinking, he saw that the mountains were clouds. His house and the little piece of ground where he was standing seemed to be all that was left of the earth. The night’s storm had washed away all the rest, and there he was shipwrecked in a sea of clouds and mist, rocking and swirling round about. This sea must have been like Niflheim. (NT, 12)

  Like Up in the Wind, Wind and Mist has a generic affinity with Robert Frost’s blank-verse dialogues. The parallels include people talking at cross-purposes; mingled ‘inner’ and ‘outer weather’ (to quote Frost’s poem ‘Tree at My Window’); the framework of a place or situation being explained to an outsider; deceptively simple speech. But Wind and Mist is more symbolic, less documentary, than Frost’s eclogues, and closer to the poet’s lyric voice(s). Thomas adapts Frostian structures, including the monosyllabic line, to create a psychodrama that, like some of his lyrics, might be set alongside Sylvia Plath’s anatomies of mental breakdown. ‘View’ (lines 1 and 4) is a key word. The house, as analogue for the self, is looked both from and at; and the resultant ‘views’ or ‘worlds’ can differ as much as ‘heaven’ and ‘chaos surging back’. The first speaker, partly Thomas’s less disturbed or pre-breakdown ‘Other’, reads the landscape as an English microcosm (lines 6-8). The ‘wind and mist’ that dominate the main speaker’s retrospect and introspection symbolise a double assault on the ‘firm ground’ of the self. Thomas represents cognitive collapse as confusion of the ‘eye’ followed by confusion of the ear (perhaps hearing voices). ‘Mist’ or ‘cloud’ denotes dissociation from ‘reality’; ‘wind’, possession by another reality.

  16-17. Sometimes a man feels proud…one mighty thought’. This echoes the Faustian fantasy of Ambition (see note, 191). In lines 60-1 such subjectivism assumes a delusive, paranoid shape: ‘There were whole days and nights when the wind and I / Between us shared the world, and the wind ruled’.

  25. a castle in Spain. Thomas may have recollected a drawing by his friend James Guthrie: ‘Look again at his “Castle in Spain”; how it is perched up above that might of forest like a child that has climbed whence it cannot descend’ (Thomas’s preface to James Guthrie, A Second Book of Drawings [Edinburgh & London: T.N. Foulis, 1908]).

  26-8. I have thought…lived there then’. In November 1906 Thomas wrote of Berryfield Cottage: ‘We are now become people of whom passers by stop to think: How fortunate are they within those walls. I know it. I have thought the same as I came to the house & forgot it was my own’ (LGB, 126).

  46. The clay first broke my heart, and then my back. ‘T
he garden improves but the clay breaks first the back & then the heart’ (LGB, 211).

  48-51. a child /Was born…groans’. The birth was difficult, and baby Myfanwy later contracted a mysterious illness. She recovered, but the period of anxiety ‘more than ever increased our growing dislike of [the house]’ (HT, 130). This passage conveys a peculiarly depressive state (‘grey mind’).

  54. cloud castle. Thomas was a compulsive cloud-watcher: ‘Round upon round [the hill] rose up, nodding but secure, until its summit overhung the rocky base and on this ledge was the likeness of a wall and turret in ruins. Such a castle it might have been as a child draws with its eyes out of nothing, when it reads for the first time of the Castle Perilous or Joyous Gard, set far above the farms and churches and factories of this world…And this mount, this mountain forest and overhanging brow, this incredibly romantic ruin upon the shelf of it, were built out of cloud in the violet western sky’ (CC, 3-4).

  54-68. I had forgot the wind…wind and mist. As with ‘mist’, ‘earth’ and ‘cloud’ in lines 35-43, the repeated words – often placed at the end of end-stopped lines as if blocking progress – dramatise obsession. The speaker’s narrative tics signal that his neurosis continues: ‘Pray do not let me get on to the wind’.

  59. quite unreal. Despite his ironically phrased paranoia, the speaker, unlike his interlocutor (whose sanity approaches banality) or ‘the house-agent’s young man’, may have learned something about ‘reality’.