The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  63. My past and the past of the world were in the wind. The other speaker projects the passing of time and the processing of memory on to a contrastingly harmonious vista (lines 9-12).

  72-3. would…could…should. The modal verbs here echo the last quatrain of The New House, but with a more positive twist as befits the speaker’s desire to ‘try the house once more’.

  Ms: BL. Published text: AANP, LP. Differences from CP1978: 16 proud of proud at [misprint in AANP, probably owing to ‘at’ in line above, corrected in CP1928] 43 ‘You had a garden dropped down a space in CP1978 as in BL Note: in l.64 LP and CP1944 print ‘may’ rather than ‘will’ [BL, AANP].

  A Gentleman (75)

  2 April 1915

  Another poem of contrapuntal voices, A Gentleman takes a socio-linguistic approach to different ‘views’: to perception and ‘judgment’. Although the latter seemingly goes against the judgmental ‘stranger’, we are invited to read between ‘the Gypsy dame’s’ lines. In The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans Mr Torrance recalls a similarly ambiguous character-witness: ‘The Gypsy [here an inn-keeper’s wife] was a most Christian body. She used to treat with unmistakeable kindness, whenever he called at the inn, a gentleman who was notoriously an atheist and teetotaler. When asked upbraidingly why, she said: “He seems a nice gentleman, and as he is going to a place where there won’t be many comforts, I think we ought to do our best to make this world as happy as possible for him’ (HGLM, 132). Smith observes that, for all Thomas’s ‘anxiety about being an “isolate self-considering brain”, few collections of verse can have so many narratives of conversation and encounter, more vocatives, reported speech, or direct celebrations of the unique quiddity and otherness of other creatures and people’ (SS, 159). Thomas was often an eavesdropper at ‘inns’: a passage in The South Country records an interchange between ‘three labourers and the landlord…heated in conversation about some one not present’ (SC, 246-9). In A Gentleman, as in Man and Dog, pentameter couplets provide a grid that casts the sentence-sounds of casual conversation into revealing postures. Formally, the poem functions as a bridge between Wind and Mist and Lob.

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: P.

  Lob (76)

  3, 4 April 1915

  Lob was ‘very close to [Edward’s] heart’, and well received by his literary circle: Thomas told Eleanor Farjeon: ‘Bottomley…agrees with everyone about “Lob”’ (EF, 173, 147). Frost declared: ‘The goodness is in Lob. You are a poet or you are nothing…I like the first half of Lob best: it offers something more like action with the different people coming in and giving the tones of speech. But the long paragraph is a feat. I never saw anything like you for English’ (RFET, 43). Edward Garnett found Lob ‘a little breathless or rough’ on the first reading, but Thomas confidently defended his methods: ‘I am doubtful about the chiselling you advise. It would be the easiest thing in the world to clean it all up & trim it & have every line straightforward in sound & sense, but it would not really improve it. I think you read too much with the eye perhaps. If you say a couplet like “If they had reaped their dandelions and sold / Them fairly, they could have afforded gold” I believe it is no longer awkward. Then “because” at the end of a line looks awkward if one is accustomed to an exaggerated stress on the rhyme word which I don’t think necessary’ (LEG, 29).

  Lob is as central to Thomas’s “English” explorations as The Other to his poems of the inner road. Perhaps because it takes political nationalism to raise folklore’s status, relatively few poems in the tradition of post-Romantic European cultural nationalism draw on English folkloric materials. But Thomas had long noted Yeats’s exploitation of Irish lore and legend (see Introduction, 20); and William Morris, with his medieval and Nordic mythic scenarios, was a common literary ancestor. Another influence on Thomas was Charles M. Doughty (1843-1926), best known as the author of Arabia Deserta. He emulated neither Doughty’s archaic vocabulary nor his jingoistic patriotism. Yet his massive epic poem The Dawn in Britain (1906-7), set in Celtic-Roman Britain, touched some (perhaps Anglo-Welsh) chord: ‘[Doughty’s] picture of early Britain, vast, wild, sunlit, coloured, full of the songs of birds, with here and there a town and here and there the burial mounds of princes and unknown men – that picture would alone have made the poem deserve an undying name. It is a little matter, but I had no worthy sense of the rich great age of this home of my race until I found it here.’ Thomas dreamed that the poem might give children ‘such an harmonious view of early history and folklore and ancient monuments and the physical beauty of Britain as we can only grope after’ (review of The Dawn in Britain V and VI, Daily Chronicle, 7 February 1907). Forced to admit, ‘positively Doughty is an antiquarian’, he went on praising him: ‘Doughty is great. I see his men & women whenever I see noble beeches, as in Savernake Forest, or tumuli or old encampments, or the line of the Downs like the backs of a train of elephants, or a few firs on a hilltop’ (LGB, 118-19, 135).

  Although Leeds and Yorkshire are mentioned, the poem’s “England” is Thomas’s ‘South Country’: ‘In a sense this country is all “carved out of the carver’s brain” and has not a name. This is not the South Country which measures about two hundred miles from east to west and fifty from north to south. In some ways it is incomparably larger than any country that was ever mapped, since upon nothing less than the infinite can the spirit disport itself. In other ways it is far smaller – as when a mountain with tracts of sky and cloud and the full moon glass themselves in a pond, a little pond’ (SC, 11). Yet Thomas’s Welsh and western horizons make Wiltshire (which also features in The Other), rather than the Home Counties, his spiritual epicentre. He told W.H. Hudson: ‘Wiltshire is almost my native county as my grandparents moved there [to Swindon] before my father left home and I spent all my holidays there for nearly twenty years’ (ETFN 52 [August 2004], 8). He returned to Wiltshire while writing a book on his first literary love, Richard Jefferies: ‘the genius, the human expression, of this country, emerging from it, not to be detached from it any more than the curves of some statues from their maternal stone’ (RJ, 1). For Thomas, ‘Jefferies came to express part of this silence of uncounted generations’ (RJ, 20). His topography of the Jefferies country stresses its history (Celtic, Roman, Saxon) and pre-history: ‘tumuli and earthworks that make the earth look old, like the top bar of a stile, carved by saunterers, bored by wasps, grooved and scratched and polished again’ (RJ, 5).

  Among Thomas’s many visits to Wiltshire was a cycling tour in May 1911 with his son Merfyn. His notebook for the tour (FNB53), on which he drew for The Icknield Way, is headed: ‘Marlboro’, Pewsey, Amesbury, Salisbury, Tisbury’. One evening he visited Stonehenge (which he had adored as a child): ‘sky very light and clear…I walk fast with a strange excitement under this sky and at length see 13 or 14 dark pillars [?] with great crosspieces and touching them on right a huge mound – Stonehenge’. Thomas’s most recent field trip to Wiltshire had been in October 1914. He stayed in Avebury (‘a village of obscure paths and roads that dwindle into paths’), and watched troops mobilising on Salisbury Plain: ‘At Ludgershall I began to see soldiers and nothing else…soldiers in motors, on horses, driving artillery waggons, walking, everywhere, quiet whether busy or not…Suddenly at the end of the street is the Down or rather the camp – hundreds of bell-tents in rows, and marquees, and lines of mostly pack horses tethered’ (letter to Helen, 5 October 1914, NLW).

  Scattered through Thomas’s prose are many prototypes of ‘Lob’ as an old countryman (see notes on Man and Dog, 185). He turns up first as ‘A Wiltshire Molecatcher’: ‘It may be that he carries secrets which shall die with him; so, at least, his morose reserve suggests…Seated in the mound, between high double hedges, at noon over his “dinner”, luxuriously pillowed among lush grass and golden pilewort, with his back leaning against an elm, he will converse intelligently on subjects that might have been deemed beyond his care, with a sharpness of sense and economy of words that bespeak a healthy mind cleansed by the pure hillside ai
r’ (TWL, 49-50). He becomes a wandering ‘Umbrella Man’: ‘Every village, almost every farmhouse, especially if there were hops on the land, he knew, and could see with his blue eyes as he remembered them and spoke their names. I never met a man who knew England as he did’ (SC, 192). Thomas can be sentimental about elderly ‘Earth Children’ (a chapter-title in The Heart of England) of both sexes. But he had been educated in rural culture by David Uzzell, his friend since childhood, who laid the deep foundations for ‘Lob’: ‘I called [him] Dad, in the Wiltshire style, almost from the first day. I remember him first as a stiff straight man, broad-shouldered and bushy bearded, holding his rod out and watching his float very intently…He knew the names of most birds and could imitate their cries: his imitations of the jackdaw calling his name, and of the young rook crying and swallowing a worm at the same time, were wonderful. The flowers, too, he knew, both the common pretty flowers and those whose virtues he had read about in Culpeper’s Herbal. With dried and powdered dock root and with extracts of leaves, flowers or bark, he composed dark medicinal-looking draughts’ (CET, 129-31).

  Thomas’s fascination with the ‘knowledge’ possessed by old country people goes beyond the sociological approach of ‘George Bourne’ (George Sturt) in The Bettesworth Book (see note, 185), and even Hudson’s more holistic vision in his Wiltshire-based A Shepherd’s Life (1910). It was a literary impulse like that which sent Yeats ‘down into Connaught to sit by turf fires’ and so gain access to ‘the unwritten tradition which binds the unlettered…to the beginning of time and to the foundation of the world’ (Yeats, Essays and Introductions [London: Macmillan, 1961], 4-6). The step from ‘Lob’ as rural archetype to ‘Lob’ as poetic tradition is clear in this passage where an exile from the countryside recalls ‘an old, old man’: ‘You may be sure there were hundreds like him in Shakespeare’s time and in Wordsworth’s, and if there aren’t a good sprinkling of them, generation after generation, I do not know what we shall come to, but I have my fears. I warrant, every man who was ever any good had a little apple-faced man or woman like this somewhere not very far back in his pedigree. Where else will he get his endurance, his knowledge of the earth, his feeling for life and for what that old man called God? When a poet writes, I believe he is often only putting into words what another such old man puzzled out among the sheep in a long lifetime’ (TC, 9).

  Thomas wrote Lob when completing This England: An Anthology from her Writers (see note, 165), conceived as a riposte to propagandist anthologies like Songs and Sonnets for England in Wartime (1914). He began a review of ‘Anthologies and Reprints’: ‘The worst of the poetry being written today is that it is too deliberately, and not inevitably, English. It is for an audience: there is more in it of the shouting of rhetorician, reciter, or politician than of the talk of friends and lovers’. His article ‘War Poetry’, printed in the same issue of Poetry and Drama (2, 8 [December 1914]), similarly insists: ‘I need hardly say that by becoming ripe for poetry the poet’s thoughts may recede far from their original resemblance to all the world’s, and may seem to have little to do with daily events.’ This England has seven sections: This England, Merry England, Her Sweet Three Corners, London, Abroad and Home Again, Great Ones, The Vital Commoners. Thomas’s brief ‘Note’ cuts to the chase: ‘This is an anthology from the work of English writers rather strictly so called. Building round a few most English poems like “When icicles hang by the wall”, – excluding professedly patriotic writing because it is generally bad and because indirect praise is sweeter and more profound, – never aiming at what a committee from Great Britain and Ireland might call complete, – I wished to make a book as full of English character and country as an egg is of meat. If I have reminded others, as I did myself continually, of some of the echoes called up by the name of England, I am satisfied.’

  This England includes extracts from (among others) Anon., Chaucer, Shakespeare, Browne, Walton, Cobbett, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Clare, Hazlitt, Borrow, Dickens, Morris, Jefferies, Hardy, Doughty and Hudson. Thomas saw poetry as quintessential, and picked the kinds of prose that fed his poetry. In his essay ‘England’ he says of Walton’s Compleat Angler: ‘Since the war began I have not met so English a book, a book that filled me so with a sense of England, as this, though I have handled scores of deliberately patriotic works…In Walton’s book I touched the antiquity and sweetness of England – English fields, English people, English poetry, all together’ (LS, 109). That might be a template for The Manor Farm and Haymaking, the poems he sneaked into This England under his pseudonym ‘Edward Eastaway’. In Lob Thomas does the opposite: he sneaks This England into a poem, anthologises the anthology. At once ars poetica and cultural manifesto, this quirky quest-poem reaches more deeply into “England” than do ‘deliberately patriotic works’. What Thomas says of Keats applies to himself: ‘English literature, English poetry, the Muse of his native land, that “first-born on the mountains”, as he calls her, was a main part of what England meant for Keats’ (K, 16-17). Lob brings to the surface the historical sense of English poetry that permeates his poems. Yet this involves a test as well as a quest. Poetry, like other traditions, faces into ‘No Man’s Land’ (see Introduction, 18).

  Intermediary between ‘Lob’ as rural archetype and ‘Lob’ as poetic tradition is ‘Lob’ as folklore. Besides anthologising traditional songs (see note, 166), Thomas had compiled Celtic Stories (1911) and Norse Tales (1912). Closer to Lob is a more original work, Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds: ‘I wish I had gone on where the Proverbs left off. Probably I never shall, unless “Lob” is the beginning’ (EF, 172). In Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds, ostensibly a children’s book, Thomas invents absurd origins for proverbs such as ‘It’s all my eye and Betty Martin’. He called this enterprise ‘rather English, I fancy’ (quoted, [ed.] Edward Garnett, Selected Poems of Edward Thomas [Gregynog Press, 1927], xii). But the tales eclectically relish English, Scottish, and Welsh place names and personal names. Proverbs transmit collective wisdom as idiom, as proto-poems. When Frost says ‘I never saw anything like you for English’, he recognises that Lob is a self-delighting linguistic tour de force marked by Thomas’s attraction to demotic speech as the root of poetry. ‘Lob’, intriguingly, ‘has thirteen hundred names for a fool’. The narrator, the ‘squire’s son’, and ‘Lob’ as proverb-coiner all use proverbial expressions in the subversive spirit of ‘Lydia Fairweather’, a gypsy who speaks solely in proverbs. She replies to a vicar’s complaint that this ‘puts an end to conversation`: ‘You do no harm, though: you leap like a cock at a blackberry. Your wit’s as long in coming as Cotswold barley, and without it you might as well live on Tewkesbury mustard. Were you born at Wotton under Weaver where God came never?’ (FTB, 109-10).

  ‘Lob’ is a folk-name, more common in northern England, linked with Hob (hobgoblin) and Robin Goodfellow/Puck. The Fairy in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream addresses Puck as ‘thou lob of spirits’, and asks this ‘shrewd and knavish sprite’: ‘are you not he /That frights the maidens of the villagery; / Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern, /And bootless makes the breathless housewife churn…?’ In Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), Puck, ‘the oldest old thing in England’, represents continuity, the rural basis of English life, and the national genius loci. The attribution of ‘Lob’ to a spirit implies that he is not a small fairy, but of human size. Sometimes he is said to be the giant son of a witch and the Devil. Helpful as well as mischievous, he receives milk and a place by the fire for his services. In Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ the ‘lubber fiend’ or ‘drudging goblin’ lies down after threshing corn all night: ‘And, stretched out all the chimney’s length, / Basks at the fire his hairy strength’ (see ‘Lob-lie-by-the-fire’, l.56). The etymology of ‘Lob’/‘lubber’ seems to imply heaviness or dullness, but Thomas takes the name’s associations and translations beyond any previous usage.

  Alun Howkins relates Thomas’s construction of ‘Lob’ to the historical moment when “village England” became an object
of nostalgia; when ‘Hodge’, the stereotypical lumpen-labourer, was replaced by an archetypal repository of vanishing lore (see ‘From Hodge to Lob: Reconstructing the English farm labourer, 1870-1914’, in eds, Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck, Living and Learning [Menston: Scolar Press, 1996], 218-35). Raymond Williams argues that Thomas romanticises the rural worker to create a dubious mystique of Englishness: ‘All countrymen, of all conditions and periods, are merged into a singular legendary figure. The varied idioms of specific country communities – the flowers, for example, have many local names – are reduced not only to one “country” idiom but to a legendary, timeless inventor, who is more readily seen than any actual people’ (The City and the Country [London: Chatto & Windus, 1973], 257). For David Gervais, however: ‘What redeems [Lob] and distinguishes it from other exponents of “Englishness”, is that it is honest enough not to pretend to some privileged vision of England…The poem is too subtle and too light to give us the option of falling back on words like “nation” and “race” to explain everything. We end simply in Wiltshire, with particular places and things, reminded of the battles still to come in Flanders’ (Literary Englands [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 63). Yet Gervais, like Williams, sees Thomas as failing to ‘give the social and political England of his time an adequate place in his verse’ (63-4). According to Smith, the poem knows this, since it effectively ‘admits’ that ‘Lob’ is obsolescent or ‘ghostly’: ‘the defiance [of “He never will admit he is dead”] is really the posthumous bravado of a ghost refusing his own mortality…the intangibility and evasiveness of Lob becomes the figure of a larger loss. This spirit of England is already no more than an image within the brain, an illusory site for all that the wandering subject feels dispossessed of’ (SS, 82).