by Edna Longley
Thomas belonged to a Zeitgeist that collected folksongs and folklore (the Folklore Society was founded in the year of his birth), interviewed old country people, and artificially returned to Nature. But he was critically alert both to the economics of the countryside and to the contradictions inherent in ‘that cultivation of the instinctive and primitive which is the fine flower of a self-conscious civilisation, turning in disgust upon itself’ (TC, 39). There is self-satire in his portrayal of the narrator who twice goes ‘In search of something chance would never bring’. At one level, second time round, the narrator has become an anthropologist on a field trip, frustrated and teased by his informants, pre-empted by the old man’s opinion of archaeologists: ‘They…couldn’t find it, by digging, anywhere’ (lines 11-12). ‘It’ remains elusive, and (cf. The Other) the quest may constitute the discovery. Just as ‘the naturalists’ miss something in The Unknown Bird, so the narrator – on another level, a poet – may get further than academic findings. Or, given the nature of his attention to the ‘squire’s son’ (part-based on Richard Jefferies), the poet may be a more sensitive anthropologist. Further, as Gervais notes, ‘particularity’ deflects rhetoric.
In attaching Lob to Wiltshire, more specifically to the Vale of Pewsey, Thomas elaborates his wartime notion ‘that all ideas of England are developed, spun out, from [a local] centre into something large or infinite, solid or aëry’ (LS, 111; see notes on The Manor Farm, and Adlestrop, 165, 177). As ‘an idea of England’, and idea of poetry, Lob sets death against metamorphosis. This tension, which can be read as a critique rather than denial of modernity, does not evade history in the shape of war. ‘Lob’ is elusive, and the poem allusive, partly because the Great War, conjoined with modernity, raises difficult questions about cultural memory and about memory as poetry.
4. sweet as any nut: perhaps an echo of W.H. Davies, ‘The Child and the Mariner’: ‘An old seafaring man was he; a rough / Old man, but kind; and hairy, like the nut / Full of sweet milk’.
9. opened up the barrows. This may allude to a group of barrows and tumuli a mile north of Alton Priors (see note on lines 14-17), which includes the long barrow Adam’s Grave, formerly ‘Woden’s barrow’, excavated in 1860. But ‘opening up the barrows’ also condenses the history of archaeological digs in Wiltshire, and its implications.
10. while I was scaring sparrows. Birds used to be ‘scared’ away from seeds with wooden clappers, songs and shouts – proverbially, a child’s first employment. William Cobbett recalls in his autobiography, in a passage that Thomas chose for This England: ‘My first occupation was, driving the small birds from the turnip seed, and the rooks from the pease’ (TE, 163).
12. couldn’t find it, by digging: ‘of these many folds in our nature the face of the earth reminds us, and perhaps, even where there are no more marks visible upon the land than there were in Eden, we are aware of the passing of time in ways too difficult and strange for the explanation of historian and zoologist and philosopher’ (SC, 152).
14-17. three Manningfords…Alton Barnes and Alton Priors. FNB53 contains jottings on the Manningfords. ‘Those villages’ are in the Vale of Pewsey. The Vale extends from Devizes in the west to Savernake Forest in the east. ‘This is the ford of Manna’s people, from a Saxon original Manningaford. Abbots is from the Abbey of St Peter at Winchester, Bohun is from Henry de Boun who owned the manor in 1212, Bruce is from Briouze in Normandy.’ ‘First recorded as Aweltun in 825, [Alton] means the settlement at the source of a river [Saxon awiell, tun]…Alton Barnes takes its name from the Berners family, who were Norman landowners…Alton Priors reminds us that the land here was once owned by the priory of St Swithun, Winchester’ (Martyn Whittock, Wiltshire Place-names: their origins and meanings [Newbury: Countryside Books, 1997], 95, 11). See also John Chandler, The Vale of Pewsey (Bradford on Avon: Ex Libris Press, 1991, 2000). Thomas exploits the mingled repetition and difference in the names to dramatise the trickery of language and ‘memory’: the narrator remembers being unable to remember. The villages ‘Lurking to one side’ belong to a mysterious confusion of actual and imagined landscapes.
18-30. All had their churches…gold. Thomas describes a Wiltshire village as ‘an archipelago of thatched cottages, sprinkled here and there, and facing all ways, alongside an almost equal number of roads, lanes, tracks, footpaths, and little streams, so numerous and interlaced that they seemed rather to cut it off from the world than to connect it’ (HGLM, 264). The poem’s sequestered villagers seem caught in limbo: able neither to engage with what ‘the road’ and ‘aeroplanes’ represent, nor to maintain their own mode of ‘dwelling’. Shooting the weathercock, a traditionally foolish act like the feats of the men of Gotham (see note below), becomes a parable of cultural self-harm. Like the failure to ‘reap dandelions’ and ‘sell them fairly’, it suggests that ‘the people’ – not only Wiltshire villagers – do not truly value their assets. Thomas’s joke may make a precise economic and political point about ‘the death of rural England’. English agriculture had entered a long depression in the 1870s (see Introduction, 23), partly because the government allowed the market to be flooded with cheap American wheat. The narrator’s (unexplained) return after ‘Many years’ may both reflect Thomas’s visit to Wiltshire in October 1914, and imply that, with war compounding socio-economic problems, the quest for ‘Lob’ has acquired new urgency.
36. old Bottlesford. Bottlesford is the name of another village in the area.
38-40. White Horse…Walker’s Hill. What Thomas calls ‘that very tame White Horse above Alton Priors’ (IPS, 15) is near Adam’s Grave, and ‘lies in a shallow dip between Walker’s Hill and Milk Hill…in the midst of a group of barrows and tumuli’ (Kate Bergamar, Discovering Hill Figures [Princes Risborough: Shire Publications, 1997], 60).
40-2. A girl proposed…Marked on the maps’. The ‘girl’ and Thomas are both up to ‘roguery’. In this special form of ‘mapping’, Adam’s Grave on Walker’s Hill evokes ‘Adam Walker’ – primordial man – to symbolise how humanity ‘marks’ the earth and vice versa. ‘You will find “Welsh Ways” all over England. Walkers or Workaway Hill, where the Ridgeway descends southward from Wansdyke to the Pewsey Valley, is said to be a corruption of Weala-wege, and to have been called Walcway (or Welshway) by a shepherd not long ago’ (IW, 22).
44-6. Who loved wild bird…loved the earth. His ‘loves’ identify the ‘squire’s son’ with Richard Jefferies. Fishing was the only blood sport ever practised by Thomas, who ironically notices ‘the sportsman’s tenuous emotion of loving the hare that he has killed’ (RJ, 38), but he accepted the contradiction built into any countryman’s love of the earth: ‘Where men and children are at close grips with nature, and have to wrest a living from the soil or the sea, there is apt to hide, like an imprisoned toad, at the very roots of their philosophy, if it does not flap like a crow in the topmost branches, a feeling that all the life that is not with them – as horse and sheep and cow are – is against them…[Jefferies] arose out of the earth, and he had its cruelty’ (RJ, 34). See note on Thomas and hunting (178).
51. His home was where he was free. See general note to Home (197). This semi-paradox alludes to “liberty” as a peculiarly English value (‘the free-born Englishman’), pushed to the margins by nineteenth-century capitalism. The ‘wild’, wandering aspect of ‘Lob’ associates that shift with Enclosure.
53. Does he keep clear old paths…? ‘Untrodden but indelible old roads, worn by hoofs and the naked feet and the trailing staves of long dead generations’; ‘East, south, and west flint-diggers’ cartways, old roads, and hares’ paths lead over the downs’ (RJ, 4, 12).
56-7. Lob-lie-by-the-fire / Came in my books. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (III, 423-6) the Citizen’s wife informs her husband: ‘there’s a pretty tale of a Witch, that had the divels marke about her, God blesse us, that had a Giant to her sonne, that was cal’d Lob-lie-by-the-fire’. But this figure seems more likely to be first met in a chil
dren’s book like Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Jackanapes, etc. (1892), which includes the tale of ‘Lob-lie-by-the-fire or the Luck of Lingborough’ with the gloss that he is ‘a rough kind of Brownie or House Elf’. Walter de la Mare wrote two poems called ‘Lob-Lie-by-the-Fire’.
58-78. He has been in England…he might say. The verbal bravura of this passage makes its point. As Adam-like namer of flowers, birds and places, and translator of birdsong, ‘Lob’ becomes more openly a portrait of the artist. He rhymes ‘cherry’ with ‘merry’, finds metaphors for natural phenomena, and releases the latent qualities of ‘English’. As naturalised man, ‘Lob’ bestows in turn names that humanise Nature (‘Bridget-in-her-bravery’) or link the animate and inanimate (‘the Hog’s Back’). All this implies that ‘word’ and ‘thing’ cohabit on earth (see note on Old Man, 151).
61. And in a tender mood he, as I guess. Replying to criticism from John Freeman, Thomas wrote: ‘The…line is, I fear, echoed from a line in Adonais “He, as I guess, / Had looked on Nature’s naked loveliness”. But isn’t it all right or mayn’t Lob have been tender or have had a mood?’ (ETFN 38 [January 1998], 12). Like Shelley, he is also echoing Chaucer’s recurrent tag and line-ending, e.g., ‘But Venus is it soothly, as I gesse’ (Knight’s Tale, 1102). The phrase highlights Chaucerian qualities in Thomas’s own couplets and his casting of Lob into this foundational English metre. ‘At hawthorn-time in Wiltshire travelling’ updates the start of The Canterbury Tales (a poem from which This England takes seven passages), with Chaucer himself now an object of pilgrimage. After l.98, BL brackets the following lines, probably cut as over-explicit: ‘Chaucer and Wordsworth and all true poets were / His friends, and Cobbett, Bunyan and Latimer’. (This England contains down-to-earth extracts from sermons by the martyred reformer Hugh Latimer.) In M1 Walton appears in the list of literary worthies, and ‘Bunyan’ replaces [Gilbert] ‘White’. Cobbett eventually found his way into Haymaking.
59. ‘By the way, we call wild cherry trees in these parts “Merry Trees”’ (letter to W.H. Hudson, 2 May 1907, ETFN 52 [August 2004], 7).
65-6. old herbal Gerard…Traveller’s-joy. This England contains an extract from the Herball (1597) of John Gerard (1545-1612): ‘The Traveller’s Joy is found in the borders of fields among thorns and briers, almost in every hedge, as you go from Gravesend to Canterbury in Kent; in many places of Essex, and in most of these southerly parts about London, but not in the north of England that I can hear of…It is called commonly Viorna quasi vias ornans, of decking and adorning ways and hedges, where people travel, and thereupon I have named it The Traveller’s Joy’ (TE, 97).
67-70. Our blackbirds…rejoiced. Here birdsong, a proverb, and a poem by Hardy freely associate in the style of Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds. A male version of the proverb is more usual: ‘Like lucky John (Jan) Toy – lost a shilling and found a tuppenny loaf’. Hardy’s ‘The Spring Call’, included in This England, celebrates regional versions of the blackbird’s call. It begins: ‘Down Wessex way, when spring’s a-shine, / The blackbird’s “pret-ty de-urr!” / In Wessex accents marked as mine / Is heard afar and near.’
73. the Hog’s Back. By repeating the name, the speaker endorses its fitness. ‘I came in sight of the Hog’s Back, by which I must go to Farnham. That even, straight ridge pointing westward, and commanding the country far away on either side, must have had a road along it since man went upright, and must continue to have one so long as it is a pleasure to move and to use the eyes together’ (IPS, 72).
74. Mother Dunch’s Buttocks: the Sinodun Hills (a Celtic name), also known as the Wittenham Clumps, Berkshire Bubs or Bumps. ‘Mother Dunch’s Buttocks’ comes from the Dunch family who once owned the land. Thomas refers to ‘the clear heavings of the Sinodun Hills’ (IW, 159). When sending Lob to Blackwood’s Magazine Thomas substituted ‘Happersnapper Hanger’ for ‘Mother Dunch’s Buttocks’, lest ‘the disgusting line’ should cause problems (EF, 145). The poem was still rejected.
76. Totteridge and Totterdown and Juggler’s Lane. Totteridge is in Hertfordshire, Totterdown in Jefferies country ‘where the Ermine Street…crosses the Ridgeway’ (RJ, 3). Thomas himself partially “explains” Juggler’s Lane: ‘If [old winding roads] go out of use in a new or changed civilisation, they may still be frequented by men of the most primitive habit. All over England may be found old roads, called Gypsy Lane, Tinker’s Lane, or Smuggler’s Lane; east of Calne, in Wiltshire, is a Juggler’s Lane; and as if the ugliness of the “uggle” sound pleased the good virtuous country folk, they have got a Huggler’s Hole a little west of Semley and south of Sedgehill in the same county’ (IW, 3).
77-8. Why Tumbling Bay…he might say. ‘We have need of men like that to explain “Eggpie” Lane near the village of Sevenoaks Weald, or Tumbling Bay in a neighbouring parish far inland’ (Thomas’s preface to Isaac Taylor, Words and Places [London: J.M. Dent, 1911], ix). Here Thomas is criticising amateur etymologists, country people who have lost touch with their traditions. He says: ‘Better pure imagination than rash science in handling place names.’ At the point where even philologists must bow to the ‘incalculable’, ‘Lob’ or poetry does better: ‘Studies like Canon Taylor’s can only feed the roots of the imagination; they can colour or shape the flowers only by means beyond anticipation or estimate…Association is as strange as life: it absolutely distinguishes “guitar” from “catarrh”, and helps to make the gulf between Amberley and Anerley’ (ix-x). The name ‘Tumbling Bay’, that of a house in Seal parish near Tonbridge, remains ‘incalculable’. See note on If I should ever by chance (285).
79-88. ‘But little he says…forgot and done. The contrast between ‘Lob’ and ‘the sage’ is not a piece of anti-intellectual primitivism but a comment on cultural and creative processes. It echoes two of Thomas’s dicta on poetry, quoted above: ‘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’; ‘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’. Reviewing John Davidson’s The Triumph of Mammon, Thomas says: ‘We ought to guess the philosophy from the poetry no more than we guess the athlete’s meals from the length of his leap’ (Daily Chronicle, 30 April 1907); and, in another review of new verse: ‘Poetry is a natural growth, having more than a superficial relation to roses and trees and hills. However airy and graceful it may be in foliage and flower, it has roots deep in a substantial past. It springs apparently from an occupation of the land, from long, busy, and quiet tracts of time, wherein a man or a nation may find its own soul. To have a future, it must have had a past’ (Daily Chronicle, 8 February 1904).
85-6. Proverbial: ‘Quietness is best, as the fox said when he bit the cock’s head off’.
90-1. Proverbial: ‘to skin a flint (stone) for a penny, and break a knife of twelvepence’ (hence ‘skinflint’). In the poem’s economics ‘someone else’s wife’ contrasts with ‘Jan Toy’: another opposition between price and value.
96-8. This is tall Tom…when icicles hung by the wall. The preface to This England (see above) indicates that ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ from Loves Labour’s Lost, which Thomas also quotes in The Owl, was central to the anthology’s conception. Why he thought this wintry song ‘most English’ may be judged from its use here to clinch the transactions between environment, demotic culture and high literature that characterise Lob. It matters that ‘Tom’ and Shakespeare should ‘talk’. Thomas had wanted to write ‘a book on Shakespeare [giving] a background of the literature, social life and natural life, folk lore, and legend, and mythical natural history, and show how Shakespeare’s pictures of nature and country life sprang from it’ (SL, 89).
99. Herne the Hunter. The Shakespearean motif continues. Thomas first wrote about Herne in his short guide book, Windsor Castle: ‘It is supposed to have been in [Elizabeth I’s] childhood, in her father’s reign, that the events which led to the story of Herne the hu
nter took place:
There is an old tale goes, that Herne the hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor forest,
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns;
And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
So speaks Mistress Page in opening her plans for the discomfiture of Falstaff. It is said that a yeoman hanged himself on a tree for fear of the king after hunting in the Forest without leave. The tree was cursed, and a ghostly stag haunted the place and butted at the tree and breathed smoke and fire as it tore the roots. There was also a story that Herne was a keeper and went mad after being gored by a stag. He tied a pair of antlers upon his head, ran naked through the Forest, and hanged himself on the tree near Shakespeare’s Oak in the Home Park, which was called Herne’s Oak for centuries’ (Windsor Castle [London: Blackie, 1910], 51-2). Mistress Page’s speech (Merry Wives of Windsor IV, iv) is in This England.
104-12. When there were kings in Kent…So they were married. Although ‘our Jack’ is not named until l.123, Thomas is already drawing on the English cycle of “Jack tales”: ‘Jack is not the dull moral prince of the fairy tale, but rather the folk hero, sharp, gaining his ends unscrupulously or even immorally, often through luck rather than virtue, often too lazy to work at ordinary pursuits. He is a trickster, or he is the clever younger son, or he is the unpromising hero, but always he is destined to turn events to his own account rather than having them shaped in his favour’ ([ed.] Maria Leach, Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend [New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1949-50], 535). In ‘The Princess of Canterbury’ Jack, a foolish shepherd, wins the princess by passing various tests, one of which is to stay awake all night by her bedside. He entertains her by pretending to catch from his pocket fish that he has already placed there. In ‘Lazy Jack’ Jack takes a series of jobs to support his widowed mother but always loses or spoils, through his folly, the payments-in-kind he receives. Having dragged a piece of mutton home on a string, he promises to carry the next day’s wages on his shoulders. The wages prove to be a donkey, and the sight of Jack with the donkey makes the deaf and dumb daughter of a rich man laugh for the first time in her life. Her father has promised that the man who achieves this feat shall marry her. (See, ed., Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy Tales, 1890-4 [repr. Bodley Head, 1968], 283-5, 95-6.)
