The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  113-22. And while he was a little cobbler’s boy…scraped his boots. This “stupid ogre” tale, from Charlotte S. Burne’s Shropshire Folk-lore (1883), appears in This England. Burne’s version ends: ‘But where [the giant] put down his load there stands the Wrekin to this day, and even the earth he scraped off his boots was such a pile that it made the little Ercall by the Wrekin side’ (TE, 68-9). In Burne, the cobbler is a man. The change to a ‘boy’ accentuates the David and Goliath element, reinforced later by ‘as Jack the giant-killer / He made a name’. As well as the archetypal invader, this giant may be a specific image of ‘the German threat’ (WC, 219-20).

  123. Gotham’s sages. The proverbial expression ‘as wise as a man of Gotham’ derives from tales based on the fabled idiocy of a village in Nottinghamshire. The men’s exploits include hedging the cuckoo and drowning an eel (see Jacobs, English Fairy Tales, 279-82). In a nursery rhyme they go ‘to sea in a bowl, / And if the bowl had been stronger / My song had been longer’; in a song by Thomas Love Peacock, which Thomas chose for his Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air, they embark ‘To rake the moon from out the sea’.

  128-9. ground up…The Yorkshireman. Most English tales of giants and ogres include the war-cry: ‘Fee, fi, fo, fum! / I smell the blood of an Englishman! / Be he alive or be he dead,/ I’ll grind his bones to make me bread!’ The ‘grinding’ image (repeated l.142), like the story of Hob and the hog, uses a folk-motif to represent violence as intrinsic to English history – now symbolised in its internal aspect. Jacobs (whom Thomas possibly read) associates the cry with the two-headed giant Thunderdell, who ‘comes from the northern dales to be revenged’ on Jack the Giant-Killer (English Fairy Tales, 68). Thomas may allude to regional clashes in England, to the ‘mills’ of the industrial revolution, and (Cooke suggests) to war-profiteers (WC, 219). ‘Yorkshireman’ indicates that Thomas’s historical geography resembles Kipling’s: ‘Kipling’s history is rural and it is southern, as indeed is the project of many if not most of those who sought to change Hodge’ (Howkins, ‘From Hodge to Lob’, 230).

  133-41. The man you saw…Lives yet. As indicated above, some critics question the grounds for this climactic affirmation. Williams rebukes ‘the casual figure of a dream of England, in which rural labour and rural revolt, foreign wars and internal dynastic wars, history, legend and literature are indiscriminately enfolded into a single emotional gesture. Lob or Lud, immemorial peasant or yeoman or labourer: the figure was now fixed and its name was Old England’ (The Country and the City, 258). Yet lines 139-40 – written later than BL and M1 mss, and thus an interesting afterthought – seem calculated to cover a range of internal and external conflict. And ‘Lob’ does not remain embodied as ‘peasant or yeoman’ (‘a mere clown, or squire, or lord’, l.132). In a fast-forward summation of the poem, he flickers between Nature, culture, politics, language, and literature. Linked by ‘or’ rather than ‘and’, this crescendo of ‘naming’ seeks, at least, to figure metamorphosis rather than ‘fixity’.

  133. Jack Cade: leader of Kent peasants and smallholders in rebellion (1450) against the economic policies of Henry VI; also a character in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI. In naming Cade and then Sedgemoor (l.140), Thomas again glances at current rural conditions. Smith comments: ‘At Sedgemoor, in 1685, the West Country peasants who had flocked to support the pretender Monmouth’s revolt against James II were wiped out in large numbers. Their insurrection had been brought about by an economic and social collapse beyond their capacity to understand, but linked, by [G.M.] Trevelyan [in England under the Stuarts, 1904] with a Waterloo which, in assuring British global hegemony, spelt the end for English agriculture’ (SS, 83).

  136. Jack-in-the-hedge, or Robin-run-by-the-wall: local names of several wild plants. Having accidentally omitted this line when he sent Lob to Eleanor Farjeon, Thomas remarked that it ‘connects the Jacks and the Bobs too’ (EF, 131).

  137. Robin Hood, Ragged Robin. The outlaw, who reinforces the poem’s anti-authoritarian tendency, does not intrude into this (seemingly) botanical catalogue. Robin Hood has lent his name to several plants, including the Ragged Robin – which implies poverty, as the plant-names in l.136 imply a marginal, hidden, fugitive existence.

  138. One of the lords of No Man’s Land. Perhaps only in this poem could the name given to the ground between the British and German trenches realise its full significance as the translation of a rural term into a term of war. Thomas mentions ‘a waste place of no man’s land’ (SC, 12) and ‘No Man’s Land’ in ‘the middle part of the South Downs’ (LPE, 160).

  141-5. He never will admit…On to the road. The poem has been turning back on its tracks since ‘The man you saw’, and will come full circle when the ‘squire’s son’ morphs into the original ‘ancient’. Here Thomas reintroduces the problematic ‘weathercock’ and the tension between ‘lane’ and ‘road’. While these images confirm ‘never’, and affirm the perennial need for ‘Lob’ since ‘millers’ will always ‘grind men’s bones for bread’, they also project a utopia.

  144. Lob ends here in M1. In BL Thomas cancels a full stop and continues.

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 15 was, was 32 looked I looked 42 roguery, roguery 103 wrong, wrong 119 Of shoes for mending. The giant let fall from his spade Of shoes. The giant sighed, and dropped from his spade 128 He too He, too, 140 Sedgemoor too, – Sedgmoor, too, – Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [JT] rather than P. In l.148 P omits the comma after ‘blood’ present in PTP.

  Digging (79)

  4 April 1915

  ‘Rich perfume of sage, dead grass and leaves, a mustard field and crumbling wild carrot seeds’ (entry for 2 October, ‘Open-Air Diary’, in [ed.] Thomas, British Country Life in Autumn and Winter [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909], xi). His essay ‘Flowers of Frost’ ends: ‘Frost seems also to play a part in sharpening the characteristic odours of winter, such as the smell of cherry-wood or the currant bushes freshly cut by the pruner, of tar when they are dipping hop-poles, the soil newly turned and the roots exposed by the gardeners…Above all, the fragrance of the weed-fire is never so sweet as when its bluish and white smoke heaves and trails heavily and takes wing at dawn over the frost and its crimson reflections of the flames and among the yellow tassels of the dark hedge’ (Country Life, 13 February 1909). Like Sowing, a complementary “gardening poem”, Digging is voiced by ‘an inhabitant of the earth’ (see note, 161). Once again, reciprocity with ‘the dark earth’ integrates mind and body, here in a lingering present-tense epiphany: ‘I think/Only with scents’ heals the Cartesian split. Yet ‘wounds’ and ‘The dead, the waste, the dangerous’ suggest that all reciprocities have been hard-won. ‘Goutweed’ is a pest; and it takes a figurative ‘bonfire’ to turn neurosis into poetry (‘sweetness’). Interestingly, Thomas wrote this autumnal poem in Spring. In Digging he again remakes the quatrain for special purposes. He trellises an assonantal catalogue across three stanzas, and counterpoints shorter and longer lines to dramatise the diffusion of smells and thoughts. See Thomas’s other poem with this title (99).

  1-2. I think /Only with scents. ‘He seemed to me to be able to use all his senses at once more acutely than most people use a single one… I remember that, for the whole of the last evening he spent with me, he at intervals pulled some mysterious object out of his pocket to smell. What it was I never saw, but it seemed to give him nearly as much satisfaction as his pipe’ (J.W. Haines, ‘Edward Thomas, As I knew him’, In Memoriam: Edward Thomas [London: The Morland Press, 1919], 14-15).

  3. wild carrot’s seed: ‘one of those clusters of wild carrot seeds, like tiny birds’ nests, which are scented like a ripe pear sweeter and juicier than ever grew on pear-tree’ (HGLM, 133).

  5-8. Odours that rise…celery. Besides conveying sharp ‘odours’ in sharp sounds, onomatopoeia tracks the kinetic interchange between human energy and the natural world: ‘wounds’ / ‘goutweed’, ‘spade’ / ‘raspberry’.

  10-12. a bonfire
burns…all to sweetness turns: ‘the scent of the dying year is pungent as smoke and sweet as flowers’ (SC, 44). ‘All’ could be both object and subject of ‘turns’.

  13-16. It is enough…Autumn mirth: ‘empurpled evenings before frost when the robin sings passionate and shrill and from the garden earth float the smells of a hundred roots with messages of the dark world’ (SC, 274). Other phrases from this passage will be recycled in October. As in Sowing (‘the far / Owl’s chuckling first soft cry’), birdsong is an aesthetic marker.

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 6 root [LP] roots [M1, BL] Note: in l.6 two singular nouns make the relation between ‘root’ and ‘tree’ more conceptually and rhythmically coherent. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 removes the brackets. See Note on Text.

  Lovers (80)

  5 April 1915

  Lovers, including the irony of ‘He has not got a gun…’, and In Memoriam(Easter, 1915) prepare for the ‘lovers’ who ‘disappear into the wood’ in As the team’s head-brass.

  9. ‘What a thing it is, this picking may’. ‘What a thing it is’ was a favourite expression of Thomas’s Wiltshire friend David Uzzell (see general note to Lob, 213). Uzzell’s ‘extraordinary freedom’ educated the adolescent Thomas in sexual matters: ‘he was the first man old enough to be my grandfather with whom I was on thoroughly good easy terms. He did not hide anything or invent a moral code for my benefit…he shook his head solemnly as he saw the once decent middle-aged gaffer from the works going up the canal-side with an obvious loose woman and later on emerging from the ash copse… At first I supposed him to be a wicked old man until I came to believe that all men were radically like him but most of them inferior in honesty. He was not in the least unseemly or obtrusive, but grave and roused very rarely to his Shakespearian laughter and the words, “Well, well, what a thing it is!”’ (CET, 131-2). When Edward and Helen were secretly ‘lovers’, Uzzell let them stay in his Wiltshire cottage. Uzzell’s voice seems to have licensed Thomas’s most openly and happily sexual poem. His characteristic phrase marks genial assent, whether from the tolerant ‘George’ or some more mysterious source, to the erotic drives associated with ‘picking may’.

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: AANP, LP.

  In Memoriam (Easter, 1915) (80)

  6 April 1915

  Like A Private, this is no orthodox war memorial. An unexpected presence points to an absence. Insofar as the ‘flowers left thick at nightfall’ represent casualties, Wilfred Owen’s rebuke in ‘Insensibility’ (‘they are troops who fade, not flowers / For poets’ tearful fooling’) does not apply. If Thomas’s woodland flowers are partly a wreath and partly a metaphor, they primarily mark a socioecological rupture: the loss of pre-war customs and futures. The dead may be ‘far from home’, but ‘home’ is also far from itself. The syntax of the last two lines prevents easy rhythmical or emotional resolution. R. George Thomas notes that BL’s ‘long gap between them and and [suggests] a significant pause before the final phrase is read’ (CP1978, 172). See note on Thomas’s short poems (284).

  Ms: BL. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: Easter, Easter

  Head and Bottle (81)

  14 April 1915

  This unsettling parable, which depends on a surreally disembodied ‘head’, features another of Thomas’s doubled pairs. The drinker and ‘I’ stake out an implied choice – which is ultimately no choice – between voluntary oblivion and inevitable death. The drinker’s suspended animation, in what could be either farmyard or graveyard, shuts down the faculties that define life. Yet his state appears more seductive than natural decline, tracked by the asset-stripping assonances ‘lose…lose…alyssum…bees’ hum…beeless flowers’: ‘it had early been observed, as by the Chinese Chuang Tzu, that a drunken man who falls out of a cart does not die: “His spirit is in a condition of security. He is not conscious of riding in the cart; neither is he conscious of falling out of it. Ideas of life, death, fear, etc., cannot penetrate his breast; and so he does not suffer from contact with objective existence”’ (‘Ecstasy’, unpublished essay, BC). Thomas counterpoints entropy and suspension by adapting the limping couplet, also used in After Rain.

  1. alyssum. ‘Sweet Alyssum’ is a four-petalled white garden flower, also a garden escape, which grows in clusters and has a honey-like scent that attracts bees. ‘“Snow on the mountains”, Alyssum Saxatile, a fleecy show in cottage-gardens’ (TWL, 229).

  Ms: BL. Published text: P.

  Home (81)

  17 April 1915

  See Home (64), and notes. Thomas’s most affirmative ‘home’ poem (‘’Twas home’) is set in Steep. On 12 April he had written: ‘Evening of misty stillness after drizzly day – last thrushes on oaks – then man goes by a dark white cottage front to thatched wood lodge and presently began sawing and birds are all still’ (FNB80). Considered as epiphany, Home reverses the centrifugal structures of Adlestrop: birdsong dies into ‘silence’; each self-contained stanza, with its apt mix of no rhyme and full rhyme, spirals inwards towards the two-stress final line and a ‘point of home’ (see note, 177). At one level, like Adlestrop, the poem enacts the discovery of its own aesthetic bearings: ‘all/That silence said’. ‘Eve’ (l.8) suggests a beginning as much as the end of day.

  4-6. one nationality…One memory. These lines are succinctly radical. At a time when oneness in, and the oneness of, ‘nationality’ and ‘memory’ was propagandised, Thomas gives the words local and ecological ‘meaning’.

  10-11. familiar…and strange too. Cf. Good-night, lines 5-8 (where ‘welcome’ also occurs); Words, lines 23-7; and see note (245).

  20-4. A labourer…silence said. Smith stresses the communal dimension of ‘home’ in this poem, which ends with ‘the sound of human labour’: ‘If silence speaks, it is no longer a threat to the isolated self, but is rendered harmless, even comforting, by a community of labour within which solidarity can be rediscovered’ (SS, 89-90). The speaker’s solidarity with birds also makes him ‘an inhabitant of the earth’ (see note, 161). The poem absorbs birdsong and sawing into its own sound-system. Jonathan Bate notes that the sawing implies localised ‘dwelling’: ‘“The sound of sawing” is not that of a sawmill, of mass consumption and destruction…“Sawing” is also a word for thrush song; and a thrush, like a labourer, takes wood to make its dwelling’ (Bate, The Song of the Earth [London: Picador, 2000], 275-6).

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 13 oaktop oak top 21 weariness, weariness Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [MET] rather than LP. Note on title: Title is given in BL.

  Health (82)

  18 April 1915

  ‘The best and worst of sickness is to think how glorious health is or [?]might / must be. – glorious ambitious feeling on April 18 when Butser [Hill] was but a great jump away over hollow land early in morning and sky all blue but one white cloud’ (FNB80). The proximity here of ‘glorious / health / ambitious’ links Ambition, Health and The Glory: all early morning poems that measure the distance between desire and fulfilment, aspiration and achievement. This provides a basis for dialectics between different selves, and between versions of the mind’s relation to the world. On 28 April Thomas told Eleanor Farjeon: ‘I was rather ill for 4 days with a chill…a chill and a boil together’ (EF, 31). His tendency to small ailments, fatigue and boils supports the surmise that he had ‘an incipient diabetic condition’ (RGT, 243). But, partly owing to his psychological problems, Thomas conceived ‘health’ as more than physical well-being: ‘I have long thought that I should recognise happiness could I ever achieve it. It would be health, or at least unthwarted intensity of sensual and mental life, in the midst of beautiful or astonishing things which should give that life full play and banish expectation and recollection’ (HE, 91). A later passage prefigures The Glory as well as Health:

  The sun has been up for an hour without impediment, but the meadows are rough silver under a mist after last night’s frost. The greens in cottage
gardens are of a bright, cold hue between blue and grey, which is fitter for the armour of heaven, or the landscape of some strong mystic, than for one who loathes to leave his bed. The blackbirds are scattering the frost, and they live in glittering little hazes while they flutter in the grass.

  But the sky is of an eager, luminous pale blue that speaks of health and impetuousness and success. Across it, low down, lie pure white clouds, preserving, though motionless, many torn and tumultuous forms; they have sharp edges against the blue and invade it with daggers of the same white; they are as vivid in their place in that eager sky as yews on a pale, bright lawn, or as lightning in blue night. If pure and hale intelligence could be visibly expressed, it would be like that. The eyes of the wayfarer at once either dilate in an effort for a moment at least to be equal in beauty with the white and blue, clear sky, or they grow dim with dejection at the impossibility. The brain also dilates and takes deep breaths of life, and casts out stale thought and coddled emotion. It scorns afterthought as the winds are flouting the penitent half moon. (‘The Pride of the Morning’, HE, 135)