The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  2-3. Codham…Lapwater. ‘If only those poems which are place-names could be translated at last, the pretty, the odd, the romantic, the racy names of copse and field and lane and house. What a flavour there is about the Bassetts, the Boughtons, the Worthys, the Tarrants, Winterbournes, Deverills, Manningfords, the Suttons: what goodly names of the South Country – Woodmansterne, Hollingbourne, Horsmonden, Wolstanbury, Brockenhurst, Caburn, Lydiard Tregoze, Lydiard Millicent, Clevancy, Amesbury, Amberley (I once tried to make a beautiful name and in the end it was Amberley, in which Time had forestalled me)…’ (SC, 148). What Thomas calls ‘the fascination of a roll-call of country names’ (IW, 22) is itself an embryonic poetry in his prose, and place names are central to his thinking about ‘word’ and ‘thing’. He writes of London street-names: ‘They are the elements of a puzzle map of England, which gradually we fill in, now recognising from a bus-top the name of a Wiltshire village, and again among the Downs coming upon a place which had formerly been but a name near Clapham junction’ (IPS, 39). Further, the fact that place names often defy ‘translation’ (in a different sense) gives them a quasi-autonomous status. In these poems, up to a point, they are legacies in themselves. Yet the names also bear out Thomas’s “associative” concept of language: they evoke ‘things’, however arbitrarily (‘Cockridden, and Childerditch’). As his orchestration of sound releases their poetry, he conjures up microcosmic landscapes.

  4. my elder daughter. Rachel Mary Bronwen Thomas, usually called ‘Bronwen’, was born on 29 October 1902. She died in 1975.

  8. find them before I do. ‘Bronwen was Edward’s most eager sharer of wild-flower lore; she knew as many as he did, had an eye almost as quick…In his happiest poem…Edward offers to bestow on his elder daughter half a dozen sweet-named places…provided she finds the first white violet of the year before he does. Every spring it was a race between them’ (EF, 22).

  9. if she finds a blossom on furze: a generously easy condition to fulfil since furze (gorse, whin) flowers all year round. Cf. ‘gorse that has no time not to be gay’ (October, l.17). These phrases ‘have their origins in the country saying, “When gorse is out of flower then kissing’s out of fashion”’ (MT, 289).

  Ms: M2, B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: If I should ever by chance Household Poems [1 Bronwen] 11 absent in CP1978, as in P and CP1920; present in B, CP1928 and CP1944 Note: It is unusual for this edition to go against P and PTP, but it does so with regard to l.11. Elsewhere Thomas never leaves a couplet incomplete [here he would also fail to complete a kind of sonnet], and single lines can be omitted in transcription or typing. Note on title: In PTP the poem is given a first-line title.

  If I were to own (115)

  1-7 April 1916

  See general note to If I should ever by chance (285).

  4-14. Wingle Tye…untranslatable. This catalogue, the most amplified in the sequence, works centripetally. It moves from the outer reaches of an estate to a sheltered garden, from plurality to ‘single trees’, from Nature and culture to poetry (the thrush). ‘Proverbs untranslatable’ reflexively aligns the poem itself with birdsong, and figures meanings encrypted even more deeply than in place names. Poetry is also implicated in the murkier matter of the blackbird (see below).

  3. the Tyes. In Essex ‘tye’ seems originally to have meant an outlying common, then an enclosed field.

  5-7. Skreens…Lillyputs. The names ending in ‘s’ either stem from a local manorial name or have been assimilated to this form.

  15. my son. Philip Merfyn [Mervyn] Ashcroft Thomas, the Thomases’ first child, was born on 15 January 1900. He died in 1965.

  23-5. unless I could pay, for rent…not I. The ‘rent’ specified here revitalises the idiom ‘for a song’, making it the measure of true value. If the speaker should despoil this currency, he will lose his residual rights in the heritage. Bird-killing seems to symbolise some form of violation; song/poetry some form of redemption. Violence and the prospect of being ‘left old and alone’ probably reflect Thomas’s difficult relations with Merfyn (see general note to Parting, 193). As with his attitude to his own father in I may come near loving you, there are Oedipal overtones. Yet this complex ‘proverb’ of inheritance, property and power may also allude to the war (as does the killing of creatures in The Combe and The Gallows), and echo the question posed by E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1912): ‘To whom does England belong?’ In any case, Thomas’s legacy in the male line, with its ultimate focus on ‘the house’, takes a different turn from the poems for his daughters.

  30. till the cart tracks had no ruts: i.e., forever.

  Ms: M2, B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: If I were to own [2 Merfyn] Note on title: In PTP the poem is given a first-line title.

  What shall I give? (116)

  2-8 April 1916

  See general note to If I should ever by chance (285). What shall I give? belongs to the poetic genre that expresses wishes for a girl’s future – traditionally, dynastic wishes, as in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’. Some poems invert that emphasis. W.H. Davies’s ‘Sweet Stay-at-Home’, which Thomas would have known, begins: ‘Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Well-content, / Thou knowest of no strange continent’. But whether grand or modest, such wishes usually represent a socio-political vision that denies female agency. Thomas may avoid this trap by subverting both ‘power’ and ‘contentment’. His ‘queen/Who …sat in Havering Bower’ anticipates Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ (1919), where the ideal woman is no ‘great queen’ but ‘Rooted in one dear perpetual place’. Philip Larkin’s ‘Born Yesterday (for Sally Amis)’, which redefines ‘ordinary’, seems aware of Thomas’s and Yeats’s poems.

  1. my daughter the younger: Helen Elizabeth Myfanwy Thomas, ‘Baba’, born on 16 August 1910. Myfanwy Thomas died in 2005.

  3. I shall not give her anything. The poem proceeds to contradict this statement. Its trajectory from ‘South Weald and Havering’ to ‘the Pleiades’ at least gift-wraps the values of ‘Steep and her own world’.

  4-9. Havering…Havering Bower. Reviewing Reginald A. Beckett’s Romantic Essex, Thomas remarks: ‘We are grateful…for the mere repetition of such names as Ashingden, Cressing, Havering-atte-Bower’ (Daily Chronicle, 2 May 1901). The Crown held the Royal Manor or Liberty of Havering for six centuries. Two palaces were built there. ‘Bower’ indicates that Havering was particularly associated with queen consorts: Eleanor, wife of Henry III, who added it to the royal property in 1267; Isabelle of France, child-bride of the deposed Richard II; and Joan, widow of Henry IV, who was imprisoned on a charge of treason and witchcraft and returned to Havering to die (1437) in the palace of Pyrgo.

  11. Samarcand: more usually ‘Samarkand’. James Elroy Flecker’s The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913) may have brought this exotic city to mind, although – or because – Thomas had reviewed Flecker’s ‘Parnassian’ collection unfavourably (Bookman, October 1913). There is aesthetic point to his deconstruction of the opposition ‘Samarkand’/‘Steep’ (as of ‘Romantic Essex’). But if he demystifies the former as a spur to poetry, he does not sentimentalise the latter.

  Ms: M2, B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: What shall I give? [3 Myfanwy] Note on title: In PTP the poem is given a first-line title.

  And you, Helen (117)

  9 April 1916

  See general note to If I should ever by chance (285). Along with Essex place names, the cultural aspect of Thomas’s will-making has been receding. ‘Self’ at the end of What shall I give? brings its psychological aspect into the foreground. The poems can be read as family therapy for neurosis that derives from the speaker: as compensating for all he has failed to ‘give’. Thomas’s own self-reproaches and Helen Thomas’s memoirs evidence his difficulties in belonging to any ‘household’. In autumn 1912, after leaving home for a time to board with Vivian Locke Ellis, he told Bottomley: ‘My habit of introspection & self contempt has at last broken my spirit. Intense irritability made
life intolerable in a cottage where I could not suffer without making 4 others suffer with me’ (LGB, 226). Above all, compensation was owed to Helen: ‘Helen usually gets a share of my depression, & in fact has done so for so many years now that she is always too near the edge, has lost her buoyancy & is thin & often poor-spirited: but she still has a lot of courage & whenever I let her, gets hopeful again’ (LGB, 162). And you, Helen, the only vocative poem in the sequence, reintroduces the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of No one so much as you. ‘Yourself’ and ‘myself’ are again in mutual question as Thomas elaborates his regret that ‘I could not return / All that you gave’. He imagines giving Helen back her life.

  7. A clear eye as good as mine. Helen Thomas was short-sighted. ‘The amazing keenness of Edward’s sight was brought home to me on these walks; he would remark on some bird in a distant tree when to me the tree was only a blur on the landscape. (Once when we were riding on an open bus-top in town, he pointed out to me the curious difference in the two eyes of a dog sitting in a window. I took his word for it)’ (EF, 24). ‘The clearness of the physical is allied to the penetration of the spiritual vision. For both are nourished to their perfect flowering by the habit of concentration. To see a thing as clearly as [Jefferies] saw the sun-painted yellow-hammer in Stewart’s Mash is part of the office of the imagination’ (RJ, 44).

  Ms: M2, B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: And you, Helen [4 Helen] Note on title: In PTP the poem is given a first-line title.

  The Wind’s Song (117)

  22-30 April 1916

  See note on Thomas’s sonnets (294). His third sonnet returns to the Romantic equation between wind and poetic inspiration, last reworked in Aspens. Specifically, Thomas returns to Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ where the symbolic wind brings dead things to life: ‘Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth’. The Wind’s Song seems to diagnose the speaker’s initial ‘dullness’ or depression as compounded of creative sterility and sexual tristesse (‘nunneries’, ‘a mere stump’). It is as if the Muse has withdrawn. ‘Lone pine clump’ echoes the ominous ‘close pine clump’ (cf. ‘close copses’ here) in Roads, and Thomas’s self-image as a ‘pine in solitude’ in No one so much as you. The sonnet’s strong contrasts are accentuated by its couplet-form, and by the sestet’s marked ‘turn’ from ‘sad’ to ‘glad’.

  2. anemones. During his courtship of Helen, Thomas called her ‘my anemone maiden’ (SL, 8).

  7. branchless and flayed and prone. This self-flagellating phrase recalls the psychological terrain of The Hollow Wood.

  13-14. My heart…was made free. Cf. the ending of Beauty, with which the poem has other parallels.

  Ms: M2, B. Published text: CP1928. Note: CP1928 has ‘Dull thoughted’ in l.1, but ‘Dull-thoughted’ [B, M2] seems preferable. Note on title: this may have been given to the poem when it was first published in CP1928. CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.

  Like the touch of rain (118)

  23-30 April 1916

  Like the touch of rain and When we two walked are linked by the motif of ‘walking’; by emotional retrospect; by form (three quatrains rhymed ABAB); and by dialectics that oppose doomed passion to lesser ‘happiness’. In part, the poems may reprise the narrative of Hope Webb (see notes 238, 279).

  5. love of the storm: ‘everything annihilated save the wind, the rain, the streaming road, and the vigorous limbs and glowing brain and what they created…We and the storm were one’ (IW, 13). The weather-imagery and ‘sings’ echo the climax, perhaps also in a sexual sense, of The Wind’s Song. Cf. The Mill-Pond too.

  8. ‘Go now’: in M2 ‘I’ll go now’.

  Ms: M2, B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: Like the touch of rain [P] ‘Go now’ Note on title: CP1978 follows a reference to the poem in a letter to Eleanor Farjeon [EF, 194]. PTP provides no warrant for this.

  When we two walked (118)

  23 April - 1 May 1916

  See general note to Like the touch of rain above. R. George Thomas refers this poem to ‘a long walk taken by the poet and his wife before Easter 1914’ (CP1978, 414). But, whether applicable to their marriage or not, its ‘Lenten’ setting seems primarily metaphorical. Thomas’s most nuanced gloss on ‘happiness’ (as so often, a recollected rather than present condition) gives the quatrain here a very different sound from the tones of extremity in Like the touch of rain. 7-8. Who acted…Juno and Jupiter. An ‘exile’ returning to childhood scenes says: ‘We forgot that ours had been the sin of Alcyone and Ceyx who, in their proud happiness, called one another Zeus! and Here!’ (HE, 49-50). Zeus (Jupiter) punished the sinners by turning Alcyone into a kingfisher, Ceyx into a gannet. In The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans a ‘cottage woman’ recalls the young Morgans, several of whom die: ‘You never saw the like of them for happiness. When I used to stop at the gate and see them in the grass, perhaps soaking wet, tumbling about and laughing as if they weren’t Christians at all, I said to myself: “Oh, dear, dear me, what trouble there must be in store for those beautiful children, that they should be so happy now. God preserve them, if it be his will.” I whispered: “Hush, children, be a bit more secret-like about it.” It don’t do to boast about anything, let alone happiness’ (HGLM, 270).

  Ms: M2, B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 9 Gods gods

  Tall Nettles (119)

  24 April - 1 May 1916

  See note on Thomas’s short poems (284). Tall Nettles is a corner of his poetry that many readers ‘like most’. ‘The walnut tree among the ricks is dead…deep in the brittle herbage underneath it lean or lie broken wheels, a rude wooden roller, the lovely timber of an antique plough, a knotted and rusted chain harrow’ (HE, 108); ‘the barn and sheds, apparently tumbling but never tumble-down, were…surrounded by a disorderly region of nettles’ (HGLM, 130). Like But these things also and The Word, Tall Nettles tests Thomas’s critical dictum: ‘Anything, however small, may make a poem; nothing, however great, is certain to’ (MM, 28). Here one starting-point may have been the fourth line of The Mill-Water: ‘On the prone roof and walls the nettle reigns’. But dereliction and Nature’s victory now co-exist with a ‘farmyard’, and springy rhythms pull all the poem’s elements together. The symbol lacks its earlier aura of apocalyptic foreboding mixed with desire for a post-human earth.

  7. dust. ‘Cobwebs and wholesome dust – we needed some of both in the corners of our minds’ (HS, 112).

  8. sweetness. Braced by ‘dust’, ‘prove’, and its climactic position, this problematic word powerfully justifies its use (see note, 233).

  Ms: M2, B. Published text: P.

  The Watchers (119)

  24 April - 1 May 1916

  That Tall Nettles and The Watchers appear on the same page of B suggests their proximity in Thomas’s head, and the extent to which they comprise an ars poetica. Like the similarly paired poems that precede them, both are written in an ABAB quatrain. The stanzas of The Watchers, with their different rhythms, are themselves dialectically opposed. MacDonald Emslie comments: ‘The visitor at the inn watches from behind glass. The stuffed creatures on the walls of his room watch him from behind an inner layer of glass…This watching of the visitor who is watching the carter who is watching his horse provides three kinds of watching and three different worlds, each reflecting critically on its neighbour’ (‘Spectatorial Attitudes’, Review of English Literature 5, 1 [1964], 67). The Watchers condenses Thomas’s critique of Walter Pater and ‘the contemplative aesthetic life, too refined for the contamination of experience’ (WP, 147). Pater’s ‘spectatorial attitude’ makes him ‘forget that the thing seen is not a picture’ (cf. ‘no fire, but a view’, l.7). Such ‘sequestered egotism’ ends in inhumanity: ‘Thinking of the noble attitudes of men – heroes of novels – in their strife with circumstance, he asked whether men would fret against their chains if they could see at the end “these great experiences”, these noble attitudes, these tragical situations�
��One more step, and he would bid the dying gladiator be comforted by the stanzas of Childe Harold’ (WP, 172, 149, 174, 74). Lafcadio Hearn has the same faults:

  The book [Chita] is not without humanity, but the attitude towards human things, the most tragic and the most simple, is usually spectatorial. He describes, for example, the jetsam of a storm which destroyed an island and all its holiday population…The impression given by the passage is that Hearn had never got beyond the point of view that this scene was a good subject for description. He was writing as a detached aesthetic artist and this cold figure is as conspicuous as the storm and its havoc. In a different key is the description of yellow fever which ends the book. Hearn himself had nearly died of the disease in New Orleans: in Chita it kills a man but it gives some life to the style… (LH, 51-2)