by Edna Longley
23-31. Strange…familiar…lost homes: see note on Thomas and the Unheimliche or uncanny (199). In Words the paradox that ‘strange’ and ‘familiar’ can change places is tracked to the very sources of language. ‘Lost homes’ compresses some ideas about words (their ‘half-wild’ night-life and ‘ancient lineage’) explored by Thomas in passages quoted above.
33. oldest yew. During his Cotswolds trip Thomas visited Painswick: ‘the place with 100 yews in the churchyard where no one can count beyond 99’ (26 June, LWD). Wordsworth’s ‘Yew-trees’ appears in This England: ‘There is a Yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale…This solitary Tree! A living thing / Produced too slowly ever to decay’.
35. Worn new. This succinct oxymoron suggests what happens to language in history and poetry, and also how “tradition” works. Judy Kendall points out the link with Thomas’s ‘pseudo-translation “Eluned”’ in Beautiful Wales: ‘She is dead, Eluned, /Who sang the new songs / And the old; and made the new/ Seem old, and the old /As if they were just born and she had christened them’ (BW, 82; JK, 67).
40-1. the earth which you prove / That we love. Cf. ‘The magic of words is due to their living freely among things’, quoted above from Feminine Influence on the Poets. As in Old Man, echoed in ‘the names, and the things’ (l.50), Thomas conceives the non-identity of word and thing in associative (and ecological) rather than post-structuralist terms.
43-5. some sweetness / From Wales…nightingales. ‘After all, Wales is good for me. In spite of my accidentally Cockney nativity, the air here seems to hold in it some virtue essential to my well-being, and I always feel, in the profoundest sense, at home’ (SL, 16). See Sally Roberts Jones, ‘Edward Thomas and Wales’ (JB, 77-83). Here Thomas’s Anglo-Welshness slips over a supposed border with such ease that he virtually elides the English and Welsh languages. He uses the fact that nightingales’ habitat stops short of Wales to attribute a special music to Welsh speech and names. In Beautiful Wales Thomas quotes George Borrow’s reference to the Welsh poet Huw Morus (1662-1709) known as Eos Ceiriog: the Nightingale of Ceiriog (BW, 5-6).
56. ecstasy. ‘Where a man’s life culminates in some hidden or famous deed of love, heroism, poetry, where he is exalted out of himself, out of the street, out of mortality, there is ecstasy’ (‘Ecstasy’, unpublished essay, BC).
57-8. Fixed and free / In a rhyme. Another succinct oxymoron defines poetic form, perhaps with an implied critique of ‘free’ verse. The poem’s own form makes the point: one- or two-beat lines that give each word enormous space; rhymes that may be adjacent or twenty-four lines apart (‘dreams’/ ‘streams’). Cf. Keith Douglas’s ‘Words’ (1943): ‘I keep words only a breath of time / turning in the lightest of cages’.
Ms: B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 36 again: [P] again; [B] Note: From CP1920 to CP1949 there is no stanza-break after l.51: an error due to the fact that it ends a page in P.
The Word (93)
5 July 1915
Thomas’s letters during the first half of 1915 show him trying to make up his mind, with increasing urgency, about a future in which he seemed ever more likely to join Frost in America (see general note to I built myself a house of glass, 242). On 26 June he told Walter de la Mare: ‘I am planning to go to America in a month or 2 to see if there is anything to be had there’ (LWD). Perhaps the Cotswolds trip that produced Words drew him back to England. On 11 July he wrote to Frost: ‘Last week I had screwed myself up to the point of believing I should come out to America & lecture if anyone wanted me to. But I have altered my mind. I am going to enlist on Wednesday if the doctor will pass me’ (RFET, 78). On 14 July Thomas was passed fit for military service, and by 19 July he had joined the Artists’ Rifles: ‘a territorial corps which trains men to be officers’ (LGB, 252). From late June (Words) to 23 July (Cock-Crow) his poetry seems to deliberate, at a deep level that implicates its own aesthetic, the meaning of such a decision. He would revisit these deliberations in This is no case of petty right or wrong and other poems.
In FNB80 origins of The Word and Haymaking are intermingled: ‘Things forgotten – / I have forgotten the names of the stars, the big above the little / and to one side – and dates of wars etc. / But I remember / Those little copses of blackcaps nettles bramble where / a man might hide forever dead or alive’ (after 2 June). The Word responds dialectically to Words: the biblical, transcendental ring of its singular title being set against language (and poetry) as a historical and cultural phenomenon. Midway through the poem (l.11), the speaker moves from forgotten human names to ‘remembered’ birdsong, from the ‘abyss’ of history to the perennial present tense of poetry. A ‘pure thrush word’ recalls the bird-Muse of The Unknown Bird, and might seem to represent poetry as music, as ‘pure’ sound. Yet the second half of The Word has also opened up an evolutionary vista in which ‘singing’ and ‘saying’ converge. All these dialectics bear on the question of “war poetry”.
5. Abyss: a word that will recur in A Dream (l.10).
6-9. I have forgot, too…Some things I have forgot that I forget. Here, in contrast with Old Man (another dialectical point of reference), ‘forgetting’ acquires a positive value because it sorts out mnemonic, and poetic, priorities. To retain ‘lesser things’ cuts ‘mighty men’ and ‘old wars’ down to size, as does the reversal of expected order in ‘lost or won’. This may imply that lyric – ‘pure thrush word’ – rather than epic, or any other heroic brand of “war poetry”, remembers what really matters and is itself remembered. In thus playing with proportion and scale, Thomas applies his critical dictum, ‘Anything, however small, may make a poem; nothing, however great, is certain to’ (MM, 28), to the context of war.
16. only the name. Cf. Adlestrop (l.8) and ‘Home’ (l.28).
17-19. thinking of the elder scent…the wild rose scent…like memory. ‘The air smells like the musky wild white rose; coming from the west it blows gently, laden with all the brown and golden savours of Wales and Devon and Wiltshire and Surrey which I know, and the scent lifts the upper lip so that you snuff deeply as a dog snuffs’ (HE, 95); ‘the pink roses which have the pure, slender perfume connected by the middle-aged with youth’ (IW, 107). To ‘think of’ a scent, and make ‘memory’ a simile, is to give the senses a cognitive centrality that again unsettles hierarchies. The poem’s reflexive ending suggests that the inspiration and impact of poetry (‘a pure thrush word’ surprises the reader too) dissolve barriers between mind and body, thought and memory.
Ms: B. Published text: AANP, LP. Note: CP1928 and CP1944 print ‘will’ [B] for ‘can’ in l.5.
Under the Woods (94)
5 July 1915
‘Lazy keeper in cot under woods – smokes and has one green shrivelled stoat, he killed ages ago when trees were young – never shoots now’ (after 2 June, FNB80). In The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans Mr Torrance recalls: ‘Now, home and the garden were so well known, so safe, and so filled with us, that they seemed parts of us, and I only crept a little deeper into the core when I went to bed at night, like a worm in a big sweet apple. But the woods on the hills were utterly different, and within them you could forget that there was anything in the world but trees and yourself, an insignificant self, so wide and solitary were they. The trees were mostly beeches and yews, massed closely together. Nothing could grow under them…Nobody took heed of the woods except the hunters…The last keeper had long ago left his thatched cottage under the hill, where the sun shone so hot at midday on the reed-thatched shed and the green mummy of a stoat hanging on the wall’ (HGLM, 149-51). In Under the Woods, as in House and Man, trees shadow a precarious human presence. Despite ‘children’, ‘old’ does not seem to ‘wear new’ (Words) for people as for thrushes. In some respects, Under the Woods reverses the trajectory of The Word.
3. sung. It is odd that Thomas, who often half-rhymes, should use ‘sung’ not ‘sang’, but ‘sung’ appears in all three extant texts.
18-22. Out of most memories…no scent at all. The stoat is a stark little omen
that contrasts with the final self-images of The Word, where memory and strong scents interpenetrate.
Ms: B. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: title Under the Woods Under the Wood Note on title: CP1978 follows a typescript [JT], in which ‘Wood’ is singular, rather than LP [no title in B]. But see Thomas’s plural in source-passages and in the poem itself.
Haymaking (94)
6-8 July 1915
Copious notes for Haymaking include the following: ‘Park mead of thin grass…grove of low squat elms and long grass and men under – a solitary yew – also on the slopes of chalkpit wych hazel and flowering elder – a stack in midfield – tosser idle – men lean on rakes – oldfashioned as Crome and Constable. How old it is! I seem to see it now as someone long years hence will see it in a picture’ (after 2 June, FNB80). Haymaking was first published in This England together with The Manor Farm, written six months before (see notes, 165, 214). More self-conscious than its precursor, this summer farm-landscape encapsulates not only pastoral England but also English pastoral. As Lob tracks English tradition, and Words celebrates its linguistic mode and poetic medium, so Haymaking distils Thomas’s reading of country books. The prose passages and notes behind the poem also implicate landscape painting. Here lyric memory rescues more from the ‘abyss’ (The Word) than in Under the Woods. Thomas had often tried to capture the ‘spirit’ of rural scenes shaped by ‘centuries of peace and hard work and planning for the undreaded future…The spirit of the place, all this council of time and Nature and men, enriches the air with a bloom deeper than summer’s blue of distance’ (SC, 13). A related passage prefigures The Cuckoo and Cock-Crow as well as Haymaking:
[T]he sun is once more in the sky, the mist has gone… The swallows flying are joyous and vivid in colour and form as if I had the eyes of some light-hearted painter of the world’s dawn. Where the gleam was, that haunt of the sun’s, that half hour’s inn to which he turns from the long white road of the sky to rest, is seen to be the white farm house that stands in the midst of woods and ricks.
Yet, though so clear, the house, half a mile off, seems to have been restored by this fair and early light and the cooing of doves to the seeming happy age in which it was built. The long, tearing crow of the cock, the clink of dairy pans, the palpitating, groaning shout of the shepherd, Ho! ho! ho! ho! ho! now and then, even the whirr of the mowing machines, sound as if the distance that sweetens them were the distance of time and not only of space. (HE, 71-2)
1-2. After night’s thunder…cold: cf. the weather-setting of May 23. Both poems have sources in Thomas short story ‘The Artist’ (see note, 194): ‘clouds, the most delicate of toppling marble mountains…Round about the sun itself hung a mass of…blue-grey, edged with fiery gold’ (LAT, 133-4).
5. A draft of this line, ‘And joyous bathed in Homer’s sea’ (FNB80), suggests that Thomas has long European vistas in mind.
8. the holly’s Autumn falls in June: ‘The little June Autumn of the hollies’ (FNB80). Here Thomas blends seasons more subtly than in The Manor Farm (lines 18-20). Cf. ‘kernel sweet of cold’ (l.2).
13-15. And in the little thickets…garden warbler. These lines are anticipated in jottings for The Word (see note, 246): ‘Those little copses of blackcaps nettles bramble where / a man might hide forever dead or alive’ (FNB80). The blackcap is closely related to the garden warbler.
16-18. shrill shrieked…The swift…arrow. The aural and visual ‘sharpness’ of this impression prepares for the writers and painters in l.35, and for the final ‘Uttered’ and ‘picture’. In ‘The Artist’ the eyes of Adams the painter delight ‘in the flight of the swift which was as if the arrow and bow had flown away together’ (LAT, 133).
35. Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome. ‘Older than Clare and Wordsworth Morland and Crome’ (FNB80). Thomas writes of John Clare (1793-1864): ‘To enumerate the flowers was a pleasure to him, and he did so in a manner that preserves them still dewy, or with summer dust…No man ever came so near to putting the life of the farm, as it is lived, not as it is seen over a five-barred gate, into poetry’ (LPE, 234-5). ‘William Cobbett is one of those names which have come to symbolise the bearer’s character to perfection. It is now impossible to say how much of the character of the name was given to it by this one man in his seventy-two years of life (1763-1835). It was an altogether English name to begin with, thoroughly native and rustic; and English it remains, pure English, old English, merry English… William Cobbett is the only Cobbett in the Dictionary of National Biography, but through him speak a thousand Cobbetts, too horny-handed to hold a pen, hairy, weather-stained, deep-chested yeomen and peasants, yet not one of them, I dare say, a better man than this Farnham farmer’s boy, whose weapons included the sword, the spade, the voice, and the pen’ (RR, vii). Thomas praises Cobbett’s style in terms central to his own and Frost’s ideas about speech and poetry (see note, 298). This England contains four extracts from Cobbett’s writings, and twice juxtaposes Clare and Cobbett.
Thomas quotes from George Borrow’s Wild Wales: ‘Such was the scene [a water-mill and pigs] which I saw from the bridge, a scene of quiet rural life well suited to the brushes of two or three of the old Dutch painters, or to those of men scarcely inferior to them in their own style – Gainsborough, Moreland [sic], and Crome’ (GB, 283). George Morland (1763-1804), a painter of landscape and animals, gets a sympathetic mention in The Isle of Wight: ‘This most English – old English – of painters knew every corner of the island, especially those parts which are still least accessible, as he knew every fisherman and publican…There is no cruciform or other stone to his memory: nothing left but his paintings, his pleasant name, and the stories of his merriment and after wretchedness’ (IOW, 43). Thomas applies the simile ‘as English as Morland’ to ‘a perfect type of the dark ancient house in a forest’ (HGLM, 72). John Crome (1768-1821), often called ‘Old Crome’, to distinguish him from his son, founded the ‘Norwich school’ of painting.
37. A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree. This powerful symbol, which interweaves the human or animal body with house and tree, condenses aeons of agriculture, culture, and pastoral representation. ‘White’ links the house with ‘empty road’ and ‘mill-foot water’.
41-2. out of the reach of change – / Immortal. The poem’s permanence seems indexed to the obsolescence of what it depicts. The ‘undreaded future’ (see quotation above) no longer applies. As in his preliminary sketch – ‘I seem to see it now as someone long years hence will see it in a picture’ – Thomas pans away from the framed scene, which freezes into an icon as landscape becomes “landscape”. This ambiguous, elegiac and self-elegiac ending is conditioned by ‘the death of rural England’ (see Introduction, 23) as well as by war.
42. grange: originally a granary, then a country house with farm buildings attached.
Ms: B. Published text: TE, P. Differences from CP1978: 24 team, team; 35 Cobbett Cowper Note: CP1978 follows TE rather than P. In PTP, however, Thomas has changed ‘Cowper’ to ‘Cobbett’. In CP1928 and CP1944 ‘stiff up’ [l.9] is changed to ‘up stiff’ [B].
A Dream (96)
7, 8 July 1915
On 9 July Thomas talked to ‘a sergeant of the Artists’ Rifles at their H.Q.’ (SL, 115). On 22 July he wrote to Frost: ‘A month or two [ago] I dreamt we were walking near Ledington but we lost one another in a strange place & I woke saying to myself: “somehow someday I shall be here again” which I made the last line of some verses’ (RFET, 83). In May he had listed among possible topics for poems: ‘Somehow someday I shall be here again (waking from dream of deep pool. Full of water revolving and plunging – dream of Frost too and a walk to this.) I woke with this line of farewell to the place’ (FNB80). ‘Thomas recorded many dreams in his various notebooks, all carefully worked over…often with clear indications of their source in waking experience’ (R. George Thomas, CP1978, 400). Thomas draws on dreams for the elements of fantasy and fable in his prose. A Dream may allude to another po
et’s dream vision: its underground stream, a symbol at once psychological and historical, recalls the ‘deep romantic chasm’, ‘mighty fountain’, and sacred river’s ‘mazy motion’ in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’.
A Dream is Thomas’s first sonnet (see note on his sonnets, 294), although he has written double sonnets, such as The Glory, and been ever alert to sonnet-form as a deep structure of lyric. Given Rupert Brooke’s 1914 sequence, and Thomas’s rivalry with Brooke (see Introduction, 17), it is interesting that his first sonnet should be a “war sonnet”. But Thomas reinvents the genre. The syntax of the opening lines dramatises departure from ‘known fields’: from the past; from all that Haymaking represents; perhaps from Brooke’s ‘corner of a foreign field /That is for ever England’. Then ominous ‘waters’ ruffle the rhythm until ‘Heaving and coiling’ erupts into the sestet. At the sonnet’s centre, between daylight and underworld, stands the poet-speaker ‘thinking’. The transition from ‘thinking’ to ‘bemused’ suggests that, at an unconscious level where a decision or poem may be forming, he is drawn to ‘the abyss’. Hence ‘I forgot my friend’.
3-8. dark waters…white. In ‘Penderyn’ Thomas writes of the Welsh river Neath as seen in October 1914: ‘the river, fresh from a waterfall, poured out into the light under ash trees…in one place [it] ran black underground, and in another danced down a quarter of a mile of cascades white as milk’ (COE, 24).
9. So. Placed at the sonnet’s turn, this word serves a double grammatical function. It both intensifies ‘bemused’ and makes that state a consequence of what has occurred.
