The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  17-20. What to do…until myself I knew. Cooke comments: ‘Even the syntax makes him the pursuer of himself’ (WC, 204). Cf. the syntactical mystery tour of lines 89-90. ‘When caught’ cuts both ways, like ‘keep in sight’ (l.102).

  21. I tried the inns. ‘An impulse as sick and as profound as the fatigue du nord, or as that which drove Richard Jefferies from inland meadows to the sea, goads some of us to the life of inns. Something, we may think, that overpowers the delicious sense of home, bids us exchange that for an abode that is a truer symbol of our inconstant lodging on the earth’ (HS, 39). Besides ‘inconstant lodging’, inns (as in Aspens) may represent society: Thomas compares an ‘inn door’ to ‘the entrance to a bright cave in the middle of the darkness: the illumination had a kind of blessedness…not without foreignness; and a half-seen man within it belonged to a world, blessed indeed, but far different from this one of mine, dark, soft, and tranquil. I felt that I could walk on thus, sipping the evening silence and solitude, endlessly’ (IPS, 214). Motion detects a contrast between the (rural) ‘inn in the sun’, linked with a ‘happy mood’, and the narrator’s reception in this ‘urban context [where] social harmony has been replaced by isolation’ (AM, 40). But the poem draws on Thomas’s touchiness about all inhospitable inns, as well as his sense of all society as ‘foreign’. He recalls his anger at being churlishly refused a bed in a country village: ‘To be elbowed out at nightfall after a day’s walking by an unconscious conspiracy of a whole village was enough either to produce either a hate of Chiseldon or a belief that the devil or a distinguished relative was organising the opposition’ (IW, 307).

  22. a long gabled high-street grey: a trace of Wiltshire (see note on lines 61-80): ‘Marlborough town, with its dormered and gabled High Street, long, wide and discreet, and, though genial, obviously an entity which the visitor can know little of…The downs and Savernake Forest dominate the town. It is but a place at the edge of the forest’ (RJ, 5).

  24. weary way: perhaps an echo of Gray’s ‘Elegy’ (‘The ploughman homeward plods his weary way’), but see note on l.87.

  29-30. never-foamless shores / Make better friends than those dull boors. A similar declaration to that about ‘man’s ingratitude’ in ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’ (As You Like It, II, vii). Thomas may also allude to ‘the foam / Of perilous seas’ in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, thereby countering social alienation with poetic vocation. Yet ‘dull boors’, a phrase that covers his sensitivity to perceived neglect by ‘friends’, strikes a paranoid note that prepares for the next stanza.

  32. Aimed at the unseen moving goal. In its reflexive aspect, this line sums up the empiricist and agnostic metaphysics that make the quest / journey the defining trope of Thomas’s poetry. Cf. ‘some goal / I touched then’ (I never saw that land before); ‘I had not found my goal’ (Some eyes condemn).

  37. Desire of desire. ‘Desire’ (like ‘beauty’) is a word that survives from Thomas’s formative exposure to Romantic poetry and his baptism in fin-de-siècle aesthetics. It tends to carry a feverish, erotic charge. Although ‘desire’ also denotes other kinds of lack, including frustrated creativity, at one level the poem has moved from friendship to love (‘kiss’), thus prefiguring themes of Thomas’s love poetry. ‘Remedies / For all desire’ may be any alleviation that entails self-suppression, as when Thomas wonders ‘whether for a person like myself whose most intense moments were those of depression a cure that destroys the depression may not destroy the intensity – a desperate remedy?’ (LGB, 163). Such ‘cures’ aggravate neurosis by inducing ‘Desire of desire’. This vicious spiral takes the narrator ‘beyond control’, and prevents ‘wholeness’.

  40. I quite forgot I could forget. Here difficult memory is no longer being evaded or sedated or sublimated.

  53-4. To find him out…bore. ‘I don’t like…to meet continually some respectable acquaintance with whom I must stop to bore or be bored’ (SL, 23). ‘Find him out’ rather than ‘find him’ makes ‘confession’, like boredom, a two-way traffic.

  61-80. I sought then in solitude…An old inhabitant of earth. On 18 December 1913, when staying with Vivian Locke Ellis at Selsfield House, East Grinstead, Thomas recorded in FNB67: ‘East Grinstead. 4.30 one of those eternal evenings – the wind gone, no one upon the road. I grasp the stile by the holly and look over the ploughland to the near ridge, the crocketed spruces, the dark house mass, and behind them a soft dulling flame-coloured sky where large shapeless soft dull-dark clouds in roughly horizontal lines are massing with one bright star in an interstice – and far behind me an owl calls again and again and somewhere far to one side in a hid hollow a dog barks and nearer, one or two blackbirds chink as they fly along hedges. What does it mean? I feel an old inhabitant of earth at such times. How many hundred times have I seen the same since I was 15’. The note continues: ‘at 5.30 wind moaning and over the west is a mass of cloud like a great hand with a star eastward’. The composite landscape of these stanzas also recalls climactic images of Salisbury Plain in In Pursuit of Spring. As in Lob, Wiltshire provides conditions for revelation: ‘I emerged into the glory and peace of the Plain, of the unbounded Plain and the unbounded sky, and the marriage of sun and wind that was being celebrated upon them’; ‘over the wall [of the Plain] rounded clouds, pure white and sunlit, were heaving up …The late afternoon grew more and more quiet and still, and in the warmth I mistook a distant dog’s bark, and again a cock’s crowing, for the call of a cuckoo, mixed with the blackbird’s singing…already the blackbirds were chinking and shifting places along the hedgerows. And presently it was dark, but for a lamp at an open door, and silent, but for a chained dog barking’ (IPS, 172, 177-8). After the disappointments of social intercourse, ‘solitude’ becomes intrinsic to self-discovery and to the integration projected onto harmony with, and within, Nature. ‘Naked’ implies return to a primal state. The narrator communes with ‘hidden’ and ‘unseen’ things. The ‘Other’ (along with ‘difference’) vanishes from these stanzas, in which the two merge under the sign of ‘one star, one lamp, one peace’.

  67. crocketed dark trees. Crockets are Gothic architectural ornaments in the form of buds or curled leaves: this phrase returns them to their natural origins. Thomas describes Steeple Ashton church as ‘bristling with coarse crockets all over, and knobby with coarse gargoyles’ (IPS, 176).

  79. solemn quiet mirth. This echoes a phrase in ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), a poem that Thomas quotes in Feminine Influence on the Poets: ‘When a sedate Content the Spirit feels, / And no fierce Light disturbs, whilst it reveals; /…Till the free Soul to a compos’dness charm’d, / Finding the Elements of Rage disarm’d, / O’er all below, a solemn Quiet grown, / Joys in th’inferiour World, and thinks it like her Own’. Thomas comments: ‘[the poem] makes us feel that she has had the magical experience which has only been perfectly expressed by much later poets’ (FIP, 60). ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ may have influenced lines 61-80 more generally, also Liberty (see note, 261).

  80. An old inhabitant of earth. See Thomas’s use of this key formulation in the passage from FNB67 quoted above. His praise of George Meredith links it with his favourite Wordsworth quotation (see note, 154): ‘From first to last he wrote as an inhabitant of this earth, where, as Wordsworth says, “we have our happiness or not at all”, just or unjust’ (IPS, 60). In ‘The First Cuckoo’ Thomas analyses our pleasure in recurrent seasonal events: ‘I am not forgetting how much of the thrill may be due to the feeling of a fresh start, combined with that of being an old inhabitant of the earth’ (LS, 60). ‘An old inhabitant of earth’ situates the speaker, healingly, not in the contemporary social world (‘far off from men’, l.86), but in a community defined by an ecological sense of history: ‘[Salisbury Plain] makes us feel the age of the earth, the greatness of Time, Space, and Nature; the littleness of man even in an aeroplane, the fact that the earth does not belong to man, but man to the earth’ (IPS, 150). ‘The Stile’, based on a
harmonious walk with a friend, ends at sunset with the narrator – now solitary – saying: ‘Somewhere…I was gathered up with an immortal company, where I and poet and lover and flower and cloud and star were equals, as all the little leaves were equal…And in that company I learned that I am something which no fortune can touch, whether I be soon to die, or long years away…I shall go on, something that is here and there like the wind, something unconquerable, something not to be separated from the dark earth and the light sky, a strong citizen of infinity and eternity’ (LAT, 50-1).

  81-7. Once the name…everlastingness. Thomas’s concern with the interpenetration of ‘melancholy’ and ‘happiness’ will reappear in Melancholy and October (see notes, 231, 259). ‘Melancholy’ is indeed the name he gives to his depression in early letters and diaries: ‘I cannot relieve my melancholy today; it is so oppressive that I long to have some physical ill which would swallow it’ (Diary, 4 January 1902, NLW). At that time, he was devoted to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and identifying with De Quincey’s Opium-Eater. ‘When…bowers’ seems to be a self-contained clause that proposes alternative versions of the narrator’s condition: another doubleness. If an understood ‘I’ is the subject of ‘Smiled and enjoyed’, this suppression of the first-person singular and the odd syntax situate him in a psychic orbit where his symptoms change their aspect, perhaps where they are translated into poetry. ‘Powers’ implies resurgent creativity.

  87. Moments of everlastingness: an oxymoron, like ‘everlasting lease’ in l.70. Both phrases may allude to the writing of poems. Thomas included Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Retreat’ in his Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air: ‘But felt through all this fleshly dress / Bright shoots of everlastingness’. Another seventeenth-century religious poet may also hover over what is almost a declaration of faith. Coombes notes that The Other ‘curiously recalls in one or two places’ George Herbert’s ‘The Pilgrimage’: e.g., l.24 parallels Herbert’s line, ‘A long it was and weary way’ (HC, 217). Like Thomas’s ‘goal’, Herbert’s ‘gladsome hill’ is always ‘further’. In his introduction to Herbert’s The Temple and A Priest to the Temple (1908) Thomas appreciates the Englishness of Herbert’s Anglicanism, but clearly prefers more visionary religious poetry: ‘he seems most himself when he is most an Anglican…and he rarely soars out of that gracious and well-ordered park’ (xi). Yet Herbert’s ‘afflicted’ mode (as in ‘The Pilgrimage’) is not remote from Thomas’s own sensibility. In Pursuit of Spring visits Bemerton, once Herbert’s parish: ‘The bells, the sunshine after storm, the elm trees, and the memory of that pious poet, put me into what was perhaps an unconscious imitation of a religious humour. And in that humour, repeating [Herbert’s ‘Sunday’] with a not wholly sham unction, I rode away from Bemerton. The Other Man, however, overtook me, and upset the humour.’ He does so by ‘repeating in his turn, with unction exaggerated to an incredibly ridiculous degree, [Herbert’s] sonnet on Sin’ (IPS, 140).

  89-90. See note on lines 17-20.

  98. under a ban. A ‘ban’ is a curse or interdict that carries supernatural sanction. Coombes says: ‘when the other in the taproom complains that he lives “under a ban” because of the pursuer’s relentlessness, he is stating a condition which is precisely central to the pursuer himself’ (HC, 219).

  100. I slipped away. The impulse on each side to evade the Other has its counterpart in how Thomas depicts his reaction to being overtaken in a walking race by ‘the boy who notoriously ran’: ‘I hated being pursued…I began to believe that the running boy was gaining on me. I could not stand it. Turning off the track I threw myself down on the grass on the pretext that I had a stitch’ (CET, 115). The Other’s abuse of the narrator may denote ‘resistance’ (Jung’s word for ‘ban’) to acknowledging one’s Shadow.

  101-10. And now…cease. ‘I awoke to hear ducklings squeaking, and a starling in the pine tree imitating the curlew and the owl hunting’ (IPS, 216). This stanza brings the poem full circle and repeats its course in miniaturised form. However, in keeping with overtones of death rather than birth, the repeated elements have become ‘uncanny’, unheimlich. Freud defines the uncanny as a ‘frightening’ effect produced by ‘something repressed which recurs’; also as ‘nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression’ (363-4). The disturbingly imitative starlings contrast with the earlier ‘kestrel and woodpecker’, ‘marshbird’ and ‘blackbird’. The effect resembles the exchange of attributes between birds, fish and human beings in The Hollow Wood (see note, 171). Yet, if this distortion in Nature mirrors the blocked meeting between narrator and Other, further cycles of the journey are anticipated. Perhaps a ‘fortunate’ search, integration or remission, can only be ‘brief’ (lines 88, 91).

  104. I steal. Miller glosses ‘steal’ as ‘a furtiveness which courts or desires disclosure…[The narrator] steals towards rather than away – which would have been the more familiar move of the two’ (Miller, Doubles, 27).

  Ms: none. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 85 weaknesses weakness [misprint] Note: LP is identical with the only surviving typescript, sent by Thomas to Robert Frost.

  Birds’ Nests (43)

  December 1914

  For date, see general note to After Rain (154). ‘In the dense green coverts of the summer hedgerows nests were difficult to find, but now they show at every turn. The cunning basket-work of the lesser whitethroat, so frail as to seem incapable of holding the smallest egg, is filled with rotting black leaves and haws that have dropped thus early’ (TWL, 91). Chapter 7 of The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans recalls Thomas’s birds-nesting as a boy. W.H. Davies’s elegy for Thomas, ‘Killed in Action’, alludes to later ‘days…When you and I, with thoughtful mind, /Would help a bird to hide her nest,/ For fear of other hands less kind’.

  5. no need of eyes to see them with: a paradox that implies Thomas’s high standards for ‘seeing’ natural phenomena, and hence for other forms of perception. Cf. ‘And now I see as I look’ in First known when lost, which has other links with Birds’ Nests.

  13. winter nest. P and PTP have ‘winter nests’. Like CP1978, this edition prefers the singular, to which ‘nests’ is altered in several typescripts, and which seems warranted by the specificity of ‘Once’ and ‘there’, and by the following entry in FNB79 among scattered notes for the poem: ‘one – grass and goosegrass and a squirrel’s dined there often’. Thomas’s Wiltshire mentor ‘Dad’ Uzzell showed him a pet dormouse’s ‘empty kernels…bored with a round hole as neatly as if it had been drilled’ (ETFN 46 [January 2002], 8).

  Ms: none. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 11 knew them not never found them 12 and squirrels or squirrels 14 into: into; 15 hazel-nuts, hazel nuts; Note: In P lines 1 and 2 end with full stops: probably a misprint since PTP has commas. For this edition’s other departure from P, see note on l.13 above. CP1978 throughout follows a typescript [MET] rather than P.

  The Mountain Chapel (43)

  December 1914

  For date, see general note to After Rain (154). Thomas’s prose contains several representations of Welsh chapels:

  [Siloh stands] bravely, – at night, it often seems perilously, – at the end of a road, beyond which rise immense mountains and impassable… But Siloh stands firm, and ventures once a week to send up a thin music that avails nothing against the wind; although close to it, threatening it, laughing at it, able to overwhelm it, should the laugh become cruel, is a company of elder trees, which, seen at twilight, are sentinels embossed upon the sky – sentinels of the invisible, patient, unconquerable powers: or (if one is lighter-hearted) they seem the empty homes of what the mines and chapels think they have routed; and at midnight they are not empty, and they love the mountain rain, and at times they summon it and talk with it, while the preacher thunders and the windows of the chapel gleam. (BW, 25-6)

  …a little desolate white church and white-walled graveyard, whic
h on December evenings will shine and seem to be the only things at one with the foamy water and the dim sky, before the storm; and when the storm comes the church is gathered up into its breast and is a part of it, so that he who walks in the churchyard is certain that the gods – the gods that grow old and feeble and die – are there still, and with them all those phantoms following phantoms in a phantom land…which make Welsh history, so that to read it is like walking in that place among December leaves…while an ancient wind is ceaselessly remembering ancient things. (BW, 199)

  The church, a plain building of harsh stone on the highest ground, was locked, but the grave digger was still at work filling up with bits of limestone the grave of a Morgan or Jones or Jenkins or Evans…The grass grew among the tombs thick and long…when I crossed the brook the rustle of an overhanging aspen deceived me into thinking I heard water run. Between that sound and the rush of water there is not more difference than between the meaning of Penderyn to me and its meaning to an inhabitant. (‘Penderyn’, COE, 26-7)

  The poem, like the prose, is tinged by the mystique of desolation and dereliction in which “Celticism” has ‘shrouded’ western landscapes since the publication of James Macpherson’s Ossian in the 1760s. In Beautiful Wales Thomas attacks ‘lovers of the Celt’ as aesthetes and poseurs: ‘Their aim and ideal is to go about the world in a state of self-satisfied dejection, interrupted, and perhaps sustained, by days when they consume strange mixed liquors to the tune of all the fine old Celtic songs which are fashionable…I cannot avoid the opinion that to boast of the Celtic spirit is to confess you have it not’ (see BW, 10-13). Yet his own ‘early feeling for Wales’ had been partly formed by Celticism: ‘[it] culminated in my singing of Moore’s “Minstrel Boy”…I knew only of Welsh harps. I…trembled with a kind of gloomy pleasure in being about to die for Wales’ (Addenda to CET, BC). And, despite now mocking the Ossianic cult of lost battles and lost civilisation (the ‘reader feels that it is a baseness to exist’), Thomas can still write of a Welsh mountain: ‘it is clear, as it is not in a city or in an exuberant English county, that the world is old and troubled…Sometimes comes a thought that it is a huge gravestone…It belongs to the past, to the dead; and the dead, as they are more numerous, so here they are greater than we’ (BW, 149). Similarly, Cornwall’s ‘deserted mines are frozen cries of despair as if they had perished in conflict with the waste’ (SC, 158-9). But if The Mountain Chapel and The Manor Farm appear antithetical as earthly abodes, autobiographical loci or psychic states, the chapel has ‘homely’ aspects, and ‘empty homes’ haunt Thomas’s Hampshire landscapes too. Indeed, Celticism may have influenced the prophetic thrust of his eco-historical vision. The Mountain Chapel prefigures The Mill-Water in being reflexively occupied with natural sounds that overpower the ‘human’.