by Edna Longley
As a boy it was of such a being that I used to think – though my imagination was not energetic enough to body it forth quite clearly – when I felt, in loneliest places among the woods or clouds, that my foot-falls had scared something shy, beautiful, and divine…she was akin to the spirit abroad on many days that had awed or harassed me with loveliness – to the spirit on the dewy clovers…to the spirit in mountain or forest waters, in many unstained rivers, in all places where Nature had stung me with a sense of her own pure force, pure and without pity…She was in sight for less than a minute as I went up from the sea over the moor, and when I turned in one of its hollows she had disappeared and I saw nothing but sea and sky, which were as one. (RU, 143-4)
See Martin Haggerty, ‘Hope amidst Dejection’ (ETFN 26 [February 1992], 5-15); Richard Lowndes, ‘“Louder the heart’s dance”’ (ETFN 27 [August 1992], 17-22).
Yet, as Thomas himself insists in Feminine Influence on the Poets, love poetry is not autobiography: ‘Many love-poems were never shown to their begetters, many would not have moved them nor were in a sense meant for them at all. The love-poem…is written in solitude, is spent in silence and the night, like a sigh with an unknown object. It may open with desire of woman, but it ends with unexpected consolation or with another desire not of woman’ (76). The ‘maidens’ that flit through his prose and poetry are shaped by literature as well as sex: by Romantic poetry; by Richard Jefferies’s dewy rural heroines; by George Meredith’s Nature-goddesses; by the ethereal icons of the fin-de-siècle; by traditions of the “Muse”. Thomas’s poetry of ‘desire’ has parallels with Yeats’s poems to Maud Gonne. He writes in ‘Isoud with the White Hands’ (1902): ‘something floated under the trees, turning an unknown face towards me; then passed away as softly as the day was fading. I just saw the pale glorious face’ (HS, 184). In ‘The End of a Day’ he imagines Hope similarly: ‘She might some day be a Helen, a Guinevere, a Persephone, an Electra, an Isoud’ (LAT, 56).
In Feminine Influence Thomas stresses the dynamics between love poetry as a genre and the whole poetic ‘impulse’: ‘individual women…give the impulse and the subject. When the subject changes the impulse will remain, and the influence, though not easily definable, is not the less great’ (5). ‘[A]ll poetry is in a sense love-poetry’ (86). ‘The sight of a fine landscape, recovery from sickness, rain in spring, music of bird or instrument or human voice, may at any time evoke as the utterance of our hearts the words long ago addressed to a woman who never saw them, and is now dead. And as these things revive poems in the mind of a reader, so certainly they have given birth to some of those poems in the minds of poets; and the figure of a woman is introduced unwittingly, as a symbol of they know not what, perhaps only of desire’ (77). ‘[Women’s] influence in love has been exerted by the stimulation of desire – desire to possess not only them but other known and unknown things deemed necessary to that perfection of beauty and happiness which love proposes. It is a desire of impossible things which the poet alternately assuages and rouses again by poetry, in himself and in us’ (91).
Ms: B. Published text: AANP, LP.
Celandine (113)
4 March 1916
Celandine recasts ‘July’ (LAT, 96-116): a tale of doomed lovers that may also draw on Thomas’s feelings for Hope Webb in January-February 1908 (see notes above). In ‘July’, ‘one of those crude mixtures of experience & invention which prove me no artist’ (LGB, 206), the narrator watches his past self walking in a wood of ‘mossy-footed beeches’ with the dead ‘Margaret’: ‘his eyes could not distinguish the ghost of the living from the ghost of the dead…As she used to do, years before, she flowed beside him swiftly, and with a motion as if she trod not upon the earth but upon the south wind that was always blowing in that land’. The tale depends on a contrast between ‘the July land’ and ‘a low, grey winter sky and a flat white winter land’. The poem more subtly sets images of a ‘bright’ vigorous body against ‘shadow’, ‘phantom’ and ‘winter hues’. Perhaps this is Hope as ‘Persephone’ (see general note to The Unknown, 280). Like It rains, which also shuttles between past and present, Celandine has parallels with Hardy’s love poems to his dead wife.
6. phantom. ‘As I have told you I don’t like the country on the whole, only the two or three miles of moor, sandy cliff, flat marsh & sea visible from here, & even that is a remembered dream now that the child I told you of has become a phantom face & a kind but moderate letter writer…more than a whole hour do I lie in the morning twilight daily, struggling to sleep & put away worthless thoughts & images but vainly…Yet you are partly right when you propose the consolation of an unassailable vision of her. That, I dread to think, will be a possession after she is gone right away below the horizon’ (LGB, 159-60).
9-10. Her nature and name /Were like those flowers. ‘Hope’ would fit the bill.
18. locks sweeping the mossy sod: accounts of Hope stress her long hair.
23. like a never perfectly recalled air: cf. The Ash Grove, lines 12-14. This fine simile again pulls elusive memory towards art figured by folksong. Thomas’s suite of love poems ends with the speaker relinquishing fantasy.
Ms: M2, B. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 21 its juice the juice Note: in l.21 B and M2 have ‘its’; printed versions from LP to CP2004 ‘the’. Although there must have been some intermediate version [since B and M2 have ‘But ’twas’ at the start of l.19], ‘its’ in the existing mss could be read as ‘the’. ‘Its’ seems more attuned to the sound-system of the final lines. Note on title: Title is given in B.
‘Home’ (113)
7 and 10 March 1916
Thomas’s most direct poetic reflection on his life as a soldier is set in the environs of Hare Hall Camp: ‘Somebody said something about homesickness the other day. It is a disease one can suppress but not do without under these conditions’ (letter postmarked 27 February 1916, EF, 188). Previously, in camp at High Beech, Thomas had ‘found I could get on with people I had nothing in common with & almost get fond of them. As soon as we were in London the bond was dissolved & we had blank looks for one another’ (LGB, 255-6). A letter to Frost (5 March) prefigures ‘Home’:
I have been restless lately. Partly the annoyance of my promotion being delayed. Partly the rain & the long hours indoors…here I have to like people because they are more my sort than the others, although I realise at certain times they are not my sort at all & will vanish away after the war. What almost completes the illusion is that I can’t help talking to them as if they were friends…Well, the long & short of it seems to be that I am what I was, in spite of my hopes of last July. The only thing is perhaps I didn’t quite know what I was. This less active life you see gives me more time & inclination to ruminate. Also it is Sunday, always a dreary ruminating day if spent in camp. We got a walk, three of us, one a schoolmaster, the other a game-breeder who knows about horses & dogs & ferrets. We heard the first blackbird, walked 9 or 10 miles straight across country (the advantage of our uniform – we go just where we like): ate & drank (stout) by a fire at a big quiet inn – not a man to drink left in the village: drew a panorama…which is an amusement I have quite taken to – they say I am a neo-realist at it. (RFET, 124)
Later, there was to be deeper contact with some new arrivals at Hare Hall, including Bottomley’s friend, the painter Paul Nash: ‘He is a change from the 2 schoolmasters I see most of. He is wonderful at finding birds’ nests. There is another artist, too…a Welshman…I am really lucky to have such a crowd of people always round & these 2 or 3 nearer: you might guess from “Home” how much nearer’ (RFET, 132). Nash (whose painting ‘Spring in the Trenches’ is on the cover of this edition) recalls Thomas thus: ‘I believe I saw one of the happiest bits of his life while we were in the Artists – he was always humorous interesting and entirely lovable but others who knew him speak of him as the most depressed man they ever met’ (Poet & Painter: Letters between Gordon Bottomley and Paul Nash 1910-1946 [1955; repr. Bristol: Redcliffe, 1990], 89)
.
The letter to Frost quoted above may also disclose an aesthetic seed of ‘Home’: ‘Your talking of epic & play rather stirred me. I shall be careful not to indulge in a spring run of lyrics. I had better try again to make other people speak’ (RFET, 124). While Thomas went on writing lyrics, and ‘Home’ is more monologue than dialogue, the poem prepares for As the team’s head-brass in being acutely conscious of how ‘people speak’ in wartime. The inverted commas in title and text are ironical and interrogative as well as conversational. Thomas’s third “home” poem confronts the strains between personal, regional and national affiliations. It does so in dialogue with Home (81), which explicitly affirms an ecocentric localism, and other poems where “England” implicitly figures as a subjective ‘system of vast circumferences circling round the minute neighbouring points of home’ (LS, 111). But army life may have led Thomas to question even so fluid a ‘system’, let alone his patriotic high-water mark in This is no case of petty right or wrong. His pre-war short story ‘Home’ had already problematised home and nation. Here a soldier from London dreams, as he dies in the Boer war, not of Africa or London or imperial Britain but of a childhood trip to Wales: ‘The country that he had been fighting for was not [the] solitude of the marsh, the mountains beyond, the farms nestling in the beards of the mountains, the brooks and the great water, the land of his father and of his father’s fathers’ (LAT, 37).
3-5. the untrodden snow…wild and rustic and old. ‘It is fine and wintry here, very dirty though underfoot. The hills look impassable and make me think they must have looked like that 2000 years ago’ (letter, ‘probably March 11th’, EF, 191). ‘We were in a primitive world. In those short days the world seemed to have grown larger; distance was more terrible. A friend living thirty miles off seemed inaccessible in the snow. The earth had to be explored, discovered, and mapped again; it was as it had been centuries ago, and progress was not very real to our minds’ (HE, 157). It is as if ‘untrodden snow’ recreates the original Eden, Arcadia, pastoral landscape or earthly home. ‘Fair’ makes no distinction between man and Nature. Later, history and geography will disturb the harmony.
12. the cold roofs: Hare Hall Camp, not just literally ‘cold’.
14-15. fellowship / Together long. With dramatic fitness, enjambment breaches the sonnet-like structure of the first fourteen lines. Overall, the poem consists of two and a half ragged sonnets. After l.21 (‘We were divided’), a sonnet in couplets traces the speaker’s further self-extrication from any soldierly collective.
20-1. Between three counties…We were divided. ‘Such an endless variety of men & accents & names…Business men, clerks, teachers, pianists, schoolboys, colonials…all mixed up & made indistinguishable at first by the uniform. Until you know a new man fairly well you think of him simply as a soldier. I daresay I have been mistaken for one myself’ (RFET, 117-18). In the poem diversity ‘divides’, but “England” could connect Thomas with fellow-soldiers: ‘I furbish up my knowledge of England by finding some place that each man knows & I know & getting him to talk. There isn’t a man I don’t share some part with’ (LGB, 259).
22. we knew we were not friends. Cf. ‘I can’t help talking to them as if they were friends’ in the letter to Frost quoted above.
28. only the word: a fraught echo of ‘only the name’ in Adlestrop and The Word.
30-5. If I should ever…an evil dream. Here ‘we’ becomes ‘I’. Apart from contingent co-operation, ‘fellowship’ has broken down, while ‘union’ may also be queried in a broader political sense (Thomas favoured “Home Rule all round”). Thus, compared with ‘I am one in crying, God save England’ (This is no case of petty right or wrong), meanings have become incommensurable. ‘Strangeness’, which has already moved from landscape to relationships (‘We…looked strangely each / At the other’), now mutates into self-estrangement as ‘other’ begets an old motif: ‘else I should be / Another man’. ‘Home’, like Thomas’s correspondence, disproves the myth that, in enlisting, ‘he had changed his whole attitude to life, shaken hands with the past and shut his eyes to the future, so that he was troubled neither with regrets nor apprehensions’ (JM, 228). The army could irritate him on a petty level: his promotion to full corporal (which came through at the end of March) had been ‘delayed’ because he had covered up a man’s absence. More crucially, inner turmoil continued: ‘I am what I was, in spite of my hopes of last July’ (see letter to Frost). In November 1915, after a difficult visit home, he had already asked Frost: ‘Does one really get rid of things at all by steadily inhibiting them for a long time on end? Is peace going to awaken me as it will so many from a drugged sleep? Am I indulging in the pleasure of being someone else?’ (RFET, 107). The spectre of the Other ensures that Thomas’s inner life, and the war’s role in it, will continue to be volatile and dialectical. In August 1916 he wrote more positively to Frost: ‘I don’t believe I often had as good times as I have had, one way & another, these past 13 months’ (RFET, 145). Yet there is always a distinction between what Thomas says to friends, or even to himself, and his poetic psychodrama as conditioned by war. ‘Home’, which broaches the unspoken and inadmissible, implies this too.
30-2. If I should ever more admit…captivity. In his second-last letter to Helen (6 April 1917) Thomas says: ‘I, you see, must not feel anything. I am just as it were tunnelling underground and something sensible in my subconsciousness directs me not to think of the sun. At the end of the tunnel there is the sun. Honestly this is not the result of thinking; it is just an explanation of my state of mind which is really so entirely preoccupied with getting on through the tunnel that you might say I had forgotten there was a sun at either end, before or after this business…for a time I have had my ears stopped – mind you I have not done it myself – to all but distant echoes of home and friends and England’ (SL, 163).
Ms: M2, B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 6 Fair, too, Fair too 8 for, except need, for except need. 12/13 no stanza break stanza break 16 words word 30 stanza break at ‘If’ no stanza break Note: CP1978 follows B rather than P. Note on title: Title is given in B.
Thaw (114)
10 March 1916
Set in the same landscape, Thaw is an upbeat coda to ‘Home’. On 16 March Thomas told Frost: ‘the weather is changing at last. The snow has melted. The sun is very warm. The rooks in the camp trees are nesting’ (RFET, 126). Thomas wrote four poems that consist of one quatrain, the others being In Memoriam (Easter, 1915), The Cherry Trees and When he should laugh. If his poems are ‘like quintessences of the best parts of my prose books’ (JM, 326), his short poems, especially his single-quatrain poems, are quintessences of a quintessence. Thomas did not share fin-de-siècle objections to the long poem. Nor did he approve the Imagist aesthetic whose soul was brevity (see Introduction, 20; note on Cock-Crow, 257). Yet, in an otherwise negative review of the anthology Des Imagistes, he writes: ‘[Ezra] Pound…has seldom done better than here under the restraint imposed by Chinese originals or models’ (New Weekly, 9 May 1914). Whether or not Thomas internalised Imagism, he mastered the testing high-wire act of the short poem. In fact, his short poems differ from most Imagist poems in being miniatures rather than fragments. That is, all his structures (image, ordering of syntax relative to line, dialectics of tone or perspective) are stripped to their bones. Thaw is the most symbolically concentrated of Thomas’s ‘Spring’ poems – as in the slow release of ‘Winter pass’.
3. delicate as flower of grass: a simile that might apply to the poem itself. ‘The beeches that were yesterday a brood of giantesses are now insubstantial and as delicate as flowers of grass’ (‘Flowers of Frost’, Country Life, 13 February 1909). ‘Delicate’ echoes ‘freckled’ and ‘speculating’: all three adjectives span the human and natural worlds.
Ms: M2, B. Published text: P.
If I should ever by chance (115)
29 March – 6 April 1916
Discussing the selection of his poems for AANP, Thomas says: ‘The househo
ld poems ought perhaps to appear as a bunch’ (LGB, 266). Although the poems in question (If I should ever by chance, If I were to own, What shall I give? and And you, Helen) did not make the cut, they eventually ‘appeared as a bunch’ in P. On the basis of the letter, R. George Thomas gives them the overall title ‘Household Poems’ in CP1978. But, aside from the PTP evidence (see textual notes), Thomas’s phrase suggests a genre rather than a title. As contrasted with the wholly interior world of his recent love poems, this sequence explores affiliations that the Anglo-Saxon word ‘household’ might encode. These are ‘will and testament’ poems spoken in wartime by ‘an inhabitant of the earth’ (see note, 161). The apotheosis of Thomas’s catalogues, the poems at once celebrate earthly things (flowers, birds, places, place names, ‘copses, ponds, roads, and ruts’) and add symbolic value. In substituting poetic complexity for legal intricacies, in playing with ideas of ‘leasehold’ and ‘freehold’ as well as ‘household’, Thomas explores the responsibilities that earthly dwelling incurs. One way in which he does this is by attaching conditions to the speaker’s ‘gifts’, as tests accompany fairy gifts in folklore. Such traditional motifs (tradition being part of the legacy) consort with the poems’ strongly rhymed couplets, anapaestic rhythms, nursery-rhyme echoes, refrains. Apart from ‘Steep’, the names – of house, farm, hall, park, village, parish, field, lane, and brook – are taken from the area around Hare Hall Camp (Romford, south-east Essex). See Basil Reitz’s ‘Notes on the Place Names’ (ETFN 40 [January 1999], 3-4). The folk-idiom of the first three poems allows Thomas to raise serious issues lightly. Discussing price and value in his poetry, Smith writes: ‘Ownership is both an absurdity and a disgrace for Thomas’ (SS, 149). In Rose Acre Papers he whimsically asserts his imaginative right to a great estate: ‘the gardens are really mine…I have sometimes wondered when the “owner” will acknowledge my right. Yet I am in no haste to enter into possession: that in itself would be barbarous…I prefer to be outside, innocently investing the place…never was such cheerful communism, such wholesome confusion of meum and tuum’ (RAP, 9).
