The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  24th [June 1914] a glorious day from 4.20 a.m. and at 10 tiers above tiers of white cloud with dirtied grey bars above the sea of slate and dull brick by Battersea Park – then at Oxford tiers of pure white with loose large masses above and gaps of dark clear blue above haymaking and elms

  Then we stopped at Adlestrop, through the willows could be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12.45 and one thrush and no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam.

  Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willowherb and meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel – looking out on grey dry stones between metals and the shining metals and over it all the elms willows and long grass – one man clears his throat – a greater than rustic silence. No house in view Stop only for a minute till signal is up.

  Another stop like this outside Colwell on 27th with thrush singing on hillside above on road.

  On 23 June Edward and Helen Thomas attended the Russian ballet in London. They set off next day to visit the Frosts in Ledbury, Herefordshire, and seek summer holiday lodgings there (see general note to The sun used to shine, 296). Around the time of the poem’s composition, as if memory had surfaced and sent him to his earlier notes, Thomas wrote in FNB80: ‘Train stopping outside station at Adlestrop June 1914’.

  Thomas’s prose sketch ‘A Third-Class Carriage’ pivots on a moment when ‘the train stopped at the edge of a wood where a thrush was singing, calling out very loud, clear things in his language over and over again’, and ends: ‘The train whistled, frightening the thrush, and moved on again’ (LS, 49-50). In ‘Death by Misadventure’, a train kills a man: ‘There was not a sound except the hissing of the steam, until the guilty train began to grunt forward again…’ (CC, 115). The poem more indirectly sets the ‘express’ train’s modernity against the perspective, and aesthetic, opened up by what Thomas’s note calls ‘extraordinary silence’. Adlestrop has inspired homages, imitations and parodies. It remains a model not only for the “train-window” poem, such as Philip Larkin’s ‘I Remember, I Remember’, but also for the translation of memory into poetic epiphany – including the negative epiphany of ‘I Remember, I Remember’: ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’. A model, too, for art that conceals art, Adlestrop knows exactly what it is doing. The remembered scene alludes to the lyric it will engender: ‘Someone cleared his throat’; ‘And for that minute a blackbird sang’.

  4. Unwontedly. BL drafts have ‘drew up / There unexpectedly’, then ‘drew up there / Against its custom’. ‘Unwontedly’ suggests a train juddering to a halt. Its first two syllables link ‘one’ and ‘June’; its last two syllables belong to a sequence of sounds that embed ‘Adlestrop’ in a complex assonantal texture: late / left /platform/whit less / and lonely / cloudlets. The adverb’s stresses and texture contrast with the four monosyllables that follow – perhaps one reason for the change from ‘’Twas June’ in Thomas’s first BL draft (see note, 153).

  8-16. only the name…Gloucestershire. See note on Thomas and place names (285). ‘Adlestrop’ is most often pronounced so that its first two syllables rhyme with ‘paddle’ rather than ‘ladle’. It has been spelled ‘Addlestrop’, and other variants over the centuries are Titlestrop, Tattlest(h)rop, Attlesthorpe, and Adelsthrope: ‘there can be little doubt that the original form of the name was Tat(e)les-thorp; the…form Attle, Adle-, etc. arises from wrong analysis of phrases like “at Tatlesthrop”…i.e. Taetel’s dependent farmstead’ (Harvey, Adlestrop Revisited, 28). Yet ‘only the name’ invokes neither etymology nor the cognitive anxieties of Old Man (contrast ‘Only an avenue…nameless’). The poem obliquely affirms the associative nexus between word and thing, and its constant reweaving by life and poetry. ‘Adlestrop’ serves as conduit to the recovery or creation of a unique moment. Strategically placed, ‘only the name’ launches the spiralling syntax and rhythm of the last two stanzas, and the little cosmos they encompass. More strictly and subtly than in The Manor Farm, the structure corresponds to Thomas’s conception of England as ‘a system of vast circumferences circling round…minute neighbouring points’ (see note, 165). The double off-rhyme ‘mistier’ / ‘Gloucestershire’, the repeated ‘farther’ and ‘shire’, make the poem’s echoes linger beyond its last words.

  9. willow-herb: not Rosebay willow herb, common today, but ‘Great willow-herb, nicknamed Codlins-and-Cream’ (Harvey, Adlestrop Revisited, 12).

  12. high cloudlets. In BL this replaces ‘high cloud tiers’ (see extracts above from FNB75).

  Ms: BL. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 1 Yes. Yes, Note: CP1978 follows BL rather than P. A full-stop appears in PTP. Note on title: Title is given in BL.

  Tears (52)

  8 January 1915

  Like Adlestrop, Tears represents itself as translating memory into epiphany. Once again, sun, silence and solitude are intrinsic to the process. Yet these juxtaposed “English” scenes sit less peacefully in the speaker’s consciousness. Neither ‘still’ nor stills, they force him to probe the meaning of their traces in memory and now poetry. History, absent from Adlestrop, has returned. Cooke and Smith comment on disturbingly unresolved effects: ‘despite their superficial splendour, both hounds and soldiers also suggest a less attractive reality. The hounds are out to kill (“Upon the scent”) and merge into one menacing animal – “a great dragon”; the troops have lost some of their individuality by being “in line” and “in white tunics”, while it is a martial air that “pierces” the silence. The profound ambiguity of the poem’s basic emotion is caught in that astonishing paradox “rage of gladness”’ (WC, 222). ‘The gulf opened up between “English countrymen” and ‘British Grenadiers” is like that…in “The Combe”. The former are innocent in their pastoral pathos; the latter carries the burden of an imperial ideology and the exultant violence which sustains it. The two concepts define the gap in Englishness where allegiance founders…The charm, it may be, is that of a hypnotic ideological magic, seducing both young men and poet to an unnecessary and pointless death. Allegiance to such images may be misplaced…If [the speaker] is emotionally bankrupt, unable any more to respond spontaneously to the traditional symbols, the fault, though he refuses to admit it, may lie with those symbols, not with the self’ (SS, 118).

  3-4. twenty hounds…rage of gladness. It was the human element in foxhunting that Thomas disliked: ‘Run hard hounds, and drown the jackdaws’ calling with your concerted voices. It is good to see your long swift train across the meadow …Run hard, fox, and may you escape, for it would not be well to die on such a day unless you could perchance first set your fair teeth in the throats of the foolish ones who now break through the hedge on great horses and pursue you’ (HE, 155-6). ‘I like to see fine horses running at full speed. To see this sight, or hounds running on a good scent, or children dancing, is to me the same as music, and therefore, I suppose, as full of mortality and beauty’ (IW, 104). ‘Backwards and forwards galloped the scarlet before the right crossing of the railway was taken. The fox died in obscurity two miles away. How warm and sweet the sun was can be imagined when I say that it made one music of the horn-blowing, the lambs’ bleating, the larks’ singing’ (IPS, 92).

  6. Blooming Meadow. From May 1904 to late 1906 the Thomases lived at Elses Farm in the Weald of Kent. Helen Thomas recalls: ‘hay-making on the lovely slope of Blooming meadow was a festival for us all at the farm’ (HT, 104). The name both attracts and irradiates all the poem’s effects of vigour, fertility, and colour.

  8. double-shadowed Tower: the Tower of London. ‘Double-shadowed’, which throws the ‘stirring’ images into relief, may also imply the speaker’s interior state, and interpret his susceptibility to ‘charm’.

  15. ‘The British Grenadiers’. ‘I don’t think I could alter “Tears” to make it marketable. I feel that the correction you want made is only essential if the whole point is in the British Grenadiers as might be expected in these times’ (LEG, 25). ‘White tunics’ marks the soldiers’ pre-war ceremonial
role as custodians of the Tower, but another role seems latent in the image. Guy Cuthbertson calls attention to a passage that Thomas quotes from Richard Jefferies’s The Story of My Heart: ‘So subtle is the chord of life that sometimes to watch troops marching in rhythmic order, undulating along the column as the feet are lifted, brings tears in my eyes’ (RJ, 182; GC, 159).

  18. And have forgotten since their beauty passed. Tears poses questions about the proximity of violence to ‘beauty’, about the need for violence to defend beauty, about their conjoined power to kick-start feeling. Each scene is ‘pierced’ by an emotion (ironically deprecated as the ‘ghosts’ of tears) alien to previous sunlit epiphanies. A homoerotic charge runs between ‘stirring’, ‘charm’, the soldiers’ physicality, and ‘piercing’. As Smith points out, enlistment seems to be a subtext. In saying he has ‘forgotten’ what the poem makes so vividly present, the speaker parallels Thomas’s self-reproach for lack of true patriotism in his essay ‘This England’ (see notes on The sun used to shine and This is no case of petty right or wrong): ‘it seemed to me that either I had never loved England, or I had loved it foolishly, aesthetically, like a slave’ (LS, 221). To enjoy English ‘beauty’ (as in Adlestrop, perhaps) without regard to underlying ‘truths’ – truths that attach the individual to community – is to behave like Thomas’s dreaded alter ego the aesthetic spectator (see note, 290). The interplay of ‘dreamed’, ‘truths’ and ‘beauty’ implicates Keats and Romantic poetry in this scenario where responsibilities are being obliquely deliberated. Thomas placed Tears early in P, close to four other poems associated with the war: The Trumpet, The Manor Farm, The Owl and As the team’s head-brass.

  Ms: BL. Published text: P. Note: P omits the comma after ‘guard’ [l.12], present in PTP.

  Over the Hills (52)

  9 January 1915

  Although the title given to this poem in LP has been retained, it is the most questionable of the instances listed in the Note on Text. As John Pikoulis observes: ‘the poem mentions no hills, only a single “horizon ridge”’ (JP, 54). Yet ‘over the hills’ occurs in a passage (about ‘August’) from Beautiful Wales, which is possibly linked with the poem: ‘[A] mountain stream, which many stones tore to ribbons, was with me for miles, and to the left and to the right many paths over the hills ran with alluring courses for half a mile, like happy thoughts or lively fancies, and ended suddenly. The mountains increased in height as the sun sank…And in the end of the afternoon I came to a village I knew…From the inn I could see the whole village…Six bells that rang three miles off and some white downs of cloud on the horizon were in harmony. It was a time when the whole universe strove to speak a universal speech…But, as it seemed, owing to my fault, the effort was unsuccessful’ (BW, 176-7). If the poem echoes that passage, this does not necessarily make its landscape “Welsh”. Alun John points out that Thomas’s depictions of ‘romantic North Wales’ (not then known to him) ‘were culled almost entirely from the notes he had previously made of the countryside of England’ (quoted, Sally Roberts Jones, ‘Edward Thomas and Wales’, JB, 79).

  Over the Hills is another poem that represents itself as a process of remembering – or of remembering remembering. But here epiphany proves elusive. While the ‘path’ can be retraced, it figures a psychic loop-tape rather than therapeutic retrieval. As if again puncturing the unities of Adlestrop, Thomas sets ‘saw it all’ against ‘Recall /Was vain’. Another line breaks on the adversative asyndeton: ‘all were kind, / All were strangers’. Some hinted problem, whether in the original experience or in the speaker, makes ‘loss’ the poem’s pivotal word. BL has ‘I forgot my loss’: the change to ‘I did not know my loss’ deepens the interior drama.

  5. pack of scarlet clouds: a strange echo of the hunting image in Tears.

  15-19. no more…rush and stone. An image from the mountain scene serves as a bridge back to it. The rhythmical dynamic, which culminates in this intricately rhymed poem’s only couplet, runs counter to the impossibility that the lines assert. As often in Thomas, the poem gets further than the speaker. Like Jungian therapy, it pushes back towards a source. Metaphors of the body sustain the analogy between the brook and a ‘restless’ spirit seeking repose. Over the Hills has parallels with Frost’s ‘The Mountain’, which similarly circles around a point of origin: ‘There’s a brook/That starts up on it somewhere – I’ve heard say / Right on the top’.

  Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Note on title: See general note above. CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 removes the brackets. See Note on Text.

  The Lofty Sky (53)

  10 January 1915

  The Lofty Sky begins where Over the Hills leaves off. Here psychic obstacles are symbolically overcome by rhythms that make ‘The desire of the eye’ kinetic. Reviewing a book on punctuation, Thomas writes: ‘We know the beauty…of a complex sentence in which the stops are as valuable as the division of a stanza of verse into lines, or as the hedges and littered crags and out-cropping rock by which the eye travels up a mountain to the clouds’ (Academy, 23 September 1905). ‘Sky’ rarely prevails over ‘earth’ in Thomas’s poetry. Yet the transcendental urge instilled by his youthful passion for Shelley is never wholly exorcised, and may here be affirmed. In l.1 he changed ‘hills’ (BL) to ‘sky’. ‘They are no more /Than weeds upon this floor /Of the river of air’, like ‘dark surge’ in Two Pewits, echoes Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’. The Lofty Sky also echoes Walter de la Mare’s ‘Nobody Knows’ (Peacock Pie, 1913), which contrasts the wind’s freedom (‘Just a great wave of the air’) with earthly conditions: ‘And so we live under deep water, / All of us, beasts and men’.

  19-34. I am like a fish…where the lilies are. Another Romantic poet may be on the poem’s mind. Thomas describes looking out of the window after reading Keats: ‘outside, the trees and barns and shed were quiet and dim, and as much submerged and hidden from the air in which I had been living as the green streets of motionless lily and weed at the bottom of some lonely pool where carp and tench go slowly’ (HE, 161). Also in The Heart of England, Thomas compares a rare moment to the ‘old tale’ in which people see ‘an anchor let out of the clouds and rooted in the ground’ and then a man climbing down a rope to free the anchor and ‘dying at last, as if he had been drowned in the air which they breathed easily’ (HE, 112-13). ‘Where the lilies are’ is a wonderful image for the direction of Romantic desire. Michael Kirkham reads lines 32-4, with their echo of Yeats’s ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’, as ‘self-parody’ (MK, 41). But perhaps the whole conceit consciously dramatises the human and artistic need to press beyond limits.

  Ms: BL. Published text: LP. Note on title: Apart from LP, title’s only surviving source is RB 2, 2 [December 1917].

  The Cuckoo (54)

  15 January 1915

  In ‘An Old Farm’ Thomas refers to ‘the palpitating, groaning shout of the shepherd, Ho! ho! ho! ho! ho!’ (HE, 72). The same passage fed Haymaking and Cock-Crow (see notes, 248, 256). This is unique among Thomas’s poems in being a dramatic monologue spoken by a woman. He lays out a mnemonic paradox: the widow’s inability to hear the cuckoo brings a human voice into elegiac presence.

  Ms: BL. Published text: AANP, LP. Differences from CP1978: 9 ‘There it is!’ [BL] ‘There it is’ [AANP] Note: To match ‘Ho! Ho!’, and to sharpen this miniature drama, an exclamation-mark seems to be required. Note on title: Title is given in BL.

  Swedes (54)

  15 January 1915

  ‘I wonder if I can touch “Swedes”. It is one of the least like myself I fancy’ (LGB, 247). But actual and verbal colour is more common in Thomas’s poems than it might appear. The Path surprises us with tints of moss (‘gold, olive, and emerald’), Health with a Yeatsian litany of proper names. Thomas’s deceptively muted style masks its rhetorical depth-charges – like fine tweed, which in close-up reveals brilliant flecks. Swedes itself certainly achieves Wordsworth’s objective in Lyrical Ballads: ‘to choose incidents from common life…and…to throw over them a certai
n colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way’. In ‘The Mangel-Bury’ Ivor Gurney, for whom Thomas was both model and muse, continues the process by using Swedes to bring the Great War home to rural England:

  It was after war; Edward Thomas had fallen at Arras –

  I was walking by Gloucester musing on such things

  As fill his verse with goodness; it was February; the long house

  Straw-thatched of the mangels stretched two wide wings;

  And looked as part of the earth heaped up by dead soldiers

  In the most fitting place – along the hedge’s yet-bare lines.

  West spring breathed there early…

  1-4. They have taken the gable…Unsunned. Clamping is a traditional way of storing root-vegetables during Winter. A pyramid of vegetables, which extends above ground, is built in a straw-strewn trench. This is covered with more straw and then earth. ‘A cart goes by all a-gleam with a load of crimson-sprouting swedes and yellow-sprouting mangolds that seem to be burning through the net of snow above them’ (SC, 40-1).