by Edna Longley
7. Like criss-cross bayonets: a simile that first appeared in ‘Birds in March’ (1895), an article by Thomas in the Sunday School Association magazine Young Days: ‘Wandering along, we come to a woodland mere, and amidst the reeds and rushes growing along the shore, or in the shallow water at the edge, we spy a moor-hen’s nest approaching completion. It is made of the long bayonet-like reeds and other water plants’ (reprinted, ETFN 53 [January 2005], 13). In The Woodland Life Thomas calls bluebell leaves ‘dark green sword-like blades’, and notes in a field ‘Diary’ entry for 21 April 1895: ‘Reeds piercing the ripples of the brook, with twin blades, curved and meeting like callipers’ (TWL, 36, 165).
Ms: M2, B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: Bright Clouds [P] The Pond Note on title: the title in CP1978 derives from a letter to Eleanor Farjeon: ‘Did I send you the short lines on a pond?’ [EF, 199]. PTP provides no warrant for this.
Early one morning (126)
8-11 June 1916
See note on Thomas and folksong (166). ‘I am sending you a sober set of verses to the tune of Rio Grande, but I doubt if they can be sung’ (EF, 199). Thomas had included ‘Rio Grande’, whose ‘glorious tune’ he then ‘preferred to Westminster Abbey’ (LGB, 94), in his Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air:
O where are you going to, my pretty maid?
O, away to Rio;
O where are you going to, my pretty maid?
We’re bound for Rio Grande.
Away to Rio, away to Rio;
So fare thee well, my bonny young girl,
We’re bound for Rio Grande…
‘Early one morning’ is the title and opening phrase of another song, also included in the Pocket Book: ‘Early one morning, just as the sun was rising, / I heard a maid sing in the valley below: / “O don’t deceive me! /O do not leave me! /How could you use a poor maiden so?’” The drafts of Early one morning [M2] retain the songs’ “deserted maiden” narrative, except that the speaker represents himself as leaving a woman because of her father’s opposition: ‘She was lovely and young and her father unkind. / She could wait but I was hasty inclined’. The drafts also contain detail such as ‘The baker’s cart passed with a smell of new bread’ (see CP1978, 332, 452). Partly on Eleanor Farjeon’s advice, Thomas purged narrative and descriptive elements. He also cut a refrain from between the lines of each couplet (B begins: ‘Early one morning in May I set out./Away for ever / And nobody I knew was about, / Away somewhere, away for ever’). The cuts have made the poem more cryptic, surreal and ominous as an adaptation of the ‘going away’ folksong.
3-4. I’m bound away for ever, /Away somewhere, away for ever. The refrain (with its internal refrains) attached to the first and last couplets concentrates the ambiguity of the speaker’s project. In juxtaposing ‘bound’ and ‘away’ from the refrains of ‘Rio Grande’, Thomas creates a semi-oxymoron. He insinuates the contrary meaning of ‘bound’, as if ‘liberty’, with its uncertain horizons (‘somewhere’), might actually be necessity or a dark destiny. ‘Bound’ resonates with ‘burnt’ and ‘banged’: all three sound disturbingly final.
6. burnt my letters. Thomas would do a lot of this from August onwards, as his family prepared to leave Steep and he cleared the decks for joining the Royal Artillery. The phrase has the ring of ‘burning my boats’.
Ms: M2, B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: Early one morning [P] [Song 3] Note on title: In CP2004 the poem has no title.
It was upon (126)
21 June 1916
See note on Thomas’s sonnets (294). ‘A score years’ connects the poem with his field ‘Diary’ entry for 30 June 1895 in The Woodland Life: ‘Grass of the rising aftermath or “lattermath” beautifully green after a quickening rain, whilst the thistled pastures are grey’ (TWL, 185). The ‘lattermath’ is the second or later mowing of grass for hay. In the poem, the resurrected image aptly figures delayed ‘accomplishment’; while the oxymoron ‘hoar Spring’ encompasses all the paradoxes of Thomas’s second chance, his becoming a poet or soldier poet. In August 1914 he had asked Eleanor Farjeon with regard to poetry: ‘Did anyone ever begin at 36 in the shade?’ (EF, 81). The sequencing of phrase and clause is integral to how It was upon shuttles between past, a past future, present and future. The upbeat momentum of the octet (the pulse of youth) climaxes in assonantal words strategically placed: ‘Drenched…Flushed…outspread…possessed’. Here Thomas sexualises youthful ambition, and ‘possessed’ encloses ‘the future’. The maturely speculative sestet dramatises ‘recall…and question’ by delaying those verbs until two or three lines after their object, as the open-ended last line distances the incalculable ‘lattermath’. The future is becoming a more explicit theme in Thomas’s poems.
Ms: M2, B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 6 rest, rest
Women he liked (127)
22 June 1916
In The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans Mr Torrance says of an old-fashioned squire: ‘he was pure rustic English, and his white hair and beard had an honourable look as if it had been granted to him for some rare service…I think he knew men as well as horses; at least he knew everyone in that country, had known them all when they and he were boys. He was a man as English, as true to the soil, as a Ribston pippin’ (HGLM, 148-9). ‘Shovel-bearded Bob’ suggests that ‘Lob’ ‘lives yet’ in Thomas’s poetry, but the poem is tinged by his darker concerns at this period. Smith writes:
‘Women he liked’ seems full of the presence of human beings. Its ‘slow-climbing train’ from which travellers hear the stormcock singing in the elms seems to dominate the landscape. The elms themselves testify to that presence, for long ago Farmer Hayward planted them out of love. But it is in this very act, in this love, that the displacement of the human begins. The man himself is an ambiguous patriarch, at once an earth spirit, liking women and loving horses, altering the landscape by his acts, and, at the same time, an unintentionally negative force… There is an omen here of an England changing for the worse, as a result of acts which are intended to be beneficial but actually destroy…It is only in retrospect that the shift from nightingales to stormcock becomes an omen of an England itself moving from calm to turbulence… In June 1916…the slough and gloom of a lane which was once named and claimed by no one, could not but call up the desolation of another No Man’s Land, in Flanders. Bob’s love and labours have not reclaimed the landscape; rather, they have turned ‘a thing beloved’ into something else, alien and negative. (SS, 76-8)
2. Old Farmer Hayward of the Heath. The poem may have begun as a dual gloss on Hayward’s Heath in Sussex and some actual Bob’s Lane. Considered as etymology, it acts on Thomas’s belief: ‘Better pure imagination than rash science in handling place names’ (see note, 220).
7. stormcock: the missel-thrush whose song is said to presage bad weather.
16. the name alone survives. In Thomas’s M2 draft ‘Only the name survives’ is changed to the final version. Perhaps he felt that ‘Only the name’ too closely echoed the last line of Old Man: also occupied with names and a dark vista. This poem’s ‘gloom’ may be mitigated by the fact that ‘the name’, so unpredictably acquired, ‘survives’. Thomas’s key idea about language (previously quoted with reference to Old Man and A Tale) is that ‘words outlive the life of which they seem the lightest emanation…the things are forgotten, and it is an aspect of them, a recreation of them, a finer development of them, which endures in the written words’ (RJ, 298). The achieved naming of ‘Bob’s Lane’ reflexively applies to the poem and its author. Insofar as Women he liked (following It was upon) ponders the paradoxes of creativity, Thomas has proved to be a ‘stormcock’, rather than ‘nightingale’, poet.
Ms: M2, B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: Women he liked Bob’s Lane Note on title: the title in CP1978 derives from a letter to Eleanor Farjeon: ‘Bob’s Lane I liked’ [EF, 201]. PTP provides no warrant for this – and the ‘name’ should come as a surprise.
T
here was a time (128)
23 June 1916
There was a time probes Thomas’s metamorphosis from anguished introvert to soldier (its plot parallels the twist of fate in Women he liked). His letters, many of which are summed up by ‘I sought yet hated pity’ (l.11), frequently propose that only some external agent can change his life. Here he acknowledges war as a paradoxical saviour, a perversely accepted test. A month before enlisting he told Frost: ‘Frankly I do not want to go, but hardly a day passes without my thinking I should…How much of it comes of unwillingness to confess I am unfit’ (RFET, 66-7). More recently (21 May) Thomas had reported: ‘actually I find less to grumble at out loud than 10 years ago: I suppose I am more bent on making the best of what I have got instead of airing the fact that I deserve so much more’ (RFET, 131). Occupied with the nature of ‘strength’, ‘weakness’ and ‘might’, the poem also implicates broader questions, such as the relation between the artist and the man of action (for Thomas and Nietzsche, see note 227). Formally, There was a time is an extended Shakespearean sonnet with an extra quatrain before the ‘turn’.
1. There was a time when: a conscious echo of the opening words of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality’. Time-lags are on Thomas’s mind.
8-9. Because it was less mighty than my mind / Had dreamed of. This psychological reflex is common to the Romanticism of Thomas, Yeats and Philip Larkin. Cf. Yeats, ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’, and Larkin: ‘I never like what I’ve got’ (ed. Anthony Thwaite, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985 [London: Faber & Faber, 1992], 165).
10, 15. weakness: cf. The Other (l.85).
16-17. wage…gives up eyes and breath. Cf. Rupert Brooke’s sonnet, ‘III. The Dead’: ‘These laid the world away…gave up the years to be /…Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, / And paid his subjects with a royal wage’. Despite Thomas’s critique of Brooke’s war sonnets in No one cares less than I (see note, 299), in this quasi-sonnet he takes their language a little more seriously while still contesting it. Here the speaker speaks only for himself; ‘wage’ is allowed to find its own value; ‘gives up eyes and breath’ is no euphemism; and ‘what’ makes the object of the whole exercise radically uncertain.
Ms: M2, B. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 18 would [B, CP1928, CP1944] can [LP, CP1920] Note: The nuances of ‘would’ seem more complex and powerful. In M2 ‘can’ is substituted for ‘might’. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.
The Green Roads (128)
28 June 1916
‘The forest is a fragment left 6 miles from here [Hare Hall Camp], the best of all this county. I go there every time I can. There is a cottage not far off where you might like to stay some day. The people have been there 53 years. You can’t imagine a wilder quieter place’ (EF, 202). The Green Roads continues the symbolic journey that Thomas’s poetry has resumed in fresh guises. Like The Other, the poem is an emblematic landscape with fairy-tale features (‘goose feathers’, ‘forest’, ‘castle keep’), archetypal inhabitants, and a mix of heimlich and unheimlich prospects (see note, 162). Its mythic aura owes something to Thomas’s depiction of ‘Iron Wood’ in Norse Tales: ‘The trees were oak-trees, twisted, bare and black, and he could not see far into the wood. All was black, except one tiny blot of orange on a low branch of one oak-tree. All was silent except one tiny song which came from that blot of orange. It was a robin singing, and [King Gangler] stood watching it. Nothing was moving inside the wood…Years went by, and he forgot the forest. Now he remembered it, and shuddered at the thought of the old Giantess and her wolf children that would some day devour the sun and moon’ (NT, 16). Formally, too, Thomas summons the folk-ghost, recently heard in the different couplets and refrains of Early one morning. Ear as well as eye draws the reader towards the ‘forest’ – the word itself being relentlessly repeated. The variable line length, un-rhyming couplets and the second line’s wandering internal rhyme (a trap that trips up the ear) add to the unease.
3-4. Like marks…To show his track. ‘I do not know how much I may have dwelt on the story in later years, but Grimm’s Hansel and Grethel, the children going out into the wood to be lost, dropping a trail of stones behind them and finding their way back, but failing to do so when they used breadcrumbs which the birds ate, came to be to my mind one of the great stories of the world’ (CET, 57).
6. the nettle towers: cf ‘the nettle reigns’ (The Mill-Water, l.4).
12. middle deep. Each word could be either noun or adjective.
16. Excepting perhaps me. This suggests that poetry remains mnemonically vigilant when ‘all things’ are pulled towards an oblivion for which their own ‘forgetting’ may be partly responsible. As in The Thrush, memory distinguishes the poet (and his modes of refrain) from his ‘repetitive’ bird-counterpart. Thomas changed a repeated ‘twiddle’ to ‘repeat’ (EF, 206).
Ms: M2, B. Published text: P.
The Gallows (129)
3, 4 July 1916
The Thomases were staying with Vivian Locke Ellis at Selsfield House, East Grinstead: ‘At Ellises I could not help writing these 4 verses on the theme of some stories I used to tell Baba there’ (EF, 202). The stories must have been rather macabre, as is an earlier ‘dream’ in which rural ‘men and women’ are seen ‘in a kind of heaven where all day long for ever they did those things which had most pleased or most taken hold of them in life’:
The gamekeeper stood, with smoking gun barrels, and a cloud of jay’s feathers still in the air, and among the May foliage about him. Pride, stupidity, servility clouded his face as in his days of nature, and above him in the oaks innumerable jays laughed because beauty, like folly, was immortal there.
The squire, more faint, and whether to his joy or not I could not discern, was standing under a bough on which hung white owls, wood owls, falcons, crows, magpies, cats, hedgehogs, stoats, weasels, some bloody, some with gaping stomachs, some dismembered or crushed, some fleshless, some heaving like boiling fat, and on them and him the sun shone hot. (HE, 193-4)
Thomas disliked gamekeepers – rarely popular with Nature-lovers – and had come to associate them with war (see note on An Old Song I, 168). He remarks that Richard Jefferies’s veneration for keepers might induce ‘disgust with such a policeman god’ (RJ, 117). Even if it was probably too soon for him to have grasped the enormity of the Somme (on 1 July, 20,000 British soldiers had been killed), The Gallows turns a familiar rural image into a powerful fable of mass slaughter. This misnamed ‘keeper’ or hanging judge has something in common with the ‘God’ of February Afternoon. But the ‘things’ on the tree also accuse humanity as a species. Thomas uses folksong structures to transmute anger into cosmic irony. Intricate refrains build up the horror and the indictment.
Ms: M2, B. Published text: P.
The Dark Forest (130)
1, 5 and 10 July 1916
‘The other 3 [verses] I believe are no good, the forest is perhaps a too obvious metaphor’; ‘I suspect it is a bad Maeterlinckian thing’ (EF, 202, 219). Thomas had attacked Maeterlinck’s ‘entirely conscious symbolism’ (MM, 33). Coombes writes: ‘Forest’ is one of the most frequent symbols in the poetry, but when we attempt to fix its significance we find not only that it varies subtly according to the context, but also that our terms of explanation tend to sound heavy and clumsy in comparison with the poet’s touch’ (HC, 220). One context for The Dark Forest may be the increasing ‘multitudes’ of war dead. The M2 draft ends with an explicitly elegiac stanza:
Not even beloved and lover or child and mother,
One from within, one from
Without the forest could recognise each other,
Since they have changed their home.
9-10. foxglove…marguerite: cf. the symbolic flora of The sun used to shine. The ‘purple’ foxglove, like the crocuses in the earlier poem, may be linked in Thomas’s mind with ‘sunless Hades fields’ and Persephone.
Ms: M2, B. Published text: L
P. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.
When he should laugh (130)
15 July 1916
See note on Thomas’s short poems (284). In this aphoristic quatrain ‘laughable’ sums up the coldly ironical aspect of Thomas’s vision. Cf. Some eyes condemn, lines 3-8. Perhaps the ‘wiser’ man protects the feelings of ‘all such as are foolish and slow of thought and slower of speech, and laugh at what they love because others do and then weep in solitude’ (HE, 151).
Ms: B. Published text: P.
How at once (131)
10 August 1916
This poem was written when Thomas was ‘upset by vaccination’ and bored in hospital (LGB, 270). ‘I…shall be lucky to do more [verses] till the swifts are back again’ (EF, 209). By ‘next May’ Thomas had been killed. He told Eleanor Farjeon: ‘By the way, you misread that poem you didn’t so much like – about the swifts – missing the point that year after year I see them, realising it is the last time, i.e. just before they go away for the winter (early in August). Perhaps it is too much natural history’ (EF, 213). In fact, there is less and less ‘natural history’ in the poems of this period. Perhaps because they constitute “poetry of preparation” (in whatever form), their symbolic skeleton is more visible. How at once re-opens questions of ‘seeing’, ‘knowing’ and absence previously explored in First known when lost, but here they take on a self-elegiac cadence.
Ms: B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: How at once The Swifts Note on title: the title in CP1978 derives from the letter to Eleanor Farjeon quoted above. PTP provides no warrant for this.
