The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  Thomas copied into a ‘Golden Book’ of literary touchstones, which he began compiling in 1901, Sir William Temple’s reflections on ‘Health and long life’. Temple links ‘health, peace, and fair weather’: ‘health in the body is like peace in the state, and serenity in the air: the Sun, in our climate, at least, has something so reviving, that a fair day is a kind of sensual pleasure, and of all others the most innocent’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Don. e. 10). Thomas’s large concept of ‘health’ also owes much to Richard Jefferies, who is ‘on the side of health, of beauty, of strength, of truth’, and who presents Nature as ‘a great flood of physical and spiritual sanity’ (RJ, 297). Thomas read Nietzsche when working on his Jefferies biography: ‘Isn’t Nietzsche magnificent? & so necessary these days? Yet he damns me to deeper perdition than I had yet bestowed myself’; ‘Nietzsche will have to come in later. The Genealogy of Morals is a very great book. But I kick at his too completely aristocratic view’ (LGB, 152, 154). Discussing Jefferies’s The Story of My Heart, Thomas says: ‘This dream of a master-mind and his regret over the death of Julius Caesar and Augustus recall [Nietzsche’s] words: “This man of the future who will redeem us from the old ideal…as also from what had to grow out of this ideal;…this bell of noonday and the great decision which restores freedom to the will, which restores to the earth its goal and to man his hope…he must come some day”’ (RJ, 189). In proclaiming creativity, the life-force, the will-to-power, and a future Übermensch, Nietzsche was reacting against personal and cultural ‘sickness’. Thomas prefers Jefferies to Nietzsche because he ‘would not have made the mistake of so admiring the unfettered great man’s prowess as not to see the beauty of the conquered and all the other forms of life which the powerful would destroy if they might’ (RJ, 189). Health can be read as a dialogue between Nietzschean principles and resistance to them. It sits between Ambition (where a fantasy of ‘omnipotence’ is undercut) and The Glory (where it never gets off the ground).

  The surprisingly Nietzschean element in Health is matched by the poem’s formal surprise. For once, perhaps to make visionary ‘leaps’, Thomas employs free verse – a variety somewhere between Whitman and Pound. The sections (three to thirteen lines) and lines (four to sixteen syllables), into which he divides the poem, have different rhythms as well as lengths. Yet sound and sense unite to hold line and poem together, as in the repetition of key words, often at the end of end-stopped lines.

  13. what blue and what white is. ‘The sky seems to belong to this land, the sky of purest blue and clouds that are moulded like the Downs themselves but of snow and sun’ (SC, 35).

  17-18. Wiltshire…Wales: significant horizons of ‘desire’.

  29-34. With health…sunlight upon dew. In The Icknield Way one of Thomas’s personae thrills to the sound of a woman singing: ‘Oh, for a horse to ride furiously, for a ship to sail, for the wings of an eagle, for the lance of a warrior or a standard streaming to conquest, for a man’s strength to dare and endure, for a woman’s beauty to surrender…for a poet’s pen!’ (IW, 142). Later, Thomas imagines swifts ‘racing and screaming when the Danes harried this way a thousand years ago, and thus went they over the head of Dante in the streets of Florence. In the warriors and in the poet there was a life clearly and mightily akin to that in the bird’s throat and wing, but here all was grey, all was dead’ (IW, 168). ‘Warrior’ links Health with Ambition (l.6).

  31-2. Caesar, Shakespeare, Alcibiades, / Mazeppa, Leonardo, Michelangelo. Nietzsche names Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo among models for his Übermensch. In Yeats’s Nietzschean poem ‘Long-legged Fly’ (1937-8), Caesar, Michelangelo and Helen of Troy exemplify the utmost power of ‘mind’.

  32. Mazeppa: Ivan Stepanovich Mazep(p)a (1644?-1709), Hetman of the Cossacks in Ukraine under Russian imperial rule, which he eventually challenged. Byron’s poem Mazeppa draws on the legend that Mazeppa, when he ‘had no other gem nor wealth / Save nature’s gift of youth and health’, seduced a count’s wife, and the count had him tied to a wild horse. ‘Byron’s poetry without his life is not finished; but with it, it is like a statue by Michael Angelo or Rodin that is actually seen to grow out of the material. He was a man before he was a poet…There are finer poems than his “Mazeppa”, but the poet is the equal of that wild lover and of the great King who slept while the tale was told’ (SC, 111-12). If Byron is both poet and man of action, ‘Mazeppa’ is both fact and Romantic icon: he also inspired Pushkin’s epic poem Poltava, Tchaikovsky’s opera based on the poem, a painting by Géricault, a Liszt étude. Thomas, like Nietzsche and Yeats, is interested in the energies common to the creative artist, art itself, powerful men, and beautiful women.

  35-46. I could not be…four yards. Unlike achieved ‘health and…power’ (l.29), whether worldly or artistic, discontent keeps possibilities open. In suggesting that Nietzschean ‘mightiness’ has its blind spots, Thomas may imply the value of his own literary vantage-point.

  39. As the hand makes sparks from the fur of a cat. On 4 April Thomas had noted: ‘One of the prettiest Spring things is the wagtail running up and down the warm tiles twittering as if the sun made the song as one’s hand on a cat’s back makes sparks’ (FNB80). ‘I passed some examination in chemistry but, as with other things, cared nothing for it, except for doing as well as most at it. For a while I played with magnets and amber, and rubbed the cat’s fur in the dark’ (CET, 83).

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 22 still be be still [?misprint] Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 removes the brackets. See Note on Text.

  The Huxter (83)

  20 April 1915

  Here a countryman, a bottle, and a cart combine more healthily than in Head and Bottle. They also put paid to dreams of the Übermensch. A prose prototype for the ‘huxter’ (huckster, seller of cheap goods) is a ‘carter’: ‘Though a slight man he had broad shoulders and arms that hung down well away from his body, and this, with his bowed stiff legs, gave him a look of immense strength and stability: to this day it is hard to imagine that such a man could die…he did nothing but work, except that once a week he went into the town with his wife, drank a pint of ale with her, and helped her to carry back the week’s provisions’ (HGLM, 142-3). The poem relishes a less respectable figure, itinerant and carnivalesque. Like Jack Noman in May 23 and the lovers in Lovers, the huxter personifies May-time. Thomas aptly reverts, as in his next poem, to a folksong model.

  2. a plentiful lack. Hamlet teases Polonius by pretending to rebuke a satirist who says that old men ‘have a plentiful lack of wit’ (Hamlet II, ii).

  9. And they laugh as down the lane they bump. Praising the vivid country characters in Jefferies’s Amateur Poacher, Thomas writes: ‘The great heavy-laden wagon of life goes rocking down the lanes, and the artist gathers up some of the wisps from the elm trees when it has passed’ (RJ, 123).

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: P.

  She dotes (84)

  21 April 1915

  Thomas plays on the double meaning of ‘dotes’. He may still have Hamlet in mind. Discussing ‘those mad maids and their songs that are so characteristic of English poetry’, he says: ‘Such are Ophelia, Wordsworth’s Ruth, and Herrick’s Mad Maid…These maids…are always love-lorn and always flower-lovers wandering in the free air’ (FIP, 87-8). She dotes echoes the ‘old tunes’ sung by Ophelia after Polonius’s death: ‘They bore him barefaced on the bier…/ And on his grave rained many a tear’; ‘And will he not come again? / No, no, he is dead, /Go to thy death-bed, /He never will come again’. Thomas makes birds (and their songs), rather than flowers, the focus of obsessive grief and its search for meaning.

  8-10. childishness…carelessness…loverless. This consonantal rhyme/refrain mimetically suggests the woman’s obsession and frustration (‘woodpecker’ is the only other tri-syllabic word in the poem).

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

  So
ng (84)

  22 April 1915

  CP1978 prints a first stanza not cancelled in M1 or BL:

  She is beautiful

  With happiness invincible:

  If cruel she be

  It is the [M1 She has a] hawk’s proud innocent cruelty.

  It seems likely that Thomas dropped the stanza, which does not appear in AANP. Its tone, rhythm, vocabulary, and lack of refrain detach it from what follows. In the remaining quatrains, song conventions (of the court rather than the folk) depersonalise emotion as Thomas again links love, death and birdsong. He wrote the poem while ‘under a thick cloud of [his life of] Marlborough’. Sending it to Eleanor Farjeon, Thomas calls it ‘a sort of a song’ and asks: ‘Does it make you larf?’ (EF, 132). The question may imply that Farjeon, herself in love with Thomas, will realise that the poem alludes to some secret passion. See note on Thomas’s love poems (279).

  6. the cuckoo spoils his tune: proverbial, and perhaps reflexive. In June, as Thomas would have known, the male cuckoo ceases to sing his mating song, and the female’s different call is heard.

  8. And yet she says she loves me till she dies. The song behind Song is an Elizabethan favourite of Thomas’s: ‘There is a Lady sweet and kind, /Was never face so pleased my mind, / I did but see her passing by / And yet I love her till I die’ (Anon.).

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

  A Cat (85)

  24 April 1915

  Bird-murder is calculated to attract Thomas’s deepest ‘loathing’, yet he accords the cat ambiguous respect and even some compassion (lines 2-4). A line in M1 tells us that the speaker ‘From a stranger’s dog once saved this pest’. The human who drowns her kittens belongs less excusably to the same murderous scheme of things. ‘God gave her rest’, one of the barbed references to ‘God’ in Thomas’s poetry (see note, 274), questions Christian constructs more than it deplores animal Nature. Cf. the hawk’s ‘cruelty’ in the cancelled stanza (above) of Song.

  10. One speckle on a thrush’s breast: ‘the hedges are full of strong young thrushes which there is no one to frighten – is there any prettier dress than the speckled feathers of their breasts and the cape of brown over their shoulders and backs, as they stir the dew in May?’ (SC, 103). Later in the same passage Thomas condemns ‘the spirit of one who, having been disturbed while shaving by a favourite cat in the midst of her lovers and behaving after the manner of her kind, gives orders during the long mid-day meal that she shall be drowned forthwith, or – no – tomorrow, which is Monday’ (SC, 105).

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

  Melancholy (85)

  25 April 1915

  Since ‘melancholy’ is one of Thomas’s names for his neurosis, he usually updates its meaning (see notes on The Other, 161; October, 259). Yet the hexameter couplets of this near-sonnet linger over Romantic melancholy – which includes lingering and malingering – especially as patented by Keats:

  Love for vanished, inaccessible, inhuman things, almost for death itself – regret – and the consolations offered by the intensity which makes pleasure and pain so much alike – are the principal moods of these poems… The ‘Ode on Melancholy’ is one of the central poems of this period, admitting, as it does so fully, and celebrating, the relation between melancholy and certain still pleasures. Nowhere is the connoisseurship of the quiet, withdrawn spectator so extremely and remorselessly put. The ‘rich anger’ of the mistress is to be a precious, delicious object; her ‘peerless eyes’ are to be devoured as roses. Richer juice could not be extracted from poison-flowers. (K, 51-4)

  In Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’, ‘the melancholy fit shall fall / Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud’. Thomas also takes ‘rave’ and ‘soft’ from the ‘Ode’ (‘Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, / Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave’); ‘fever’ and ‘despair’ from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’; ‘wild’ and ‘strange’ from ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. Wordsworth contributes ‘a distant cuckoo’ to the poem; Coleridge, the ‘dulcimer’ of ‘Kubla Khan’. Thus the speaker’s neo-Romanticism is highly self-conscious, as is his yielding to “reverie” (in the quotation above, Thomas reads Keats in fin-de-siècle terms). His condition recalls the decadent mood of Thomas’s early prose, perhaps his intermittent opium-habit. In 1902 Thomas was ‘so much in sympathy’ with De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and the Celtic Twilight Yeats that they seemed ‘to belong to my own experience’ (LGB, 40).

  In the last five lines of Melancholy, spatial and temporal shuttles between ‘distant’, ‘near’, and ‘remote’ enact a disturbing recession from ‘history’. The syntax opens out to confirm a paradoxically ‘withdrawn’ state: solitude as solipsism. This does not help the symptoms implied by ‘raved’, ‘fever’, ‘fear’, ‘despair’, ‘wild’ and ‘foes’. For Kirkham, Melancholy is ‘one of [Thomas’s] very few unsatisfactory poems’, because it ‘induces and condones more than it presents and analyses the “strange sweetness” of abandoning oneself to despair’ (MK, 36). Thomas certainly figures more as patient than analyst. But, as Kirkham recognises, there is still a gap between the poem’s attitude and the speaker’s surrender to narcotic ‘poison-flowers’. His deliberate embrace of melancholy is itself placed as symptomatic.

  3-4. solitude…rude: words also rhymed in The Other and Home (64).

  6-7. What I desired I knew not…I knew. This pivotal sentence almost parodies (again consciously, perhaps) Thomas’s capacity to block all hopeful exits. It revisits the problem of ‘desire’ as posed in The Other (lines 33-7), and echoes that poem’s syntactical twists.

  8. wild air: a phrase that also occurs in The Source and The Sheiling.

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: P.

  Tonight (86)

  30 April 1915

  ‘Now it is when Kate comes to me – ’ (among notes that point towards April, FNB80). In M1 and BL this song-like lovers’ duet begins: ‘Margaret, you know at night’. Thomas may simply have made a mistake when transcribing the poem, a mistake that reflects some earlier stage in its composition: in M1 l.7 originally read: ‘Come soon, my heart, tonight’. Yet Tonight appears to dramatise forbidden love, whether heterosexual or homosexual. The contrapuntal stanzas contrast an open, “natural” relationship (‘the true sun above a summer valley’) with one hidden from the world (‘electric light’). The larks and ‘ask no light’ resolve the opposition.

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 7 Kate: Kate;

  April (86)

  2 May 1915

  For Thomas’s youthful love poem set in ‘over-sweet’ April, see note on No one so much as you (278). ‘Emily’ is a mystery, though see note on his love poetry (279). The notebook jotting quoted above with reference to Tonight (‘Now it is when Kate comes to me’) occurs amid notes for April, beginning: ‘As we met, the nightingale sang /As we loved – /As we parted – the same’ (FNB80). Read as a sequence, Song, Melancholy, Tonight and April, all of which include bird-call mood-music, may encode some erotic narrative. Thomas wrote to Frost on 3 May: ‘Two pairs of nightingales have come to us. One sings in our back hedge nearly all day & night…I hope the gods don’t think I’m the sort of poet who will be content with a nightingale, though. You don’t think they could have made that mistake do you? What does it mean?…Am I really ripe for being all round content, or what?…Are the children at school now? Or are you still “neglecting” them? God bless them all. By the way, there was a beautiful return of sun yesterday after a misty moisty morning, & everything smelt wet & warm & cuckoos called, & I found myself with nothing to say but “God bless it”. I laughed a little as I came over the field, thinking about the “it” in “God bless it”’ (RFET, 51-2). Cooke thinks that Thomas might have ‘suppressed’ April (WC, 248). Scannell finds the poem ‘almost maudlin in its sentimentality’, although partially redeemed by �
�an essential innocence of feeling’ (VS, 29).

  1. The sweetest thing. The problem with April, and perhaps with a soft spot in Thomas’s poetry, hinges on the adjective in the first line of each stanza. ‘Sweet’ is one of the recurrent words (like ‘joy’, ‘pain’, ‘strange’, ‘tears’, ‘mirth’) that reflect his effort to evoke basic feelings in basic English. Its appearances so far include: ‘Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,/With no meaning, than this bitter one’ (Old Man); ‘The sailors’ song of merry loving /With dusk and sea-gull’s mewing /Mixed sweet’ (An Old Song II); ‘an April morning, stirring and sweet / And warm’ (Tears); ‘This is a dream of Winter, sweet as Spring’ (Swedes); ‘that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet’ (The Unknown Bird); ‘just /As sweet and dry was the ground / As tobacco-dust’ (Sowing); ‘sweet as any nut’ (Lob); most recently and self-consciously, ‘sweeten the strange sweetness’ (Melancholy). Ahead lie: ‘Strange and sweet / Equally’, ‘Make me content /With some sweetness / From Wales’ (Words); ‘the sweet last-left damsons’ (There’s nothing like the sun); ‘The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet’ (Early one morning); ‘a song / As sweet as a blackbird’s, and as long’ (If I were to own); ‘All pleasure and all trouble, / Although most sweet or bitter’ (Lights Out); and, above all, the celebrated climax of Tall Nettles: ‘I like the dust on the nettles, never lost / Except to prove the sweetness of a shower’.

  ‘Sweet’ transfers between physical sensations, emotional states and aesthetic responses. The word works best when contrary qualities or images (‘bitter’, ‘Winter’, ‘dry…dust’, ‘strange’, ‘dead’) avert over-sweetness. The letter quoted above shows Thomas to be wary of ‘all round content’: a condition implicitly bad for poetry, like the nightingales that do get into the poem along with further sweetish words (‘smile’, ‘God bless’, ‘rapture’, ‘lovelier’).