by Edna Longley
2. bleak hut: an army-hut at Hare Hall Camp.
6. this solitude: perhaps global as well as personal.
14. Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff: the war dead. B has ‘A million’ for ‘Myriads of’.
16. the love of death: cf. ‘half in love with pain’ (Liberty). Thomas needed no cue from Keats to be more than ‘half in love with easeful Death’: ‘Yet I brood too much for suicide; the thought to kill myself kills itself by its intensity. How many sedentary people do commit suicide?’ (Diary, 2 May 1901, NLW). But in 1908 and 1913 he nearly did more than brood (see Introduction, 13). On the first occasion he noted in his diary: ‘Up 7. Reading. After tried to shoot myself. Evening reading. Read Marlowe. To bed 11’ (Diary, 29 November 1908, NLW; ETFN 27 [August 1992], 4). Three weeks earlier he had written: ‘How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave & to say It is over. With me I suppose it is vanity: I don’t want to do so difficult a thing as dying without any chance of applause after having done it’ (LGB, 174-5). See general note to Beauty (186).
Thomas uses these experiences in his prose: ‘As will happen with men who love life too passionately, [Morgan Rhys] was often in love with death. He found enjoyment in silence, in darkness, in refraining from deeds, and he longed even to embrace the absolute blank of death, if only he could be just conscious of it; and he envied the solitary tree on a bare plain high up among the hills, under a night sky in winter where the only touch of life and pleasure was the rain. And now, with his fantastic belief that the corpse is life’s handiwork and its utmost end, he is humanised only by a dread of the blank to which he is going…He has made a heaven and he fears it’ (BW, 94-5). ‘The Attempt’, a fictionalised account of Thomas’s suicidal episode in 1908, features another Welsh alter ego: ‘[Morgan Treharon] was called to death, but hardly to an act which could procure it…Death was an idea tinged with poetry in his mind – a kingly thing which was once only at any man’s call. After it came annihilation…There was also an element of vanity in his project; he was going to punish himself and in a manner so extreme that he was inclined to be exalted by the feeling that he was now about to convince the world he had suffered exceedingly’ (LAT, 165-6; cf. HT, 113-14).
17-18. If love it be towards what is perfect…disappoint. This again counterpoints Liberty (‘half in love…/With what is imperfect’). The difference between the poems’ endings turns on structure and tone. Rain ends, not with an inclusive, if ambivalent, catalogue, but with a series of qualifying clauses that echo the self-irony in Thomas’s prose portraits – Morgan Treharon is said to practise ‘luxurious self-contempt’ (LAT, 163). The notion of death as ‘perfect’ makes its lover an aesthete.
Ms: B. Published text: P. Note: In l.17, B [followed by CP1928 and CP1944] has ‘for’ not ‘towards’ [P]. While ‘towards’ might seem unidiomatic, it carries a resistant emphasis amidst the assonantal build-up: ‘Myriads/ reeds / wild rain / dissolved / what is perfect’. Note on title: Title is given in B.
The clouds that are so light (105)
15 January 1916
Thomas takes another image from The Icknield Way which (in Roads too) he seems to be recalling: ‘The air was now still and the earth growing dark and already very quiet. But the sky was light and its clouds of utmost whiteness were very wildly and even fiercely shaped, so that it seemed the playground of powerful and wanton spirits knowing nothing of earth. And this dark earth appeared a small though also a kingly and brave place in comparison with the infinite heavens now so joyous and so bright and out of reach’ (IW, 137). In the poem, the paradox of cloud-shadows and Thomas’s most habitual polarities (dark/light, earth/sky) enrich the trope of beauty’s dependence on the lover and on the poem itself (‘this small dark spot’ covers both). The clouds that are so light simultaneously invokes a Muse – perhaps a new one, given the present tense – that counters the depressive ‘love’ in Rain. It heralds the sequence of love (and hate) poems, mainly in quatrains, that Thomas would write between 8 February and 4 March. A letter to Helen Thomas shows that it also heralds her reception of them (see note, 277): ‘Fancy your thinking I might have someone in view in those verses beginning “The clouds that are so light”. Fancy your being pleased at the idea. Well, perhaps you wouldn’t be, if there really were someone, in which case I would hardly write verses, I think’ (?24 January, quoted CP1978, 408).
Ms: B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: The clouds that are so light [P] Song [title in B] [2] Note: In CP1928 the poem begins: ‘As the clouds’ and l.5 begins: ‘Even so’ [B]. In CP1944 the poem is re-titled from the change in its first line, and the B and P versions confused in the text: ‘As the clouds…And even so’.
Roads (106)
22 January 1916
The epigraph to The South Country is a speech by Paul Ruttledge in Yeats’s play Where There is Nothing: ‘As I can’t leap from cloud to cloud, I want to wander from road to road. That little path there by the clipped hedge goes up to the high road. I want to go up that path and to walk along the high road, and so on and on and on, and to know all kinds of people. Did you ever think that the roads are the only things that are endless; that one can walk on and on, and never be stopped by a gate or a wall? They are the serpent of eternity. I wonder they have never been worshipped. What are the stars beside them? They never meet one another. The roads are the only thing that are infinite. They are all endless.’ ‘The little roads, so old, wind among the fields timidly as if they marked the path of one creeping with difficulty through forest coeval with the world’ (HE, 128). Thomas follows many roads in The South Country, In Pursuit of Spring, and the first chapter of Richard Jefferies, but his road-worship reaches its prose apotheosis in The Icknield Way:
Today I know there is nothing beyond the farthest of far ridges except a signpost to unknown places. The end is in the means – in the sight of that beautiful long straight line of the Downs in which a curve is latent – in the houses we shall never enter, with their dark secret windows and quiet hearth smoke, or their ruins friendly only to elders and nettles – in the people passing whom we shall never know though we may love them…I could not find a beginning or end of the Icknield Way. It is thus a symbol of mortal things with their beginnings and ends always in immortal darkness. I wish the book had a little more of the mystery of the road about it. (IW, ‘Dedication’, vi-vii)
Much has been written of travel, far less of the road. Writers have treated the road as a passive means to an end, and honoured it most when it has been an obstacle; they leave the impression that a road is a connection between two points which only exists when the traveller is upon it…Yet to a nomadic people the road was as important as anything upon it…We still say that a road “goes” to London, as we “go” ourselves. We could not attribute more life to them if we had moving roads with platforms on the sidewalks. We may go or stay, but the road will go up over the mountains to Llandovery, and then up again over to Tregaron. It is a silent companion always ready for us, whether it is night or day, wet or fine, whether we are calm or desperate, wet or sick. It is always going; it has never gone right away, and no man is too late…old roads will endure as long as the Roman streets, though great is the difference between the unraised trackway, as dim as a wind-path on the sea, and the straight embanked Roman highway…The making of such roads seems one of the most natural operations of man, one in which he least conflicts with nature and the animals…Why go straight? There is nothing at the end of any road better than may be found beside it, though there would be no travel did men believe it. (IW, 1-5)
Thomas’s ‘Dedication’ (to Harry Hooton) is ironically aware that his walking has become a professional function. He says of youthful walks with Hooton: ‘I am glad they are in ghostland and not fettered in useless print’ (vi). Yet roads and walks condition his deepest imaginative structures. In Roads the trope of the journey, always latent in his poetry, re-emerges to be g
iven an emblematic stamp. During its half-anthropomorphic, half-animistic course, Roads ‘lightly’ touches many bases. For Thomas, the body links walking and writing: ‘[Cobbett’s] sentences do not precisely suggest the swing of an arm or a leg, but they have something in common with it’ (RR, xi). He also maps roads on to cognitive processes and vice versa: a point that the fourth quatrain makes explicit. As a self-image for Thomas’s poetry, Roads attaches its windings and back-tracks to earth-history, to the road-network, to his criss-crossings of England and Wales. Sinuous syntax loops over the quatrains like paths over the downs. The ABBA rhyme-scheme, and the way in which end-stopped quatrains melt into run-on quatrains, further dramatise twists and turns, stops and starts.
25-8. The next turn…Hell conceal. Like the poem more generally, its most allegorical stanza has absorbed Bunyan: ‘Pilgrim’s Progress is full of the sense of roads…When Christian comes to the Hill Difficulty you see the primitive man deciding to go straight uphill, turning not to the left by the way called Danger into a great wood, nor to the right to Destruction…How full of plain English country wayfaring is the passage where Hopeful and Christian take a road by a river-side, and then when it turns away from the water they see a stile leading into a path which keeps on, as a path would do, along the bank through Bypath Meadow: only, as it happens, the river is in flood and they must turn back again towards the stile. This man knew roads’ (IW, 6). Other literary referents for Roads are ‘Cymbeline…and some of the historical plays of Shakespeare’, which ‘give a grand impression of wide tracts of country traversed by roads of great purpose and destiny’ (IW, 7). Cymbeline, perhaps owing to its Anglo-Welsh “Britishness”, was a favourite play of Thomas’s.
29-32. Often footsore…As it winds on for ever. The last line, rhythm and key rhyme of this quatrain recast the ending (and refrain) of Tennyson’s ‘The Brook’: ‘And out again I curve and flow / To join the brimming river, / For men may come and men may go, / But I go on for ever’. Like ‘winding stream’ (l.15), the echo renders roads fluid as water.
33. Helen of the roads: ‘Helen is the lady in the Mabinogion, the Welsh lady who married Maxen the Emperor and gave her name to the great old mountain roads – Sarn Helen they are all marked on the maps. Do you remember the “Dream of Maxen”? She is known to mythologists as one of the travelling goddesses of the dusk’ (EF, 182). Thomas recounts ‘The Dream of Maxen’ in Celtic Stories (121-5) and The Icknield Way. Maxen dreams of a beautiful girl in a castle, and finally tracks her down after years of searching: ‘She became his bride, and he gave her three castles – one at Arvon in North Wales, one at Carleon, and one at Caermarthen in the South. Then, says the tale, “Helen bethought her to make high-roads from one castle to another throughout the Island of Britain. And the roads were made. And for this cause are they called the roads of Helen Luyddawc, that she was sprung from a native of this island, and the men of the Island of Britain would not have made these great roads for any save her”’ (IW, 7-8).
35. the Mabinogion tales: Welsh tales ‘written down at the end of the Middle Ages, and translated from Welsh into English by Lady [Charlotte] Guest in the nineteenth century [1849]. The original Welsh manuscript (called “The Red Book of Hergest”…) belongs to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but the stories had been told over and over again, and probably written down many times, before they were copied into “The Red Book”’ (CS, 126).
50-6. Troops that make loneliness…the dead / Returning lightly dance. ‘I wish you had liked “Roads” more. I thought the particular ghosts came in comfortably enough after the ghosts in general’ (LGB, 260). This is one of Thomas’s most eerily unheimlich effects (see note, 199). Subtly, ‘ghost’ does not appear in the poem, although its landscape has been haunted from the outset: ‘invisible’, ‘Forgotten’, ‘fade’, ‘dream’, ‘dawn’s twilight’, ‘the dead’. Again ‘Troops’ occurs in what might seem to be the wrong stanza. ‘Lightly dance’ is both a critique of the war and an unsettling (danse macabre) image for the war dead.
53. Now all roads lead to France. Frost told Edward Garnett after Thomas’s death: ‘His poetry is so very brave – so unconsciously brave. He didn’t think of it for a moment as war poetry, though that is what it is. It ought to be called Roads to France’ (SLRF, 217).
59. They keep me company. ‘“They” in [stanza] 15 refers to “the dead”’ (EF, 184).
61-2. the solitude /Of the loops over the downs. ‘Jefferies often thought of the sea upon these hills…There is something oceanic in their magnitude, their ease, their solitude – above all, in their liquid forms, that combine apparent mobility with placidity…They are never abrupt, but, flowing on and on, make a type of infinity’ (RJ, 13).
63. roar of towns: see note on Good-night (202).
64. brief multitude. This oxymoron challenges conventional ideas of scale. Doubly paradoxical, in combining temporal and spatial concepts, it magnifies remembrance of the dead and cuts the city down to size. Thomas writes of London: ‘A sense of multitude surged about and over me – of multitudes entirely unknown to me – collected by chance – mere numbers – human faces that were at that moment expressing innumerable strange meanings with which I had nothing to do’ (HE, 6).
Ms: B. Published text: AANP, LP. Note on title: Title is given in B.
The Ash Grove (108)
4-9 February 1916
‘I don’t quite know why, but the ash is becoming my favourite tree’ (letter to Helen, 5 October 1914, NLW). Drafts of this poem contain further stanzas. In one ms. (kept by Eleanor Farjeon) the first four stanzas, which precede drafts of the last three existing ones, are as follows:
In an ash grove among the mountains once, I was glad
Exceedingly, walking under the trees, notwithstanding I had
Naught that I knew to be glad of. Bare and decayed,
Their few leaves shaking in silence, the trees were not sad
Though half of them stood dead and the living made
Little more than the dead ones made of shade.
If it led to a house the house was long since gone,
But the ash grove welcomed me and my feet delayed
From where I saw the first of the stony roots clasp the stone
And I forgot myself and the past and future, on
To where the last of the shadows fell and the blaze
Of the sun returned, and outside I walked alone.
Before and after nothing was worth my gaze
Or my thought. For emptiness it was a day of days,
Except that moment under the ash trees tall
Which then to have understood would have been to erase.
This second ‘journey’ poem again plays with scale, space, and time. Whereas the short lines of Roads go an infinite distance, the long lines of The Ash Grove (up to sixteen syllables) stretch out ‘Paces each sweeter than sweetest miles’. ‘Interval’ (l.5) applies to time, space, inner space and the poem itself. As in The Bridge, Thomas adapts rhythm and stanza to a state of hiatus or remission. Like the long lines, the same-rhymed stanzas (AABA, BBCB etc.) ‘delay’ over fleetingly fulfilled ‘desire’. But the final unrhymed line ending, which points beyond the poem, is ‘die’.
6. sweeter…sweetest: see note on April (233).
8-9. wall //That I passed through at either end without noticing. This reflexive stanza-break mirrors one of the rare moments of integration in Thomas’s poetry when a bar or barrier unconsciously melts.
10-11. can bring /The same tranquillity. Thomas revises Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, second ed. [1800]) by celebrating tranquillity recollected in tranquillity and by maximising ‘recollection’: the nexus of memory and epiphany; good memory driving out bad; the mnemonic role of poetry – his own ‘song’ of the ash grove.
11-12. ghost…ghostly: see note on Thomas’s ‘ghosts’ (202). Like the ash grove’s history, the speaker’s ‘ghostly gladness’ is extraordinari
ly ‘veiled’, elusive and recessive. It depends on a secondary epiphany, on a notional singer and her ‘lost’ song, on love redeemed only in simile.
13. The song of the Ash Grove. ‘Llwyn Onn’ or ‘The Ash Grove’ is a traditional Welsh harp melody to which various Welsh and English words have been set. ‘Restless wing’ (l.7) and the poem’s anapaestic rhythms suggest that Thomas has in mind the version by ‘Talhaiarn’ (John Jones, 1810-70), of which this is the first stanza:
Shine, blessed sun, on the home of my boyhood,
Bright be thy rays on the famous ‘Ash Grove’,
Dear to my heart is the home of my parents,
Home of my infancy, home of my love;
Far, far away I have sailed o’er the ocean,
Still guided by fate on the wings of unrest;
Oh! that I had the swift wings of the swallow,
To fly to my home, to return to my nest.
15. something unwilling to die: cf. ‘what yet lives in me’ (Beauty, l.18). There are also parallels between ‘Llwyn Onn’ and the end of Beauty.
Ms: B. Published text: LP. Note on title: Title is given in B.
February Afternoon (109)
7, 8 February 1916
See note on Thomas’s sonnets (294). Thomas’s second sonnet, like his first (A Dream), is a war-sonnet. He told Eleanor Farjeon: ‘you didn’t realise it was a sonnet I suspect’ (EF, 187). In the octet the Petrarchan structure, tightened by similar rhyme sounds, helps to suggest the suspension or obliteration of time: ‘making as a day / A thousand years’. But history and politics are not absent. As in Digging (99), long eco-historical perspectives bring agriculture, culture and war into an unstable pastoral frame. Thomas uses millennia to focus a day in 1916; a day in 1916 to focus millennia. With its starlings’ ‘parliament’, ‘rooks’ and ‘gulls’, February Afternoon is also a bird-fable of war. Some details recall his “explanation” of the proverb ‘Birds of a feather flock together’: ‘In the clear hard weather men were ploughing in the Thames valley…The earth was turned up in rich, dark clods like the inside of a frosted cake, and on to the furrows descended hundreds of white gulls. When Bob [a little boy] shouted, the birds rose up and whirled in the air like snow. Wherever the fields had been striped black by the plough there was a dappling of white gulls on the black.’ Later [Bob] ‘saw the black clergy-birds flocking together here and there, just as the jackdaws did overhead’ (FTB, 71-3).
