by Edna Longley
14. Two drafts of this line are: ‘Saying “Someday, somehow, I shall be here again[”]’ and ‘Saying “I shall be here, someday, somehow, again[”]’ (FNB80).
Ms: B. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 7 birth; [B, LP] birth: [JT]
The Brook (96)
10 July 1915
Notes in FNB80 indicate that The Brook comes from the same matrix as The Word, Haymaking and A Dream. This sequence of July 1915 poems is also formally interconnected. All are written in rhyming couplets; and Haymaking (42 lines) and The Brook (28 lines) are further linked with A Dream by elements of sonnet-structure. As in earlier poems, like Man and Dog, Beauty and Lob, Thomas counterpoints couplet and syntax. The Brook begins with slow-paced sentences that establish a Zen-like meditation. The placing of ‘Unseen’, ‘mugwort dull’ and ‘A butterfly alighted’ adds to an impression that all the speaker’s senses are engaged yet somehow detached. Thomas’s landscapes and rhythms vary according to the perspectives on history that enter his thinking about the war: the problematics of memory in The Word, human settlement stacked up as ‘a great tree’ in Haymaking, the apocalyptic symbolism of A Dream in which sonnet-structure ‘turns’ on a decisive moment. The Brook holds several time-frames in questioning (‘as if’) balance: a timeless present, which ambiguously involves ‘loss’; history as ‘the gleam,/The motion, and the voices, of the stream’ – ‘motion’ and ‘stream’ being repeated from A Dream; eco-history (the butterfly); prehistory (the horseman). The relation between the contemporary ‘cart-horse’ and ‘the horse with silver shoes’ is among the poem’s riddles.
1, 25. child: ‘“Nobody’s been here before” says Baba [Myfanwy Thomas] paddling in sandy brook – so she thinks’ (FNB80). Baba’s remark connects with the concept of time represented by ‘the brook’ in Richard Jefferies’s writings. Thomas quotes the brook in Jefferies’s Wood Magic as saying: ‘that which has gone by, whether it happened a second since, or a thousand years since, is just the same; there is no real division betwixt you and the past…the world is not old; it is as young as ever it was’ (RJ, 147-8).
15. I was divided: a reflexive start for the second sonnet.
17. frizzled. In suggesting how the ‘waters’ look, sound and move, this adjective epitomises the poem’s synaesthetic clarity.
22. barrow. A draft in FNB80 refers to ‘the Bramdean tumulus’: a long barrow. This places the setting of The Brook as Bramdean Common, near Steep. Myfanwy Thomas recalls the poem’s occasion (MT, 45-6).
Ms: B. Published text: AANP, LP.
Aspens (97)
11 July 1915
For Thomas and trees, see note (238). The aspen, populus tremula, belongs to the willow family. Strongly flattened leaf stems cause its leaves to twist and shake in the slightest breeze. Hence the folk name ‘old wives’ tongues’. The tree was thought to have been punished with eternal quaking for not bowing its head at the Crucifixion, or, alternatively, for supplying the wood for the Cross. Another tradition stresses the aspen’s protective qualities, owing to ancient use of its wood for shields. Thus (as here) aspens were often planted near settlements. Strong root systems ensure that aspen colonies survive ‘all sorts of weather, men, and times’. Aspens is Thomas’s most complete revision of the Romantic analogy between inspiration and a wind-tossed tree. Rather than representing the poet as acted upon by a cosmic power, he reflexively connects the aesthetics of poetry with its prophetic openness to history: ‘Increasing complexity of thought and emotion will find no such outlet as the myriad-minded lyric, with its intricacies of form as numerous and as exquisite as those of a birch-tree in the wind’ (Daily Chronicle, 27 August 1901). Later Thomas wrote of Christina Rossetti: ‘For hers was an instrument having the power to make out of little words and common things, including a discontent with this earth and life which is not too deep for tears or words and “goes not to Lethe”, a music more enduring, perhaps not less monotonous or more really sorrowful, than that of a larch tree sighing in the wind’ (LS, 70). Urging Bottomley to take the poem for AANP, Thomas said: ‘“Aspens”, I have thought, was decidedly one of the better pieces’ (LGB, 265).
2. the inn, the smithy, and the shop: not just literal buildings but also the loci of human community: social life, manufacture, commerce. ‘Blacksmith’s cavern’ (l.5) has a prehistoric ring. Although this scene may be based on the cross-roads near Thomas’s house (Yew Tree Cottage) in Steep (WW, 33), see next note.
7. The clink…random singing. In Thomas’s prose-sketch ‘The Doves’ (the name of an inn) he figures as a traveller among ‘deep red buildings in parallel rows and symmetrical blocks, a solitude inhabited by unknown multitudes’, where ‘music streamed out of the Inn at the cross-roads’. He enters this inn, ‘of a red, unmellowed, unmellowable brick’, and sits apart in a small room: ‘The clink of the bar, the heavy groaning walk of the landlord, the bright sun…the lively joyless music of the young soldiers, gave me a strange ecstasy without pleasure…[The music] made mockery of home, parents, wives, ambitions, joys, sorrows, debts’ (RB 1, 3 [nd, ?1913/1914], 40-1).
12-16. ghosts…ghostly room. See note on Thomas’s ‘ghosts’ (202). The quotation in the previous note indicates that symbolic ‘talk of rain’ covers more than “village England” threatened by modernity and war. As the cross-roads becomes ‘a ghostly room’, it portends a larger human absence which implicates modernity itself. Our tenure as ‘inhabitants of the earth’ may be in question. In part, an ecological elegist, the Cassandra-like speaker is haunted by the future.
22-4. We cannot other…like a different tree. ‘About “Aspens” you missed just the turn that I thought essential. I was the aspen. “We” meant the trees and I with my dejected shyness’ (EF, 152-3). Despite this, and despite its ghostliness, Aspens is Thomas’s most assertive self-portrait as an artist. Those who ‘like a different tree’ are put on aesthetic and historical notice. The sibilant music that spreads out from the word ‘aspens’, and reaches its climax in ‘ceaselessly, unreasonably’, prevails over ‘every other sound’ in the poem.
Ms: B. Published text: SP, AANP, LP.
The Mill-Water (98)
12 July 1915
Among the poem’s sources may be ‘the tempestuous sixteen-foot fall of Steep Mill, which ceased its trade at the beginning of [the twentieth] century…[T]he Old English…called the Ashford Stream the Ludburn or Loud-bourne’ (WW, 38-9). ‘Mill full sound – heard by those alone – who are thinking and stop suddenly – and by those who watch long – so that they seem to feel with all who ever listened to it when mill was there’ (after 2 June, FNB80). Earlier, Thomas had written:
One by-road went to a lifeless mill, a tall house with upper windows of ample prospect. Above the wheel the waters no longer slid fast with awful repose, but cried and leapt through the broken flood-gates into a pool in the shadow of steep banks and underwood. The house was peopled only by the beautiful machinery of polished wood, now still and morose. The wheel too was still. Callosities of dry moss on the spokes, little by little, took the place of the weed which the river had combed into such excellence. And I could not but wonder that these things had, according to Hecuba’s wish, voices ‘in hands and feet and hair’, the eloquence of death. The place would have been sad, had it not been for the meadow cranesbill at the door, a mournful flower, but here, as part of the ceremonial of decay by which this desolation was made perfect, it left one thought, ‘How beautiful is death’. Each evening, just when the first nightjar was skimming the wood, the sedge-warblers began to sing all together round the pool. The song might have been the abstract voice of some old pain, feebly persistent. It went far into the night with a power of ghostly alarms, and attuned to such thoughts as come when night in certain places is malign, reverses the sweet work of the day, and gives the likeness of a dragon to the pleasant corner of a wood. The birds were full of prelusive dark sayings about the approaching night. (HS, 177-9)
Links between The Mill-Water and Aspens, as ‘prelusive dark sayi
ngs about the approaching night’, include the repeated ‘moonlight’, ‘gloom’, ‘drowned’ and ‘sound’ – the latter two, a repeated rhyme. Sound plays an equally important part in The Mill-Water, where the longest line often mimics the water’s power, and the rhyme scheme (ABBA) sets up an ominous sequence of echo-systems. If The Mill-Water elegises ‘a work-place and a home’, dissolution also turns inwards. As with ‘Solitude’ and ‘company’ in the syntactically tangled fifth quatrain, cognitive and communal states are intertwined. Although a ‘thought’ (the poem itself) may emerge from the water’s ‘sound’, Thomas’s water-symbolism, muted in The Brook and Aspens, resumes the apocalyptic ‘surge’ of A Dream.
7-8. mocks…busy roar: cf. ‘Hushing the roar of towns’ (Roads, l.63). Thomas’s visions of human obsolescence are all the more unsettling because he half-welcomes the end of ‘busy roar’: ‘Man seems to me a very little part of Nature and the part I enjoy least’ (SL, 51); ‘I like to see grass and flowers come down softly to take possession of any London soil…the flowers and grass are related to me as the bricks, mortar, and iron are not, and I have a kind of far-off share in their victories’ (TC, 12); ‘It is a curious pleasure to see [raw settlements] besieged by docks and nettles, and, as sometimes happens, quietly overcome by docks and nettles’ (IW, 125). Thomas’s language of war and conquest sides with natural forces. In the poem, Nature ‘reigns’ and ‘mocks’, its ‘idleness’ suggesting more than the end of old-style rural technology.
Ms: B. Published text: LP.
For These (99)
13, 14 July 1915
Thomas completed For These on the day he ‘passed the doctor’ as fit for enlistment (LGB, 252). He refers to the poem as a ‘prayer’ (EF, 152). If so, like most of Thomas’s poetic dealings with God or ‘fate’, it has an ironical tilt. For These belongs to the lyric genre that expresses desire for an idyllic rural retreat, but to its self-subverting wing (exemplified by Horace’s second epode). Thomas includes more straightforward instances in the ‘Village and Inn’ section of his Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air: poems such as John Clare’s ‘Proposals for Building a Cottage’ (rechristened ‘Clare’s Desire’), to which For These may allude:
Beside a runnel build my shed,
With stubbles cover’d o’er;
Let broad oaks o’er its chimney spread,
And grass-plats grace the door…
A little garden, not too fine,
Inclose with painted pales;
And woodbines, round the cot to twine,
Pin to the walls with nails…
And as the sweeping swallows stop
Their flights along the green,
Leave holes within the chimney-top
To paste their nest between…
For These concludes a trio of quatrain-poems. It resembles Aspens in line-length, The Mill-Water in rhyme scheme. Here the ABBA scheme helps Thomas to dwell on an ideal “home”. The delayed main verb and final stanza do not wholly negate the cumulative force of a catalogue that restores the balanced earthly (and poetic) habitat threatened in Aspens and lost in The Mill-Water: ‘Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills’. This Arcadian microcosm may also be a prospectus for ‘content’: home in its psychological aspect.
Ms: B. Published text: AANP, LP. Differences from CP1978: title For These [AANP, LP] For these [Prayer] Note on title: The title in CP1978 incorporates Thomas’s allusion to the poem in the letter quoted above.
Digging (99)
21 July 1915
‘Finding an old pipe and one of mine in garden. Someone / will assuredly find mine when I am not – / He created the elephant’ (FNB80, before 25 March 1915). This poem begins where the happier poem of the same name leaves off, reversing the rhyme ‘earth’/‘mirth’. The switch from present-tense epiphany to archaeological and eco-historical vista (see note on l.9) reflects the fact that the digger has become a ‘soldier’. This may have activated Thomas’s notebook jottings, and recalled Tears: another poem with soldiers. ‘Tears or mirth’ defines the human condition through the ages. But Thomas neither segregates these emotions, nor invokes a timelessness that excludes critique. ‘Mirth’ and ‘laughed’ convey anti-war irony as much as joy. He uses the clay pipes to question how dead soldiers are ‘represented’, and to offer a sardonic self-memorial. ‘Living air’ – the earthly biosphere – challenges the oppressions signified by ‘Almighty God’ (see note on February Afternoon, 274).
2. clay pipes. Thomas was a connoisseur of clay pipes (see IPS, 120-6).
4. Blenheim [1704], Ramillies [1706], and Malplaquet [1709]: victories of the Duke of Marlborough in the War of Spanish Succession. This line is the only obvious mark left on Thomas’s poetry by his last and most uncongenial book-commission: The Life of the Duke of Marlborough. Yet the biography mediates his response to the current war, as when he calls the panegyrics after Ramillies ‘verses of praise and flattery that never died because they never lived’ (LDM, 173). Coombes sees ‘his view of the Duke’s times and campaigns’ as ‘coolly and consistently disenchanted’ (HC, 42). Cooke highlights passages that criticise the military and political establishment, and identify with the common soldier (WC, 85-7).
9. mastodon. ‘How little do we know of the business of the earth, not to speak of the universe; of time, not to speak of eternity. It was not by taking thought that man survived the mastodon. The acts and thoughts that will serve the race, that will profit this commonwealth of things that live in the sun, the air, the earth, the sea, now and through all time, are not known and never will be known. The rumour of much toil and scheming and triumph may never reach the stars’ (SC, 26).
10. in this same light of day: once, ‘at what earth had to bear’ (EF, 153).
Ms: B. Published text: LP.
Two Houses (100)
22 July 1915
The ‘house’ is central to Thomas’s metaphysics of inhabiting the earth and the body. Here it takes on a consciously emblematic shape. In The South Country he describes a thatched cottage, and continues: ‘The one other house is not so high; nor has it eyes; nor do an old man and a girl and two children go in and out of it; it is, in fact, not a house of the living, but of the dead, a round tumulus at the edge of the hill’ (SC, 197). At one level, Two Houses, like Digging, is a poem of departure for war. The trope of “leaving England” becomes a dreamlike diptych. Thomas’s symbolic abodes split down the middle, into ‘sunny’ and ‘dark’, as if The Manor Farm and The Combe were clamped together. In fact, not every aspect of the poem is symmetrical: in each stanza the rhymes are differently distributed, and line-lengths vary. Smith argues that Thomas deconstructs the larger opposition he sets up, because this parable echoes his critique of a great house: ‘Only a thousand years of settled continuous government, of far-reaching laws, of armies and police, of roadmaking, of bloody tyranny and tyranny that poisons quietly without blows, could have wrought earth and sky into such a harmony. It is a thing as remote from me here on the dusty road as is the green evening sky and all its tranquillity of rose and white’ (SC, 116). Smith comments: ‘The poem…rips the ideological “surfaces” of “harmony” away from this vision of England, to reveal that it is in reality a haunted landscape, full of ghosts and dark echoes of historic brutality and oppression’ (SS, 66).
5/24. So pleasant to look at…Dark echoes reply. Since Haymaking, where the ‘swift’ holds visual and aural effects in balance, and where painting and writing cooperate to create pastoral, sight has become the main sensory medium for landscapes of peace (cf. ‘visible’ in For These, l.3); sound, the medium of history on the move.
7. warm tiles. Cf. The Manor Farm (l.12): ‘tiles duskily glowing’.
14. like a wasp at the muslined peach: ripening peaches are protected by light material such as muslin. This simile focuses the scene’s insulation, whether in the speaker’s mind or in ideological terms, from a road that may ‘lead to France’ (Roads). ‘Wasp’ implies anger as well as desire; ‘dusty thought�
� (l.11) is equivocal too.
21. black dog. ‘Dog that [?]barks / barked so hoarse and old by Luff’s house (near old farmyard and trees) and also by river – ? Rother [a Hampshire river] under echoing banks’ (nd, FNB80). ‘And presently it was dark, but for a lamp at an open door, and silent, but for a chained dog barking, and a pine tree moaning over the house…I could just hear the river Frome roaring steadily over a weir far off’ (IPS, 178-9). In the poem, this complex of images evokes Cerberus and the river Styx.
26-7. the dead…half hidden lie. Thomas writes of the Cornish moors: ‘On every hand lie cromlech, camp, circle, hut and tumulus of the unwritten years…It is a silent Bedlam of history, a senseless cemetery or museum…There are enough of the dead; they outnumber the living; and there those trite truths burst with life and drum upon the tympanum with ambiguous fatal voices’ (SC, 159-60).
Ms: B. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 7 under the warm under warm 14 the muslined a muslined Note: CP1978 follows B and a typescript [JT], rather than LP, which must reflect another typescript, and seems conceptually and rhythmically preferable. ‘The warm tiles’ keeps a particular farmhouse in view; ‘the muslined’ generalises the simile.
Cock-Crow (101)
23 July 1915
Cock-Crow harks back to a prose passage also linked with Haymaking (see note, 248): ‘the long, tearing crow of the cock, the chink of dairy pans’ (HE, 72). After the splits of Two Houses, sound and sight come together again, but not straightforwardly. F.R. Leavis writes:
To present a ‘wood of thoughts’ as being ‘cut down’ by an ‘axe of light’ looks like a bold indulgence in the pleasures of stylisation. Yet we have to recognise that ‘wood’ with its suggestions of tangled and obscure penetralia, stirring with clandestine life, is not an infelicitous metaphor for the mental life of sleep. And when…we come to ‘silver blow’ we have to recognise a metaphorical subtlety…‘Cleaving’ identifies the effect of the sound with that of the axe, the gleam of which gives an edge to the ‘silver’ of the blown trumpet. The silver-sounding trumpet is a familiar convention, and the element of wilful fantasy in this translation of the cock-crow becomes overt in the heraldically stylised twin trumpeters…We are prepared so for the ironical shift of the last line where daylight reality asserts itself. (Leavis, ‘Imagery and Movement’, Scrutiny 13, 2 [September 1945], 133-4)
