The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  I had a not unpleasant half-dream seeing myself going far up an infinitely long pillared corridor. It may have been soon after this that I began to have a trivial but strange experience which has been repeated once or twice a year ever since. It happens mostly when I am lying down in bed waiting for sleep, and only on nights when I sleep well. I close my eyes and I find myself very dimly seeing expand before me a vague immense space enclosed with invisible boundaries. Yet it can hardly be called seeing. All is grey, dull, formless, and I am aware chiefly by some other means than sight of vast unshapely towering masses of a colourless subject [?substance] which I feel to be soft. Through these things and the space I grope slowly. They tend to fade away, but I can recover them by an effort perhaps half a dozen times, and do so because it is somehow pleasant or alluring. Then I usually sleep. During the experience I am well awake and am remembering that it is a repetition, wondering what it means and if anything new will occur, and taking care not to disturb the process. (CET, 152)

  Like all Thomas’ forest symbolism, the symbolism of Lights Out seems multi-layered: ‘shelf above shelf’. A visionary passage in The South Country speaks of moments when ‘a window is thrown open upon the unfathomable deep…we stand ever at the edge of Eternity and fall in many times before we die’ (SC, 24). In crossing psychic ‘borders’, Lights Out completes a circuit that began with The Other (‘The forest ended’). Indeed, The Other strangely anticipates the way in which Thomas’s inner journey doubles back on itself during the second half of 1916. As for outer journeys (not really distinct): the speaker’s balancing of will and fate reflects Thomas’s current demeanour towards life and war. He is given sufficient agency to make Lights Out, in part, a quest poem: ‘losing’ and finding oneself seem oddly equivalent. Like The Trumpet, its dialectical complement, this poem absorbs war into a larger picture. For Thomas, his (statistically likely) death counted less than the existential test of the trenches. On 9 September he had told Frost: ‘I am rather impatient to go out & be shot at. That is all I want, to do something if I am discovered to be any use, but in any case to be made to run risks, to be put through it’ (RFET, 147). At one level, ‘To go into the unknown’ accepts this test. Since July 1915, if not since December 1914, Thomas has set out to imagine the future – not just his own – as fully as possible in the time available. The ‘forest brink’ is also a dead-line. 7-12. Many a road…sink. As in the first stanza, Thomas mimetically plays syntax against line, ‘winding’ against ‘straight’. ‘Travellers’/‘blurs’ aptly ‘blurs’ a pattern of monosyllabic rhyming on crisp ‘k’ sounds. The last three lines constitute a diminuendo of six, five and four syllables. As at the end of other stanzas, the final short line reinforces the sense that there is no turning back.

  25. The tall forest towers: cf. ‘the nettle towers’ (The Green Roads, l.6).

  Ms: B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 3 Forest Forest, 4 straight, straight 6 cannot can not 8 That,…crack, That…crack 9 brink, brink 10 travellers travellers, 13 ends, ends – 14 ends, ends; 17 ends ends, 23 enter and leave enter, and leave, 25 towers; towers: 27 shelf; shelf: Note: CP1978 follows the punctuation of B on the grounds that it ‘seems to give a clearer indication of how the poem should be read’ [366]; this edition follows P. Note on title: Title is given in B.

  The long small room (136)

  November 1916

  Myfanwy Thomas relates this poem to the fact that her father ‘liked to work in a stone out-building in [the] very large garden’ of Selsfield House, Vivian Locke Ellis’s home at East Grinstead (MT, 47). In The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans the same building may have contributed to Aunt Rachel’s house, which ‘was hidden by ivy, which thrust itself through the walls and up between the flagstones of the floor, flapped in at the windows, and spread itself so densely over the panes that the mice ran up and down it, and you could see their pale, silky bellies through the glass – often they looked in and entered. The ivy was full of sparrows’ nests’. The house has ‘a large fireplace’, and ‘you never came down in the morning feeling that you had done the same yesterday and would do the same tomorrow, as if each day was a new, badly written line in a copy-book, with the same senseless words at the head of every page’ (HGLM, 85-7). After Lights Out, The long small room seems spoken posthumously: as by a ghost who haunts ‘the dark house’ of life with unfinished business, a ghost who still pursues memory: ‘When I look back’ (see note on Thomas’s ‘ghosts’, 202). The moon, ‘casement’, ‘old ivy and older brick’ have a Gothic aura, and the detached ‘hand’ is a disturbing synecdoche.

  1. willows in the west: changed from ‘the distant west’ in B, presumably owing to Eleanor Farjeon’s criticism (see below).

  2. Narrowed up to the end the fireplace filled. Here the stanza itself ‘narrows up’ from spaced, open-vowelled monosyllables (‘long small room’) to the cluttered consonants of ‘fireplace filled’. There are hints of a coffin-shape.

  12-13. my right hand //Crawling crab-like. Thomas’s years of literary drudgery make the movement of pen over paper an inevitable image for human bondage. ‘Crab-like’ implies that his life-writing, including the poem in progress, has always been at an awkward angle to the universe. The sense of agency in Lights Out is absent from this slow-motion symbolic journey, lent an Oriental fatalism by the last line.

  16. The hundred last leaves stream upon the willow. ‘I am worried about the impression the willow made on you. As a matter of fact I started with that last line as what I was working to. I am only fearing it has a sort of Japanesy suddenness of ending. But it is true, whether or not it is a legitimate switch to make’ (EF, 221). Thomas may have changed the line (see above and EF, 222) because he ‘feared’ that he was straying onto the territory of Imagism, with its Japanese models. But even when referring back to the first line, the effect remains boldly ‘sudden’.

  Ms: B. Published text: P.

  The Sheiling (137)

  23 November 1916

  Thomas, who would be commissioned 2nd Lieutenant the next day, was on leave, and saying goodbye in person as well as poems. He wrote The Sheiling when ‘travelling back from Gordon Bottomley’s (Silverdale)’ (B). Bottomley lived at The Sheiling, Silverdale, near Carnforth, on the edge of the Lake District. Thomas writes of an earlier visit (June 1914) to this northern limestone landscape: ‘the house…is on a hill top by itself, on all sides approached over slippery tussocky turf and stone mixed with thorn and brier and bracken. The house is only cut off from this by a stone wall and its trees; hardly any garden: most of the land inside the wall is the same as outside, stony and grassy’ (LTH, 72). During Thomas’s last stay, Bottomley remembers that they saw ‘an epic turbulence of storm sweeping towards us from the mountains of the Kirkstone Pass on the northern horizon’ (LGB, 5).

  Bottomley (1874-1948), a chronic invalid threatened by lung haemorrhages, was a poet and verse-dramatist whose poems or plays appeared in most of the ‘Georgian’ anthologies. From 1902 Thomas used his correspondence with Bottomley as a form of psychotherapy (Bottomley’s own letters no longer exist). He called him ‘Comforter’; Bottomley called Thomas ‘Edward the Confessor’. Thomas confessed his fluctuating mental state, the exhaustion induced by reviewing and book-commissions, his dread that he was destroying his talent. Significantly, he wrote less to Bottomley after the advent of Frost and poetry. But their literary interchange continued. Bottomley ensured that Thomas’s poems appeared in AANP, and tried to get Edward Marsh to publish them in Georgian Poetry. As regards Bottomley’s own work: whether in the letters or a review, Thomas could be severe. Reviewing Chambers of Imagery, he calls Bottomley’s ‘new verses…difficult…because they are not always wrought up to the condition of poetry, but seem to have been left in a raw state that can appeal to the intelligence only, except in a few places’ (Daily Chronicle, 5 February 1907). A letter to Frost contains similar but harsher criticism of Bottomley’s verse play King Lear’s Wife: ‘He had to make Goneril run a knife through a rabbit’s eyes. Well, I
firmly believe that if he had imagination he would have kept such a thing dark supposing he could go the length of imagining it. As it was, it sounded just a thought out cruelty, worse far than cruelty itself with passion behind it. Of course he pretended there was passion. There wasn’t’ (RFET, 131-2).

  The Sheiling does not celebrate (literary) friendship with the same intensity as The sun used to shine. It is also unusual among Thomas’s ‘house’ poems. In part, it belongs to the genre of poet addressing patron, as, in grander style, Yeats salutes Lady Gregory and Coole Park. Like Yeats, Thomas exploits the contrast between extreme landscape and a house that symbolises the architecture of civilisation. The fact that indoors and outdoors interpenetrate (‘ancient stairs’, ‘Painted by the wild air’) suggests that art can negotiate the ‘wild’. Yet l.13 obliquely sets a limit to the vision of those ‘Safe resting there’ by implying (‘But’) that they might be aesthetic spectators (see note on The Watchers, 290). That the air is also ‘travelling’ points in the artistic as well as literal direction that Thomas himself is taking: away from ‘peace’. As a psychological parable, the poem associates the house with Bottomley’s benign therapy; ‘a land of stone’ with Thomas’s need, his ‘cold heart’, perhaps his greater strengths. Each stanza has two unrhymed line-endings (apart from the off-rhyme ‘house’/‘peace’) and a single rhyme-sound that includes a same-rhyme. The overall rhythm blends containment with incompletion: a hint of horizons beyond the poem and its subject.

  7. delicate: a ‘delicate’ allusion to Bottomley’s health and art.

  11. Safe: ‘Soft’ is cancelled in B.

  15. wild air: a phrase that also occurs in The Source and Melancholy.

  16. One maker’s mind. Up to a point, ‘oneness’ in creativity (starting with Nature’s) and mutual ‘kindness’ reconcile the poem’s various tensions. Yet the same-rhyming of ‘kind’ produces an effect of distance.

  Ms: B. Published text: P.

  The Lane (138)

  December 1916

  On 7 December Thomas told Eleanor Farjeon: ‘they asked for volunteers to go straight out to Batteries in France and I made sure of it by volunteering. Don’t let Helen know’ (EF, 231). This decision may have conditioned his poetic move from ‘a land of stone’ to an iconic memory of Steep. Writing to Helen (22 January 1917), Thomas says: ‘You never mentioned receiving those verses about Green Lane, Froxfield. Did you get them? They were written in December and suggested by our last walk there in September’ (see CP1978, 421). The poem also harks back to a lane evoked in Beautiful Wales: ‘I knew that I took up eternity with both hands, and though I laid it down again, the lane was a most potent, magic thing, when I could thus make time as nothing while I meandered over many centuries’ (BW, 166). Like other recent poems in which prospect and retrospect converge, The Lane has a high self-quotation quota. The poem might be read as an epiphany of Thomas’s epiphanies. It presents an abundant timeless moment, collapses the seasons, fuses the senses, and lists flora and fauna. It also combines Thomas’s Keatsian mode (October etc.) with the ‘Steep’ poem, unrhymed lines with near sonnet-form. ‘Halcyon bells’ makes the whole mix strangely magical, as if this oasis in time and war symbolises poetry itself, and a farewell to it.

  3. Green Lane: a post-Enclosure road, and therefore ‘straight’. ‘The lane does end suddenly. It is broad because enclosure commissioners always made their new roads to standard widths, with a grass verge on one or both sides’ (WW, 34).

  5. bracken and blackberry, harebell and dwarf gorse: cf. ‘Harebell and scabious and tormentil, / That blackberry and gorse…/ Bow down to’ (October).

  7. halcyon bells: the harebells, blue like the halcyon (a name for the kingfisher). The later allusion to ‘waters’ may implicate the mythical halcyon: a bird said to breed in a nest that floats on the sea at the Winter solstice, and to calm winds and waves – an image for peace. In l.13 ‘those bells ring’ is a synaesthetic image for the scene becoming sound, for writing the poem.

  8. no vessel ever sailed: perhaps (together with the dots after the clause) an allusion to Thomas’s going overseas.

  9-11. a kind of spring…like summer…winter’s quiet. ‘[T]he air was vibrant though windless – stirred like water in a full vessel when more is still poured in…It was the most perfect of [February] days. The air had all the sparkling purity of winter. It had, too, something of the mettle and gusto of the spring. The scent of young grass…was sharp though faint, and thus the air was touched with a summer perfume’ (HS, 130-1).

  15. The lane ends: cf. the ending of The Path: ‘sudden, it ends where the wood ends’. The repeated ‘same’, like the repeated ‘ends’, is an anti-climactic shock. This historical ‘sameness’ is not the lane’s rich unity.

  Ms: B. Published text: TP, CP1928. Note on title: The Watchers and The Lane may have been given their titles when they were published together in TP. CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.

  Out in the dark (138)

  24 December 1916

  This poem was written at High Beech, Essex, where Thomas had rented a cottage for his family: ‘It is right alone in the forest among beech trees & fern & deer’ (RFET, 152). Having been given embarkation leave, Thomas spent Christmas there. Sending Out in the dark to Eleanor Farjeon, he remarks: ‘It is really Baba who speaks, not I. Something she felt put me on to it’ (EF, 237). In a letter dated 29 December he asks Baba (Myfanwy) herself: ‘Did Mother tell you I wrote a poem about the dark that evening when you did not want to go into the sitting room because it was dark?’ (MT, 57). But a passage in The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, possibly based on a childhood memory of his own, seems relevant:

  In the library I found Aurelius reading, with his back to the uncurtained window, by a light that only illuminated his face and page. Running at first to the window, I pressed my face on the pane to see the profound of deepening night, and the lake shining dimly like a window through which the things under the earth might be seen if you were out. The abyss of solitude below and around was swallowing the little white moon and might swallow me also; with terror at this feeling I turned away…Aurelius lighted another lamp. I went over again to the window and looked out. In a flash I saw the outer vast world of solitude, darkness, and silence, waiting eternally for its prey, and felt behind me the little world within that darkness like a lighthouse. (HGLM, 54-6)

  Out in the Dark probably influenced Hardy’s ‘The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House’. Having read P, Hardy planned to get LP ‘from the Times Book Club’ (Vere H. Collins, Talks with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate [London: Duckworth, 1928], 5).

  One without looks in tonight

  Through the curtain-chink

  From the sheet of glistening white;

  One without looks in tonight

  As we sit and think

  By the fender-brink.

  We do not discern those eyes

  Watching in the snow;

  Lit by lamps of rosy dyes

  We do not discern those eyes

  Wondering, aglow,

  Four-footed, tiptoe.

  Hardy may have recognised and reclaimed a debt. The diction of Out in the dark is unusually Hardyesque: ‘haunts’, ‘sage’, drear’. Thomas’s poetic dialogues with this key precursor tend to complicate Hardy’s metaphysical, psychological and rhythmic structures (see note on As the team’s head-brass, 301). But sometimes the intertextual traffic flows the other way. In February Afternoon and Out in the dark, perhaps in extremis or tenebris, Thomas’s vision and cadences approach Hardy’s ‘most tyrannous obsession of the blindness of fate, the carelessness of Nature, and the insignificance of Man’ (IPS, 194). In Out in the dark Thomas’s symbolism of ‘outside the house’ extends to ‘outside the earth’. The speaker, seemingly without agency as in The long small room, is exposed to the spaces of the universe. In the second stanza, ‘the dark’ assumes the agency that the speaker lacks. ‘Stealthily’, ‘haunts’ and ‘bound’ make it an actively sinister force, hunting as
well as haunting, and moving fast. At one level, this force embodies the war, as the doe and her fawns represent birth, family, peace. The monotonous rhyme scheme that ‘Drums on [the] ear’ adds to the poem’s fatalistic insinuation that ‘the might…of night’ is irresistible in all its guises. Thomas may be recalling Keats’s self-elegy ‘Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art’: ‘at the beginning of his “posthumous life”…the sonnet was written. It is the hymn of stillness, equalising the steadfast watching star, and the poet that saw likewise…The snow spreads like winter’s grave-cloth over the earth. The star hangs vigilant and regardless’ (K, 72).

  9. hound: an image suggested by deer-hunting.

  18. Love and delight: not deliberately ‘turned from’, as in Lights Out.

  20. If you love it not. Cf. the end of Rain: ‘the love of death, / If love it be towards what is perfect’. The ambiguous ‘If’ leaves open a positive alternative to ‘fear’, but one that equally surrenders to ‘night’.

  Ms: B. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 11 star and I I and star Note: in l.11 this edition [like CP1928 and CP1944] follows B, rather than LP and a manuscript reproduced by Eleanor Farjeon [EF, 238]. The rhythm, including the chiasmus of sounds ‘star’/‘deer’, then ‘star’/‘deer’/‘near’/‘far’, seems to locate ‘I’ more effectively in a ‘nearness’ yet distanced by the repeated ‘and’. ‘Star’ and ‘far’ also rhyme by being similarly positioned in the line. In l.7 CP1920, CP1928 and CP1944 print ‘the lamp’ [B has ‘a lamp’]. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.

  The sorrow of true love (139)

  13 January 1917

  Thomas wrote this poem at Tin Town, Lydd, Kent, shortly before leaving for mobilisation camp at Codford, Wiltshire. He would embark from Southampton on 29 January. On 11 January he had said goodbye to his family at High Beech, and eaten with his parents and brothers in London. On 13 January he noted in the diary he would take to France, and into which he copied the poem: ‘Nothing to do but test compass which never gives same results…Cold drizzle…Even wrote verses’ (CP1978, 463). Another near-sonnet, these ‘verses’ (couplets) fit with the fact that Thomas had packed Shakespeare’s Sonnets into his baggage. As Richard Lowndes points out (ETFN 27 [August 1992], 21-2), he echoes the rhymes ‘hope’ and ‘scope’ in Sonnet XXIX (‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state’); also Romeo and Juliet (II, ii): ‘parting is such sweet sorrow’. The sorrow of true love glances back over Thomas’s ‘love poetry’, as other valedictory poems have reviewed other genres. He returns to the generic conundrum posed by Those things that poets said; to the ‘remorse and pity’ of No one so much as you; perhaps to the contrary ideal of ‘true love’ in The Unknown, which evokes his feelings for Hope Webb (see notes, 238, 279). Like When first, but less hopefully, The sorrow of true love juxtaposes ‘hope’ and ‘parting’. It also alludes to Parting. The condition figured by ‘frozen drizzle perpetual’ resembles ‘the perpetual yesterday / That naught can stir or stain’ in that poem, and causes similar grief. There is no happy ending to this ‘beweeping’, no consolatory Shakespearean final couplet.