The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  Gone, gone again (131)

  3 September 1916

  Gone, gone again starts by brooding on the last word of How at once. The bleakly repeated ‘gone’ and ‘again’ are echoed by ‘oranges’, ‘young’, ‘began’ and ‘dung’. Thomas was now an officer cadet with the Royal Artillery in London, which may have prompted this gloomy retrospect. Lines 15-16 constitute a stark summa of the war (a month after its second anniversary); and images of fallen apples and broken glass, now given a darker tinge, recall The sun used to shine and I built myself a house of glass, poems linked with his decision to enlist. Gone, gone again also looks back to The Mill-Water and The Thrush: poems that similarly consist of eight quatrains and mainly two-beat lines. While the former is rhymed ABBA and the latter mostly ABCA, the rhyme scheme of Gone, gone again runs through six variations. This fits the unresolved way in which Thomas revisits material from the earlier poems. The urban ‘old house’, like ‘the old mill’ in The Mill-Water, focuses anxieties about the dissolution of home and the self: anxieties that seem to have become still less controllable. In The Thrush the poet-speaker’s power to ‘read’ different months figures the complexity of human consciousness at work on the world. The entropic first quatrain of Gone, gone again flattens out difference: an effect replicated by ‘Youth, love, age and pain’. ‘Not memorable’ switches off the faculty that distinguishes man and poet from thrush. There is also no hint, in this depressive scenario (‘empty quays’), that poetry itself might be a therapeutic agent.

  11. Blenheim oranges: a large yellow eating apple with orange flecks, given its martial name by the subject of Thomas’s Life of the Duke of Marlborough.

  12. grubby. Cooke points out that this word ‘combines the sense of “dirty” and “eaten by grubs”’ (WC, 141).

  14. the lost one: possibly Hope Webb (see notes 238, 279), although the seasonal context does not fit her.

  17-24. Look at the old house…age and pain. See general note to Two Houses (255). This London house, in the first of three London poems, identifies the speaker’s state with the vanishing landscape of Thomas’s childhood. He mourned ‘the charm of the older suburban houses and gardens, yielding nothing to the tide that has surrounded them on every side, until one day their cedars fall and the air is full of mortar and plaster, flying from ceiling and wall, and settling on the grass and prostrate ivy’ (RJ, 105-6). As Thomas comes closer to departure for France, his symbolic houses represent tenancy of the mind, body and earth as ever more precarious. He speaks as the ghost of haunted houses:

  Hanging from the wall in rags, too wet even to flap, are the remains of an auctioneer’s announcement of a sale at the house behind. Mahogany – oak chests – certain ounces of silver – two thousand books – portraits and landscapes and pictures of horses and game – of all these and how much else has the red house been disembowelled. It is all shadowy within, behind the windows, like the eyes of a corpse, and without sound, or form, or light…

  A house is a perdurable garment, giving and taking of life. If it only fit, straightway it begins to chronicle our days. It beholds our sorrows and our joys; its untalebearing walls know all our thoughts, and if it be such a house as grows after the builders are gone, our thoughts presently owe much to it; we have but to glance at a certain shadow or a curve in the wall-paper pattern to recall them, softened as by an echo… It is aware of birth, marriage and death; and who dares say there is not kneaded into the stones a record more pleasing than brass? (SC, 235-6, 239)

  Ms: B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: Gone, gone again Blenheim Oranges Note on title: the title in CP1978 derives from a reference to ‘those last verses – the Blenheim Oranges – of mine’ in a letter to Eleanor Farjeon [EF, 213]. PTP provides no warrant for this.

  That girl’s clear eyes (132)

  10 September 1916

  See note on Thomas’s sonnets (294). In its opening and closing lines, assonantal rhyme-sounds tighten the mesh of this Shakespearean sonnet. CP1944 has ‘Handel Street’ in brackets after the title. Thomas was now attending the Royal Artillery School in Handel Street, Camden: ‘I am not enjoying this half & half cadet stage a bit’ (LJB, 80). The School was close to the Foundlings’ Hospital for which Thomas Coram received a royal charter in 1739. The composer Handel gave his name to the street and money to the Hospital. The Hospital site is now a children’s playground: Coram’s Fields. The ‘stony square sunlit’ is Brunswick Square, built as recreation grounds for the Hospital. It still has a particularly splendid plane tree, which might have sheltered Thomas. The sonnet brings together disparate people: an anonymous ‘girl’, ‘children’ from the Hospital, and ‘us’: implicitly, Thomas and his fellow cadets. It may be the reader’s job to join up the dots since the point is non-communication and disjunction – which extend to the speaker’s psychology and to the ‘sealed’, coded quality of the poem itself. In Roads ‘reveal’ is linked with ‘Heaven’, ‘conceal’ with ‘Hell’. For Thomas, the failure of ‘eyes’ to meet denotes rifts, secrets or denials, whether about sexual attraction or war. ‘Like tombs’ gives some of the show away. The men ‘at [their] tasks’ are ‘sealed’ off from their environment as well as from each other, although or because that environment seems complicit in their situation. Cf. Wilfred Owen, ‘The Send-Off’: ‘So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went’.

  1-8. concealed… In spite of many words. Thomas wrote to Walter de la Mare from France (9 March 1917): ‘One is absolutely friendless here. Everybody has something to conceal and he does so by pretending to be like everybody else. All the talk is shop or worse’ (SL, 147).

  10. pleasure and pain: cf. a refrain of The Gallows.

  11. tasted…sunlit: cf. ‘tasted sunlight’, The Other (l.15).

  13. children, line after line. Sunlight, music, and regimented children ambivalently recall one of the epiphanies (‘Soldiers in line’) by which the speaker in Tears is moved, perhaps towards war (see note, 178). London, scene of that epiphany, now hub of the war, has become ‘stony’ as well as ‘sunlit’. And while (as in Tears) the most expressive language is that of the senses, this poem implies their power to deceive. Coombes notes: ‘the blazing music, the marching children, are themselves hiding a reality; in their attractiveness they (almost) blot out the memory of the pity and profound devotion of the founder of the hospital’ (HC, 224).

  Ms: B. Published text: LP. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.

  What will they do? (133)

  15 September 1916

  ‘Gone’, implicit in That girl’s clear eyes, resurfaces in this blend of valediction and malediction. A truncated sonnet, What will they do? reads between the lines of its precursor. Thomas set high standards for friendship: ‘I sometimes thought…of how there is now no man living with whom I can be completely myself – Frost nearest of all, but I think not quite, because I am a little anxious to please him’ (letter to Helen, 11 October 1914, NLW). He often suffered from the paranoid belief that he was less visible or necessary to other people than they to him. At a performance of Bottomley’s King Lear’s Wife he was perversely pleased when the changes effected in his appearance by the army confirmed this: ‘Nobody recognises me now. Sturge Moore, E[dward] Marsh, & R.C. Trevelyan stood a yard off & I didn’t trouble to awake them to stupid recognition’ (RFET, 132). More darkly, the poem’s solipsistic, self-answered question echoes Thomas’s suicidal thoughts in 1907: ‘I sat thinking about ways of killing myself…Then I went out and thought what effects my suicide would have…My acquaintances – I no longer have friends – would talk in a day or two (when they met) and try to explain and of course see suggestions in the past’ (SL, 44). The indifferent ‘they’ in ‘the loud street’ may also represent more public forms of ‘insensibility’ – Wilfred Owen’s word.

  12. Until that one turned back and lightly laughed. Cf. Virginia Woolf: ‘It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and l
augh, and run up the steps of omnibuses’ (Jacob’s Room [London: Penguin Books, 1992], 69).

  Ms: B. Published text: LP. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.

  The Trumpet (133)

  26-8? September 1916

  On 20 September Thomas had moved to firing camp: the Royal Artillery Barracks at Trowbridge, Wiltshire: ‘We are in tents and so we see the night sky. The trumpet blows for everything and I like that too, tho the trumpeter is not excellent’ (EF, 214); ‘I have written some verses suggested by the trumpet calls which go all day. They are not well done and the trumpet is cracked, but the Reveillé pleases me (more than it does most sleepers)’ (EF, 219). Cooke observes that, because The Trumpet stands first in P and hence in most editions of CP: ‘it is sometimes read as a poem of the “visions of glory” category. It is, however, wholly different from such poems and testifies more to the ambiguity of Thomas’s commitment. It was as if he had to pervert his own nature to adapt himself to the war, and the impotent climax of the first stanza…amounts almost to an act of desecration against the lovers, who represent a norm of sanity in his other poems…A phrase like “the old wars” cuts right across any optimistic belief in a “war to end war”’ (WC, 235). Here Cooke alludes to the fact that The Trumpet also stands first in the first section (‘Visions of Glory’) of I.M. Parsons’s anthology of Great War poetry, Men Who March Away (London: Chatto, 1965). Parsons takes his title from Hardy’s ‘“Men Who March Away”’: Song of the Soldiers’, praised by Thomas as ‘an impersonal song which seems to me the best of the time, as it is the least particular and occasional’ (‘War Poetry’, Poetry and Drama 2, 8 [December 1914], 345; see note on Cock-Crow, 257). The Trumpet seems aware both of Hardy and of A.E. Housman’s ‘Reveille’, with which Thomas begins his (pre-war) Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air:

  Wake: the silver dusk returning

  Up the beach of darkness brims,

  And the ship of sunrise burning

  Strands upon the eastern rims.

  Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters,

  Trampled to the floor it spanned,

  And the tent of night in tatters

  Straws the sky-pavilioned land.

  Up, lad, up, ’tis late for lying:

  Hear the drums of morning play;

  Hark, the empty highways crying

  ‘Who’ll beyond the hills away?’…

  Whereas Housman backs his rhetoric of early rising with a martial metaphor, Hardy brings war, and pro-war sentiment, into the foreground: ‘What of the faith and fire within us /Men who march away / Ere the barn-cocks say /Night is growing grey, / Leaving all that here can win us’. Thomas reverts to Housman’s metaphorical scheme and imperative mood: mimicry of the trumpet-call boosts ‘Rise up’. But he switches the focus to dawn itself as a revelation of ‘this earth newborn’. Here ‘rising’ means something more radical than getting up or getting on with it. Thomas absorbs Reveillé, as he does the bugle of No one cares less than I, into the dialectics of his own voice. It is indeed a subversive trumpet call that refers to ‘the old wars’ (cf. The Word, l.7), and urges ‘men’ (perhaps those who ‘march away’) to forget ‘everything’ except earth’s loveliness. Yet, for Thomas, a visionary moment can be as problematic as a ‘vision of glory’. If The Trumpet revisits the dewy landscape of The Glory, as well as Cock-Crow, a poem bound up with his decision to enlist, it does so with added ambivalence – a pattern in poems of this period.

  7. scatter: perhaps an echo of Housman’s ‘shatter’.

  Ms: B. Published text: P.

  When first (134)

  ? October 1916

  Apart from PTP, there are no ms. or typescript sources for this poem. R. George Thomas dates it to 1 or 2 July 1916: ‘From internal evidence I assume it was written after the poet had moved his books from his hill-top study down to his cottage in Steep village during Saturday and Sunday, 30 June and 1 July 1916’ (CP1978, 344). Yet M2 contains drafts of all the poems (except The Cherry Trees) that Thomas wrote between 4 March (Celandine) and 5 July (first draft of The Dark Forest) 1916. On 2 October he told Bottomley in terms that parallel the poem: ‘I have just seen Steep for the last time. I had 15 hours there’ (LGB, 271). He was then moving his family to High Beech (near Loughton, Essex), where he had been billeted in October 1915. Since the PTP typescript of When first looks like Eleanor Farjeon’s work, it may be significant that Thomas’s letters to her for October 1916 have been lost.

  Parallels between When first and The sun used to shine include rhyme scheme, run-on lines and quatrains, speech-rhythms adapted both to walking and to remembering, and a valedictory tilt – though here Thomas is mainly saying goodbye to himself. When first is more optimistic about ‘the future and the maps’ than are most of Thomas’s valedictions in Autumn 1916. ‘Just hope has gone for ever’ signifies not despair, but the end of youthful expectancy. The poem’s ‘beat’ gradually revives ‘the heart’s dance’ in different terms.

  12-13. this year, // The twelfth. The Thomases moved to Berryfield Cottage, the first of three houses that they rented in the Steep area, in November 1906, but they had been house-hunting there since 1905.

  17. Just hope has gone for ever: possibly a pun on Hope Webb’s name (see notes, 238, 279).

  Ms: see above. Published text: P.

  The Child in the Orchard (135)

  October 1916

  Except for rhyme scheme, Thomas’s second poem spoken by a child is formally identical to The Child on the Cliffs (see note, 199). If the LP editors gave the poem its title, this would explain their choice. Yet formal similarity highlights difference: this child expresses a life wish rather than a death wish. Thomas’s spell at firing camp in Wiltshire seems to have reactivated ‘Lob’ along with ‘the Westbury White Horse’, prompting another ‘will and testament’ poem. Given a folksong lilt and nursery-rhyme idiom, the child’s voice permits a playful return to the bases of English tradition. What the child, as inheritor, must ‘learn’ is symbolically encompassed by an actual ‘earthy’ horse, a horse that spans history and ‘rhyme’, folk art, and a litany of birds.

  5. hern: an archaic and dialect form of ‘heron’.

  7-8. ‘Who was the lady…Banbury Cross? Two answers offered by the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes are Queen Elizabeth I and Lady Godiva.

  14. the Westbury White Horse. ‘High above me, on my left hand, eastward, was the grandest, cliffiest part of the Plain wall, the bastioned angle where it bends round southward by Westbury and Warminster, bare for the most part, carved with the White Horse and with double tiers of chalk pits’ (IPS, 176).

  20. At the age of six. ‘I see that “At the age of six” is a rather rough way of explaining who speaks. But he did tell me he was six too and seemed to realise he had a long way to go’ (EF, 118).

  Ms: B. Published text: LP. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.

  Lights Out (135)

  November 1916

  On 6 November Thomas told Eleanor Farjeon: ‘Now I have actually done still another piece [since The Child in the Orchard] which I call “Lights Out”. It sums up what I have often thought at that call. I wish it were as brief – 2 pairs of long notes. I wonder is it nearly as good as it might be’ (EF, 218). Coombes warns against one way of reading Lights Out: ‘we should disregard as far as we are able what it may seem to possess of prophecy; the poignancy doesn’t need any adventitious stimulus’ (HC, 212). Helen Thomas evidently worried that the poem might be received as a suicide note. Myfanwy Thomas writes: ‘Though “Lights Out” obviously has undertones of death, Mother was absolutely certain that the poem is initially about going to sleep, that my father would never have used a euphemism for Death or anything else’ (letter, quoted ETFN 54 [August 2005], 10). By making ‘going to sleep’ an active principle, Lights Out inverts the traditional trope as employed in Sidney’s sonnet XXXIX, copied into the Thomases’ ‘Golden Book’ of literary touchstones (B
odleian Library, MS. Don. e. 10): ‘Come Sleep, O Sleep, the certain knot of peace, / The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,/…With shield of proof shield me from out the prease / Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw’. The poem also transposes the scenario of Thomas’s essay ‘Insomnia’: ‘Night after night deliberately we take upon ourselves the utmost possible weakness, because it is the offering most acceptable to sleep…I find that I desire to enter without gradation into perfect helplessness, and I exercise a quiet resolution against the strains even of memory’ (LS, 39). For Thomas, sleep and dream are usually positive, aligned with the creative process:

  It seems indeed to me that to sleep is owed a portion of the deliberation given to death. If life is an apprenticeship to death, waking may be an education for sleep. We are not thoughtful enough about sleep; yet it is more than half of that great portion of life spent really in solitude…We truly ought to enter upon sleep as into a strange, fair chapel. Fragrant and melodious antechamber of the unseen, sleep is a novitiate for the beyond…And when the world is too much with me, when the past is a reproach harrying me with dreadful faces, the present a fierce mockery, the future an open grave, it is sweet to sleep. I have closed a well-loved book, ere the candle began to fail, that I might sleep, and let the soul take her pleasure in the deeps of eternity. (RAP, 38-40)

  I fell into a deep sleep; and in my sleep I had a dream…A great forest hung round about. The might of its infinite silence and repose, indeed, never ceased to weigh upon me in my dream. I could hear sounds: they were leagues away. The trees which I could see were few: I felt that they must be thousands deep on every hand. (HS, 71-2)