by Edna Longley
Fifty Faggots (90)
13 May 1915
Writing to Frost on 15 May, Thomas copied out Fifty Faggots and told him: ‘One of my reliefs in this week’s work was to write these lines founded on carrying up 50 bunts (short faggots of thin & thick brushwood mixed) & putting them against our hedge’. He asks of the lines: ‘Are they north of Boston only?’ (RFET, 53-4). In alluding, however humorously, to Frost’s collection North of Boston, the question betrays ‘anxiety of influence’. Yet it may also have a precise point. Fifty Faggots can be read as responding to Frost’s poem ‘The Wood-Pile’, with which it shares the verb ‘warm’ as well as a focal symbol for eco-historical relations between ‘men / And trees’ (see above). The poems conceive history from different angles, perhaps English and American. In ‘The Wood-Pile’ a ‘small bird’ leads the way to a ‘cord of maple’, ‘older sure than this year’s cutting, / Or even last year’s or the year’s before’. The speaker wonders why it should have been abandoned – possibly by ‘Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks’ – ‘To warm the frozen swamp as best it could /With the slow smokeless burning of decay’. This retrospective riddle envisages greater human ‘control’ (‘fresh tasks’) over Nature and events than does Fifty Faggots. And whereas Frost’s actors (speaker, bird, wood-pile builder) seem distinct from one another, Thomas – still hesitating between going to America and going to war – projects a collectively uncertain future. Linguistic variants track the mutations of a miniature eco-system (‘underwood’, ‘faggots’, ‘thicket’, prospective nesting-place or fire-lighters). On 15 August 1916, with the war not yet ‘ended’, he admitted to Frost: ‘My faggot pile is pretty nearly used up, but it wasn’t fair. We have been saving coal by wood fires out of doors, or it would have lasted the war out I believe’ (RFET, 145). The poem’s uncertainties are mediated by deviations from sonnet-form: assonance rather than rhyme, an unresolving seven-line sestet.
1. faggots: ‘bunts’ in letter to Frost.
3. Jenny Pinks’s Copse: ‘Pinks Copse is a Steep place name, at the top of Ridge Hanger’ (WW, 13). ‘[F]ortunately science cannot destroy the imagination which kindles…at the infinite variety of significance in names like…Palfrey Green, Happersnapper Hanger, Jenny Pink’s Copse’ (Thomas’s Introduction to Isaac Taylor, Words and Places [London: J.M. Dent, 1911], x).
14-15: in BL and letter to Frost: ‘Have ended that I know not more about/ And care not less for than robin or wren’.
Ms: BL. Published text: P.
Sedge-Warblers (90)
23 May 1915
The text printed in this edition (and in SP, AANP, LP) is cancelled in BL, and a revised version dated 24 May (here, SW2) apparently preferred. CP1978 / CP2004 prints both versions. Significant differences are noted below. That SP and AANP print the cancelled version gives it a priority that also seems warranted on aesthetic grounds. SW2 omits l.14. In reducing Sedge-Warblers to 28 lines, Thomas may have wanted to stress its structure as a double sonnet (like The Glory, with which it has other links), while also destabilising the first sonnet’s clinching couplet (‘water’/‘daughter’). But the original version does equally interesting things with sonnet-form: l.15 floats freely between the rhyme schemes of two sonnets. Hence, perhaps, Thomas’s vague answer to a query from Eleanor Farjeon: ‘I expect that line ending in pair [sic] was intended to rhyme with two lines higher up [i.e. “desire”]’ (EF, 146).
FNB80 contains the following entry for 23 May 1915: ‘beyond Warnford [in Hampshire]. Water crowfoot and marigolds iris leaf and clear swift combing water but no nymph only the sedgewarblers in willows more continuous than lark and clearer than sweetest voice singing sweetest words I know, though often grating or shrill and always jerky and spasmlike with rare sweet gentle iterations and 3 or 4 together or in turns’. This is followed by notes for a poem: ‘Long ago it would have borne a nymph/ – cloudless clear sail/Now it [?]drifts the chestnut petals from the distant park / She could / Love all day long and never hate or tire / the best of May / Buttercups brighter than brass / – soft’.
Sedge-Warblers is one of the poems quoted by James Fisher to support his view that ‘the major English bird poet of our century was Edward Thomas’ (The Shell Bird Book [London: Ebury Press and Michael Joseph, 1966], 208). Birdsong can have a wholly transcendental value in Thomas’s poetry, as when the haunting ‘notes’ of The Unknown Bird and the ‘pure thrush word’ in The Word symbolise the Muse or perhaps symbolism itself. But, as in Fifty Faggots, birds are also closely observed co-inhabitants of the earth. Between their Wordsworthian poles of ‘heaven’ and ‘home’, birds often stand in for the poet or – as in Two Pewits – provide aesthetic models. This is not just anthropomorphism. Thomas assumes (rightly) that birdsong, the most complex utterance by any other species, and the lyric poem have a common evolutionary origin. Here the sedge-warblers’ song re-attaches the speaker-as-poet to the earth, and mediates the aesthetic self-correction whereby he exchanges ‘desire’ for ‘wisdom’: a nostalgic ‘dream’ of ‘beauty’ for ‘clearer’ vision with utterance ‘to match’. Another portrait of the divided artist, Sedge-Warblers adjusts the mainly visual focus of The Chalk-Pit by moving from voyeuristic fantasy to sensory and imaginative balance. The speaker ‘looks into’ while ‘hearkening’: a verb repeated from The Glory. The sedge-warblers’ stripped-down song resolves some of the problems associated with ‘beauty’ in that poem, where one curative possibility is: ‘Hearkening to short-lived happy-seeming things’. ‘Hearken’ means more than ‘listen’.
3. any brook so radiant: ‘river of such radiance’ (SW2).
8. Child to the sun, a nymph whose soul unstained: ‘Child of the sun, whose happy soul unstained’ (SW2). ‘Nymph’ fits the classical-pagan (and erotic) character of the ‘dream’, and see next note.
8-10. nymph…immortal kin. This is the idiom of Thomas’s floweriest prose: ‘Nymph-like the brook brightens and curves its crystal flesh and waves its emerald hair under the bridges at field corners, where the brambles dip their blossoms, and the nightingale sings and the sedgewarbler has its nest. For it the lonely willows in the flat fields shed their yellow leaves most pensively, like maidens casting their bridal garments off’ (HE, 98-9).
10. A lover: ‘Lover’ (SW2).
12. poison. Cooke links ‘poison’ with Thomas’s remark, ‘Victor Hugo has called reverie a poison of the brain’ (HS, 6), although that passage continues with a defence of reverie. Later he would describe Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’ as juice ‘extracted from poison-flowers’ (see note on Melancholy, 231).
13. So that I only looked into the water. In ceasing to impose ‘Another beauty’ on the scene, the speaker renews a traditional trope: ‘“Fool”, said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write”’ (Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, I).
14. Omitted in SW2.
15-17. combed…water-crowfoot. ‘[T]he kingfishers were in pairs on the brooks, whose gentle water was waving and combing the hair of the river moss’ (BW, 122). ‘The water of the pond was entirely hidden by the flowers of the water crowfoot like a light fall of snow’ (IOW, 26).
17. curdled to: ‘curdled in’ (SW2, l.16).
19-20. And sedge-warblers, clinging so light / To willow twigs, sang longer than the lark: ‘The sedgewarblers that hung so light/On willow twigs, sang longer than any lark’ (SW2, lines 18-19). ‘Clinging’ makes the birds’ persistence more precarious and hence more meaningful. It also prepares musically for ‘sang longer’.
21. Quick, shrill, or grating. As the notes for this poem indicate, Thomas often tries to reproduce birdsong (cf. The Unknown Bird, The Owl, April): ‘[The turtle dove’s] voice is a soft purring, sounding as if half buried and very warm and luxurious, far softer & less articulated than the woodpigeon’s “take two cows Taffy”. The stockdove is a third species, about the same size as the woodpigeon but not ringed round the neck & with a coo that is more of a grunt as a rule than the woodpigeon’s, a soft grunt, but it has other very pretty
notes which I can’t describe’ (LGB, 193).
25. then: ‘now’ (SW2, l.24).
25-6. sweetness…sweetest…sweet: see note on April (233). Here Thomas may criticise his inclination towards ‘sweetness’. Compare Frost’s ‘Oven Bird’ (this poem also appears in AANP), which ‘knows in singing not to sing’.
28. Wisely reiterating endlessly. ‘As to the 3-word line I thought it was right somehow, but there was nothing intentional about it’ (EF, 146).
Ms: M1, BL. Published text: SP, AANP, LP. Note: See general note above. Title is unhyphenated in AANP, but a hyphen appears in the text.
I built myself a house of glass (91)
25 June 1915
Speaking as both patient and analyst, Thomas compresses his psychological history into a disturbing parable. On the same date he wrote to Edward Garnett, ascribing his difficult behaviour to ‘self consciousness and fear’: ‘What you call superiority is only a self defence unconsciously adopted by the most fainthearted humility – I believe. It goes on thickening into a callosity which only accident – being left to my own devices perhaps – can ever break through. I long for the accident but cannot myself arrange to produce it! However, perhaps landing in New York quite alone, and under some stress, may do the trick’ (ETFN 52 [August 2004], 16). Poem and letter indicate that, despite poetry, neurosis continued, as did Thomas’s hope of salvation from outside (see Introduction, 17). Earlier, he had told Eleanor Farjeon: ‘the central evil is self-consciousness carried as far beyond selfishness as selfishness is beyond self denial …and all I have got to fight it with is the knowledge that in truth I am not the isolated selfconsidering brain which I have come to seem – the knowledge that I am something more, but not the belief that I can reopen the connection between the brain and the rest’ (EF, 13).
1. a house of glass. ‘I discovered the joy of throwing stones over into the unknown depths of a great garden and hearing the glass-house break’ (CET, 43). ‘People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’ is one of the proverbs featured in Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds, where it becomes a parable of paranoia. Archie Flinders, a tell-tale who spies on other children, throws stones at passing boys until they retaliate by breaking the glass-house in his garden. One boy quotes the proverb, and later Archie ‘dreamed that he was living in an enormous palace with rooms and halls too many for him to count. They were full of beautiful things and all were his. Nevertheless Archie was not happy; for the walls, the floors, and the roof of his palace were made of glass. Nobody else was in the palace; yet he kept looking round, out of the glass walls, up out of the glass roof, and down through the glass floor; he was afraid to do anything lest he should be peeped at, and somebody should tell tales about him.’ Unable to find ‘a corner where there was no glass’, Archie eventually rushes out of the palace: ‘Without a pause he picked up a stone and hurled it at the walls. A crash, a hundred clashes, and a long clattering dissolved the palace to a heap like a pyramid’ (FTB, 67-9).
6. No neighbour casts a stone. This line cryptically fuses two of Christ’s injunctions: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’; ‘He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone’.
Ms: B. Published text: LP. Note: The absence of a stanza-break in LP seems to be a misprint. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.
Words (91)
26-8 June 1915
In B, Words is headed: ‘Hucclecote – on the road from Gloster to Coventry’. Like I built myself a house of glass, it was written when Thomas was on a brief cycling-tour and visiting his solicitor-friend J.W. (Jack) Haines in Hucclecote, Gloucestershire. Hence the poem’s western tilt, further influenced by a trip to May Hill (from which Wales can be seen) on the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border. In 1914 Thomas had walked there with Frost. Like Lob, Words mingles cultural defence, ars poetica, and more mysterious vistas. As cultural defence, it marks a fresh turn to history, as if certain kinds of introspection have indeed been ‘broken’ by I built myself a house of glass. The first person plural is to the fore. As ars poetica, too, Words moves away from subjectivity. Thomas affirms the primacy of language, traces its evolutionary and historical accretions, and proposes an aesthetic of listening for what it encodes. Placed at the end of P, Words complements Lob by turning tradition outside in, by locating it in the linguistic and lyrical grain:
[John Clare] reminds us that words are alive, and not only alive but still half-wild and imperfectly domesticated. They are quiet and gentle in their ways, but are like cats – to whom night overthrows our civilisation and servitude – who seem to love us but will starve in the house which we have left, and thought to have emptied of all worth. Words never consent to correspond exactly to any object unless, like scientific terms, they are first killed. Hence the curious life of words in the hands of those that love all life so well that they do not kill even the slender words but let them play on; and such are poets. The magic of words is due to their living freely among things, and no man knows how they came together in just that order when a beautiful thing is made like ‘Full fathom five’. And so it is that children often make phrases that are poetry, though they still more often produce it in their acts and half-suggested thoughts; and that grown men with dictionaries are as murderous of words as entomologists of butterflies. (FIP, 85-6)
Life itself is fleeting, but words remain and are put to our account. Every action, it is true, is as old as man and never perishes without an heir. But so are words as old as man, and they are conservative and stern in their treatment of transitory life. Every action seems new and unique to the doer, but how rarely does it seem so when it is recorded in words, how rarely perhaps it is possible for it to seem so. A new form of literature cannot be invented to match the most grand or most lovely life. And fortunately; for if it could, one more proof of the ancient lineage of our life would have been lost. (GB, 40)
Cooke relates Words to Thomas’s critical ‘themes’ (WC, 137-45). The poem condenses insights from the complementary studies of Maurice Maeterlinck, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater that helped Thomas to recognise and exorcise the ‘murderous’ propensities of his own style. ‘[“Serres Chaudes”] is hardly more than a catalogue of symbols that have no more literary value than words in a dictionary. It ignores the fact that no word, outside works of information, has any value beyond its surface value except what it receives from its neighbours and its position among them’ (MM, 27). ‘Hardly before [Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon]…had words been so self-contained, so much an end in themselves, so little fettered to what they could suggest but not express …The words in [Atalanta] have no rich inheritance from old usage of speech or poetry, even when they are poetic or archaic or Biblical’ (ACS, 20-2). ‘[Pater’s] words have only an isolated value; they are labels; they are shorthand; they are anything but living and social words…Pater was, in fact, forced against his judgment to use words as bricks, as tin soldiers, instead of flesh and blood and genius. Inability to survey the whole history of every word must force the perfectly self-conscious writer into this position. Only when a word has become necessary to him can a man use it safely; if he try to impress words by force on a sudden occasion, they will either perish of his violence or betray him. No man can decree the value of one word, unless it is his own invention; the value which it will have in his hands has been decreed by his own past, by the past of his race’ (WP, 213-15).
5-9. As the winds use…crack…drain…whistle through: a downbeat version of the Romantic metaphor for inspiration, as in Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’: ‘Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is’. See general note to Aspens (251). Thomas also re-orients this trope by invoking ‘English words’ as poetry’s moving spirit. The rhyme ‘drain’ / ‘pain’ echoes Hardy’s ‘In the Cemetery’: ‘as well cry over a new-laid drain / As anything else, to ease your pain!’
13-14. light as dreams,/Tough as oak. ‘Lighter than gossamer, words can entangle and hold fast all that i
s loveliest, and strongest, and fleetest, and most enduring, in heaven and earth… They outlive the life of which they seem the lightest emanation – the proud, the vigorous, the melodious words…the things are forgotten, and it is an aspect of them, a recreation of them, a finer development of them, which endures in the written words’ (RJ, 298).
14-16. Tough as oak, / Precious as gold, / As poppies and corn. Cuthbertson connects these similes with Thomas Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England (1662) and Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations, written at the same period but not printed until 1903. This England ‘contains a passage on “The Oak of Gloucestershire” from Fuller’s Worthies [in which] Fuller records that “The best [oak] in England is in Dean Forest in this country, and most serviceable for shipping, so tough that, when it is dry, it is said to be as hard as iron”’ (GC, 133). This England also includes Gilbert White’s reflection on the Selborne oak, destroyed in 1703, and Cowper’s ‘Yardley Oak’. Thomas often quotes this passage from Traherne: ‘The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold’ (SC, 132).
17. Or an old cloak: a line absent from two typescripts in which these lines follow l.31: ‘To the touch / As a man’s old cloak’. Perhaps Thomas felt that ‘To the touch’ made it too obvious that his similes associate words with all the senses.
20. the burnet rose. J.W. Haines (a botanist) explains that on their ride to May Hill he had misled Thomas as to the name of a ‘thick wild rose in the hedge, not the ordinary pink “dog-rose”’ (quoted GC, 135). The Burnet Rose is creamy white, and grows by the sea. The actual rose may have been Sweet Briar (Eglantine), a deeper pink than the Dog Rose and more strongly scented. Its ‘sweetness’ derives primarily from the leaves.
