The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  9-10. When earth’s breath…richest oven’s. ‘A richness, now first felt, in the atmosphere, as if the sun drew fragrances from the earth’ (‘Diary’, 21 March 1896, TWL, 231).

  10. loudly rings ‘cuckoo’: an echo of Thomas’s favourite medieval lyric, with which he ended The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air: ‘Sumer is icumen in, / Lhude sing cuccu!’

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 11 ‘tsoo, troo, troo, troo’: ‘tsoo, troo, tsoo, troo’; [LP has ‘tsoo, tsoo, tsoo, tsoo’:] Note: R. George Thomas speculates that the LP editors ‘misread’ l.11 in BL [CP1978, 196]. That seems probable – ‘sharply’ does not fit a continuous ‘tsoo’ – but the third word in M1 and BL may also be ‘troo’. This sound is the source of the link between the nightingale’s song and the legend of Tereus and Philomela. John Clare’s transcription of the song includes: ‘tee rew tee rew tee rew’ [ed. Alice Oswald, The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), 36]. Note on title: Title is given in BL.

  The Glory (87)

  ? early May 1915

  The Glory, undated, precedes July in M1, and a page is cut from BL between the revised version of Two Pewits (4 May) and July (7 May). On 2 May Thomas noted: ‘Soft raindrops pit the clean pale dust’ (FNB80, cf. l.15). Other notes that prefigure Tonight, April, The Glory, July and Two Houses occur together in FNB80 between 18 April and 23 May (see CP1978, 396). The Glory has thematic links with Ambition and Health. The following passage continues Thomas’s meditation on ‘happiness’, quoted with reference to Health (227):

  I never achieved [happiness], and am fated to be almost happy in many different circumstances, and on account of my forethought to be contemptuous or even disgusted at what the beneficent designs of chance have brought…[for example] polluting, by the notice of some trivial accident, the remembrance of past things, both bitter and sweet, in the company of an old friend…Also, the flaw in my happiness which wastes it to a pleasure is in the manner of my looking back at it when it is past. It is as if I had made a great joyous leap over a hedge, and then had looked back and seen that the hedge was but four feet high and not dangerous. Is it perhaps true that those are never happy who know what happiness is? (HE, 91-2)

  With its quasi-religious keyword, The Glory (like Health) may refer to the mystical ideals of Richard Jefferies: ideals that inspired Thomas but which he usually represents as beyond his scope. Thomas says of Jefferies’s The Story of My Heart (1883): ‘He thinks of nature as supplying men with strength and desire and means for soul life. He has rediscovered the sources of joy in nature, and foresees that what has fed his lonely ecstasy in the downs will distribute the same force and balm among the cities of men below. They are, indeed, perennial sources, but his passionate love of the beautiful and joyous fills him with longing for the day when they shall be universal too’ (RJ, 187). In Chapter 5 of The Story of My Heart Jefferies writes: ‘I drank the beauty of the morning; I was exalted. When it ceased I did wish for some increase or enlargement of my existence to correspond with the largeness of feeling I had momentarily enjoyed.’ Jefferies’s ‘ecstasy’ is in the Romantic tradition. The Glory revisits Romanticism’s original ‘invitation’ to internalise the ‘sublimity’ of Nature: the set of ideas that lies behind the emotions aroused by similar morning landscapes in Ambition and Health. On one level, the poem dramatises a clash between Romantic idealism and literary modernity.

  The speaker ponders Romantic precepts for life (‘be’) and art (‘do’) figured by ‘the lovely of motion, shape, and hue’: a phrase that spans Nature and artistic creation. Aesthetics – ‘beauty’ – may take precedence over ‘happiness’, although each word occurs four times. Thus The Glory begins with Thomas also revisiting earlier poems: Melancholy and April (cuckoo), Beauty (dove), Adlestrop (‘White clouds ranged even and fair as new-mown hay’), and Tears (‘heat…stir’). He pulls these images towards an arena seemingly prepared for a grand Romantic encounter between subjectivity and the phenomenal world: ‘the sublime vacancy / Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart’. But ‘vacancy’ already sabotages the ‘sublime’. It anticipates the different aesthetic model (not wholly negative) implied by the speaker’s unresolved self-interrogation: his five questions might be scenarios for other poems. All these dialectics are mediated by sonnet structure. The Glory is a double sonnet with unpredictable rhymes and ‘turns’. ‘Start’ ends the first sonnet.

  15. And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops. At the opposite pole from ‘sublime vacancy’, this monosyllabic, onomatopoeic line aptly ‘embodies’ the speaker’s recasting of his relation to ‘beauty’ as a step-by-step empirical quest.

  19-20. Or must I be content with discontent / As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings? Kirkham calls this ‘a comparison that effectively “clips the wings” of human aspiration, since the ability to fly, especially the climbing and darting flight of these birds, is a natural image for freedom from limits’ (MK, 101). However, the simile could work the other way: by raising the status of ‘discontent’.

  21-2. And shall I ask…once more / What beauty is. Cf. Beauty, and: ‘I am not sure that I consider anything in nature (on a grand scale) beautiful. Beauty is it seems to me inferior to the sublime which is irregular, worn, or finer in intention than execution. “Lycidas” is beautiful. “Ode to West Wind” not. I find most people call “beautiful” what I call “pleasant”…but what is beauty. I don’t find answer in Burke, or Ruskin’ (Diary, 27 April 1901, NLW).

  26. fast pent: spiritually imprisoned. The phrase echoes Keats’s sonnet beginning ‘To one who has been long in city pent’, which also includes the lines: ‘Who is more happy, when, with heart’s content, / Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair / Of wavy grass…’

  28. I cannot bite the day to the core. This seeming inconclusiveness, like the sense that ‘beauty’ and ‘happiness’ are no longer absolute, marks a shift in aesthetic horizons. ‘It is interesting to note that although [Thomas] cannot “bite the day to the core”, the language and the image that he uses to tell us this have a strength and a sharpness which show at least that he knows fully what “biting” means and involves’ (HC, 201).

  Ms: M1. Published text: P.

  July (88)

  7 May 1915

  Thomas associated rivers and lakes with reverie and psychic harmony: ‘The hazy sky, striving to be blue, was reflected as purple in the waters. There, too, sunken and motionless, lay amber willow leaves…Between the sailing leaves, against the false sky, hung the willow shadows’ (RAP, 25); ‘The morning was already hot…At the river I took a dinghy and sculled for nearly two hours…Hardly a thought or memory shaped itself. Nevertheless, I was conscious of that blest lucidity, that physical well-being of the brain, “like the head of a mountain in blue air and sunshine”, which is so rarely achieved except in youth’ (‘On the Evenlode’, HS, 166); ‘There is nothing like the solitude of a solitary lake in early morning, when one is in deep still water’ (RFET, 145).

  Like Two Pewits, July calls attention to the balancing-act of form. It is as if the mirrored stanzas, the ‘doubled’ images and words (including the word ‘image’) and the self-enclosed rhyme-scheme (ABABBA) extravert the artistic processes behind the poem. They establish a fine equilibrium between subjectivity and Nature, between control (‘stirs…break’) and unconscious absorption (‘drowse’). Cf. Yeats’s ‘A Long-legged Fly’: ‘Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence’. July dissolves tensions active in The Glory, from which it repeats ‘clouds’, ‘stirs’, ‘heat’, ‘sky’ and ‘content’. ‘Naught moves’ is a positive variation on ‘naught to travel to’ at the end of The Glory.

  12. still: at once adjective and adverb.

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: LP. Note on title: Title is given in BL.

  The Chalk-Pit (88)

  8 May 1915

  For Thomas’s fascination with pits and hollows, see general note to The Combe (1
70). ‘The chalk of Froxfield and Steep was extensively used in the past to lighten the clay soils, and there are at least four or five large chalk pits… The one in “The Chalk-Pit”… is most likely that at the foot of Wheatham Hill. Along its rim an ancient road climbs, probably pre-Roman, making for Old Litten Lane and Week Green’ (WW, 28). Thomas begins his essay ‘Chalk Pits’: ‘It is sometimes consoling to remember how much of the pleasantness of English country is due to men, by chance or design…among the works of men that rapidly become works of Nature, and can be admired without misanthropy, are the chalk and marl pits’ (LS, 27-8). Among ‘lesser’ pits, he distinguishes two types: the pit scooped from a hillside and the ‘hollow pit’ that can become a dell:

  One or two of the best of them are half-way between the hollow pit and the hill-side scoop. One in particular, a vast one, lies under a steep road which bends round it, and has to protect its passengers by posts and rails above the perpendicular. At the upper side it is precipitous, but it has a level floor, and the old entrance below is by a very gradual descent. It is very old, and some of the trees, which are now only butts, must have been two centuries old when they were felled. It is big enough for the Romany Rye to have fought there with the Flaming Tinman. But in [George] Borrow’s days it had more trees in it. Now it has about a score of tall ash trees only, ivy covered, and almost branchless, rising up out of it above the level of the road. Except at midsummer, only the tops of the ash trees catch the sunlight. The rest is dark and wild, and somehow cruel. The woodmen looked tiny and dark, as if working for a punishment, when they were felling some of the trees below. That hundred yards or so of road running round the edge of the ancient pit is as fascinating as any other of similar length in England. From the rails above you could well watch the Romany Rye and the Flaming Tinman and fair-haired Isopel. But except the woodmen and the horses drawing out the timber, no one visits it. It is too gloomy. This is no vineyard, unless for growing the ruby grape of Proserpine, the nightshade. Though roofed with the sky, it has the effect of a cave, an entrance to the underworld. (LS, 32-3)

  As a poetic dialogue, The Chalk-Pit has structural links with Up in the Wind and Wind and Mist; but the poem is also an “eclogue” in the further sense that it debates aesthetic questions. The speakers stake out alternative ways of reading (and writing) the human imprint on landscape. The first speaker (A) fits the scene into ready-made slots: ‘amphitheatre’, ‘tragical’, ‘tale’, ‘play’. The second speaker (B) ‘should prefer the truth / Or nothing’. While it is tempting to see A as Thomas the fanciful prose-writer (cf. the passage quoted above), B as Thomas the empirical, plain-speaking poet, their dialectics may be more complex. In The Isle of Wight, in a passage that also underlies Up in the Wind, Thomas already broaches issues raised by the poem. He distributes different attitudes among ‘two or three’ friends contemplating ‘a solitary yew…ruinous in outline, tortured and bleak [that] added a wild and tragic note to the gentle slopes and masses’:

  ‘It is unfair of that old tree to air its misery in such a place,’ said one, ‘but it is not the first time that any of us, I dare say, has seen a tree or a rock play such tricks. Sometimes one finds a landscape that is changed in this way so as to become for ever after the legitimate setting for some poem or romance. Ruskin, you may remember, regarded it as something curious and precious…that his wandering over England took him to places where “his romance was always ratified to him by the seal of locality – and every charm of locality spiritualised by the glow and the passion of romance”. We have to be fortunate to have any such experience; for we must come early to the scene, and the hour and every circumstance must conspire if we are not to fail utterly to connect the visible scene with its imagined inhabitants. Most of us have more often constructed our own setting for tales without any effort and usually by accident…’ ‘Some books leave the mind with a picture so clear and singular that we are sure to recognise it if ever we meet it on our travels…’ ‘Yes; and there are other places which immediately strike us as fit scenes for some tragic or comic episode out of the common. I know a little white inn standing far back from the road, behind a double row of noble elms…[for the continuation of this passage see notes on Up in the Wind, 145]. ‘I don’t know why you should want to fit a story to a scene like that. I am quite willing to wait until the tragedy or comedy arrives, provided that my enquiries as to what may have happened already have been fruitless. Very likely you might learn some history for which your inn, and the trees, are the perfect arena. Try! You people have such loose fancies, and you make the world a jumble of books, and men, and Nature, like a pantomime. Still, I will grant you one scene that did move me exceedingly in something like the way you speak of…’ (IOW, 27-30)

  In the poem, B speaks for ‘waiting until the tragedy or comedy arrives’. He starts from observation, a name, the available data: ‘But see: they have fallen’; ‘It is called the Dell. /They have not dug chalk here for a century’; ‘I will ask’. Thomas’s third persona, the ‘man of forty’ recalled by B, obliquely backs up this perceptual caution: ‘The wren’s hole was an eye that looked at him / For recognition’. Here, too, B evokes not fictive ‘ghosts’ but actual people who disturb A’s ‘fancies’. The last word, the genuine ‘mystery’, is his. Yet A and B may merge in lines 30-4, which reflect memory’s difficulty in separating experience from representation, and both from subjectivity. Perhaps A voices the extent to which Thomas’s poetry remains ‘haunted’ by Romantic possibilities. He works up the curiosity on which B’s mystery depends.

  10. the smack that is like an echo. ‘Men felling trees and the sound of axe is like an echo because it comes after the stroke’ (1 January 1915, FNB80). ‘Echo’ echoes ‘smack’, which echoes ‘axe’.

  43-50. A man of forty…A girl of twenty…glinting eyes. R. George Thomas writes: ‘These lines are based on memories of [Thomas’s] open-air courtship of Helen Noble’ (CP1978, 397). But this squares neither with the age-gap nor with A’s disapproval of ‘free thought, free love’. The lines more probably encode Thomas’s bitterness about his aborted relationship with Hope Webb (see note on The Unknown, 279; HT, 120-1; RGT, 144-7). In January 1908, while working on Richard Jefferies at Minsmere in Suffolk, he ‘got very fond of a girl of 17 with two long plaits of dark brown hair & the richest grey eyes, very wild & shy’; ‘I dimly foresee a guttering candle…Yet you are partly right when you propose the consolation of an unassailable vision of her’; ‘the night before I left Minsmere I was pedantically asked not to go on writing to the girl who was away at school…So there is a more unhappy raw truncation’ (LGB, 156-61). In fact Hope was eighteen (ETFN 26 [February, 1992], 12). It seems that this history, these ‘ghosts’, invaded the scenario as originally conceived, to become the ‘tragical’ experience that really haunts the chalk-pit as poem (see textual note).

  44. orts and crosses: noughts (oughts) and crosses. ‘40 years had crisscrossed his cheeks with pain and pleasure’ (FNB80, after 18 April).

  56-8. imperfect friends, we men / And trees…mystery’. Instead of co-opting trees for an anthropomorphic drama, B invokes the partly problematic eco-history which connects ‘men / And trees’. Yet ‘mystery’ invests this nexus with quasi-religious feeling: ‘I cannot walk under trees without a vague powerful feeling of reverence. Calmly persuasive, they ask me to bow my head to the unknown god. In the evening, especially, when the main vocation of sight is to suggest what eyes cannot see, the spacious and fragrant shadow of oak or pine is a temple which seems to contain the very power for whose worship it is spread’ (HS, 183). ‘What they worshipped at Avebury temple, no one knows, but the human mind is still fertile in fantasy and ferocity – if it no longer draws blood – when it worships within walls. To me the sycamores that gloom at the entrance to the temple are more divine’ (RJ, 8). Thomas mourned trees destroyed to make way for new suburbs: ‘The elms had come unconsciously to be part of the real religion of men in that neighbourhood’ (SC, 64). Another passage from The South Count
ry prefigures the tree symbolism in his poetry:

  I like trees for the cool evening voices of their many leaves, for their cloudy forms linked to earth by stately stems – for the pale lifting of the sycamore leaves in breezes and also their drooping, hushed and massed repose, for the myriad division of the light ash leaves – for their straight pillars and for the twisted branch work, for their still shade and their rippling or calm shimmering or dimly growing light, for the quicksilver drip of dawn, for their solemnity and their dancing, for all their sounds and motions – their slow-heaved sighs, their nocturnal murmurs, their fitful fingerings at thunder time, their swishing and tossing and hissing in violent rain, the roar of their congregations before the south-west wind when it seems that they must lift up the land and fly away with it, for their rustlings of welcome in harvest heat – for their kindliness and their serene remoteness and inhumanity, and especially the massiest of the trees that have also the glory of motion, the sycamores, which are the chief tree of Cornwall, as the beeches and yews are of the Downs, the oaks of the Weald, the elms of the Wiltshire vales. (SC, 168-9)

  Ms: M1, BL. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: title: The Chalk-Pit The Chalk Pit 2, 37 chalk-pit chalk pit 4,7 briar brier 17/18, 28/9, 52/3 stanza breaks in CP1978 Note: Lines 47-51 and 53-8 are present only in LP. BL and M1 end: ‘“You may know the breed [M1 sort].” / “Some literary fellow, I suppose. / I shall not mix my fancies up with him.”’ The first two stanza breaks introduced in CP1978 are detectable in BL, but LP [for which, given the added lines at the end, there must have been a further source] has no such breaks. Note on title: Title as given in BL is unhyphenated, but see note above re LP.