by Edna Longley
Cock-Crow is one of Thomas’s best-known short poems (see note, 284). Donald Davie praises it by invoking Imagism, a compliment that Thomas might not have relished (see Introduction, 20): ‘This has all the “hardness” and “dryness” that T.E. Hulme had asked for…It is a great pity, and cause for wonder, that neither Pound nor anyone else apparently should have recognised that, if Imagism means anything, it surely means a small impersonal masterpiece like this’ (Times Literary Supplement, 23 November 1979).
Thomas’s parable could apply to many transactions between the unconscious and the conscious mind. Yet, at one level, Cock-Crow reviews the process that has led to his enlistment. Cf. the link between cock-crow and summons to war in Hardy’s ‘“Men Who March Away”’ (‘Men who march away / Ere the barn-cocks say /Night is growing grey’), an ‘impersonal song’ that Thomas admired (see note on The Trumpet, 312). On 21 July he explained to Bottomley: ‘It was not at all a desperate nor yet a purposed resolution but the natural culmination of a long series of moods & thoughts’ (LGB, 253). The poem condenses ‘moods & thoughts’ into images that move from perplexity to decision (given a mock-heroic glamour) to the point where action must begin. The sequence of end rhymes and internal rhymes (‘night’ / ‘light’ / ‘night’ / ‘bright’) intensifies a rhythmic momentum to which the last line may be climax, anti-climax, or reality-check. This is the first poem of Thomas’s to feature a martial call. Along with another eight-line parable, I built myself a house of glass, it demarcates his month of decision. He did not write another poem for nearly three months.
Ms: B. Published text: SP, P.
October (101)
15, 16 October 1915
As with the summer landscape of Haymaking, Thomas had often tried to capture Autumn. An early essay speaks in fin-de-siècle style of being ‘troubled tenderly by autumnal maladies of soul’ (RAP, 28). ‘The leaves are falling from the poplars steadily one by one…It is this dead stillness and gloom that makes the fall of the leaves so arresting; no flutter of wind drifts them through the air…as they glide through the stirless space from branch to earth Even as we gaze on this wondrous scene of colour, the mist disperses and the sunbeams pour down, further to enliven what was already gay…the earth is strewn with gorgeous hues lit up anew. As the light varies, the shadows shift, and now the orange, now the gold, is all aflame’ (‘In Autumn Woods’, TWL, 85-7). ‘This is the beginning of the pageant of autumn, of that gradual pompous dying which has no parallel in human life, yet draws us to it with sure bonds. It is a dying of the flesh, and we see it pass through a kind of beauty which we can only call spiritual…[and which] awakens the never more than lightly sleeping human desire of permanence…The motion of the autumn is a fall, a surrender, requiring no effort, and therefore the mind cannot long be blind to the cycle of things as in the spring it can when the effort and delight of ascension veils the goal and the decline beyond…Pauses there are, of course, or what seem pauses in the declining of this pomp…mornings full of the sweetness of mushrooms and blackberries from the short turf among the blue scabious bloom’ (SC, 272-4).
Cooke uses October to illustrate the ‘number of influences which may impinge on Thomas’s consciousness in the course of a single poem’ (WC, 192-4). Here the major influence is Keats: not only ‘To Autumn’ and ‘Hyperion’ (‘No stir of air was there /…where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest’) but everything that comes together in the odes where ‘the poet made for himself a form in which the essence of all his thought, feeling, and observation, could be stored without overflowing or disorder’ (K, 57); ‘To Autumn’ is ‘a landscape that is the very picture of his mind’ (FIP, 38). October, There’s nothing like the sun, The Thrush and Liberty represent Thomas’s most sustained effort to translate Keats’s ‘essence’ into his own ‘mind’. Autumn 1915 may have been his optimum moment for Keats, who presides over a return to poetry amid circumstances liable to sharpen a sense of mortality. October was the first poem that Thomas wrote in army camp (High Beech, Essex). It germinated in a letter to Frost (3, 5 September):
But now I can’t think of writing. The country is a little strange to me. It seems as if in my world there was no Autumn though they are just picking hops in Kent. On Hampstead Heath the other day I watched the bees at the bramble flowers & green blackberries & they looked so unfamiliar & with a kind of ugliness, partly but not wholly due to the fact that the earth around about was dirty London earth…As it happened I had 2 hours sleeplessness the night I was on guard after writing this & made it tolerable by making blank verses suggested by what I had just written to you. I had to. But I couldn’t finish them & now they are practically gone. (RFET, 95-6)
This explains why Thomas told Eleanor Farjeon that ‘the original version [of October] was in blank verse, but quite different’ (EF, 169). October, like There’s nothing like the sun and Liberty, is not stanzaic. But moving away from blank verse may have brought Thomas texturally closer to Keats’s odes. With their intricate patterns of rhyme, assonance, and syntactical unit, and their nods to sonnet-structure, these three poems rework aspects of Keatsian ‘form’ along with Keatsian ‘essence’.
1. one great bough of gold: ‘elms (many with several isolated boughs all yellow while the rest was green)’ (letter to Helen, 5 October 1914, NLW).
4. Harebell and scabious and tormentil. ‘Hasn’t Bronwen taught you tormentil, the tiny yellow flower in short hill grass, a flat buttercup or avens with rather separate petals? Tormentilla it is. The accent is on the 2nd syllable’ (EF, 169). Among the flowers listed for 3 October 1895 in Thomas’s ‘Diary in English Fields and Woods’ are ‘Harebells…sheep’s scabious…tormentil’ (TWL, 199). His poetic catalogues of flowers or birds, in which simplicity belies intensity, are the apotheosis of field notes. Thomas says of Keats’s art: ‘It [“Ode to a Nightingale”] and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” are of a texture so consummate and consistent that the simple line, “The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild”, in one of them, and an equally simple line in the other, “With forest branches, and the trodden weed”, both gain from their environment an astonishing beauty, profound and touching’ (K, 56).
8. The gossamers wander at their own will. ‘[T]he promise [of a timeless moment] is deceptive, for the equilibrium is easily disturbed…The hesitant rhythm of a line like “The gossamers wander at their own will” (I think it is a line of Wordsworth’s that leads one to expect “sweet will”) co-operates to produce an effect of fragility’ (see John Burrow, ‘Keats and Edward Thomas’, Essays in Criticism 7 [1957], 404-15).
10-11. fresh again…/As Spring: ‘the gold of the leaves had an April freshness’ (RAP, 31).
11-12. cool…warm. This adjectival paradox is repeated from l.7 of Two Houses in a way that re-opens channels between the senses as well as the seasons.
12. and now I might. Here October ‘turns’ like a sonnet from evocation to introspection, though rhythm (in a sense the poem’s subject) connects the two. Thomas proceeds to remix concepts from earlier poems such as The Other (title and lines 82-3), Beauty, The Glory and Melancholy.
17. gorse that has no time not to be gay: cf. If I should ever by chance, l.9, and see note (286).
18-20. happiness…melancholy: see note on The Other (161), and general note to Melancholy (231). ‘Tomorrow I shall remember I was happy today’ (before 7 September 1915, FNB80); ‘a mood long blackened and obscured by the name of melancholy’ (after 7 September, FNB80). ‘[M]elancholy is the mood most easily given an appearance of profundity, and, therefore, most easily impressive’ (IPS, 150). ‘I fell in with a philosopher who seemed to be equally moved [by an evening scene] yet could not decide whether his condition was to be described as happiness or melancholy…He was a lean, indefinite man; half his life lay behind him like a corpse, so he said, and half was before him like a ghost’ (IW, 137). ‘[M]elancholy (in spite of the ode) is too disparaging a name for this mood…we have been deceived in suspecting evil of [“Ode to a Nightingale”] because it i
s beautiful and attributes divinity to what we think a weakness’ (K, 55). In testing the unstable frontier between ‘happiness’ and ‘melancholy’, Thomas adapts Romantic language to mutations within the psyche, and to traffic between the unconscious and the self that ‘thinks’ and ‘names’.
Ms: B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 2 one by one, – one by one. – 10 rich scene late year 11 Spring Spring, 18 happiness, – happiness, Note: CP1978 follows B rather than P, whose text is vindicated by PTP. From CP1920 to CP1949 there is no stanza-break after l.9: an error due to the fact that it ends a page in P. Note on title: Title is given in B.
There’s nothing like the sun (102)
18, 19 November 1915
This is the first poem that Thomas wrote at Hare Hall Camp, Gidea Park, Romford, Essex, where he was a map-reading instructor. He would be based there until August 1916. The poem reflects ‘Beautiful cold sunny days, and the earth thick with clean snow’ (EF, 171). ‘Sweet as last damsons on spangled tree when November starling imitates the swallow in sunny interval between rain and all is still and dripping’ (1 November 1915, FNB80); ‘There’s nothing like the sun in January – / While a man lives there’s nothing like the sun’ (?16 November, FNB80).
1. There’s nothing like the sun as the year dies. Playing on the phrase ‘nothing like’, Thomas splices the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXXX (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’) with his response to the last stanza of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’: ‘something light, thin, cold and vanishing’ (K, 53). Keats rhymes ‘dies’ / ‘skies’; Thomas, ‘dies’ / ‘flies’.
2. this…so. ‘“This world being made so” is 5 heavy syllables unaccented’ (EF, 175). Accents are important throughout the poem. The next line’s monosyllabic (and monotonous) iambics place all earthly phenomena, from ‘men’ to ‘flies’, on the same level. More varied rhythms, as in the evocation of damsons, relish the diversity of months and days. ‘Last-left damsons from the bough’ echoes ‘last oozings hours by hours’: the phrase quoted by Thomas from ‘To Autumn’ to illustrate Keats’s effects of ‘mellowness and slowness’ (K, 53). Cuthbertson argues that There’s nothing like the sun is consciously belated in both literary history and the annual cycle: ‘Thomas is taking some of the fruit from Keats’s fruit-filled autumn scene; and it appears to be significant that Thomas’s autumn comes after Keats’s…The swallows have already gone’ (GC, 243).
10-11. whistling what /Once swallows sang: a variation on Keats’s ‘The redbreast whistles’ and ‘gathering swallows twitter’ in ‘To Autumn’.
20. There’s nothing like the sun till we are dead. As the poem turns back on itself, the blunt rhyme word, together with other contrasts between ‘as the year dies’ and ‘till we are dead’, makes no bones about the earthly condition. A draft has ‘till a man’s dead’ (EF, 172).
Ms: B. Published text: P. Note: B, CP1928 and CP1944 begin l.15 ‘August’ rather than ‘And August’ [P]. Thomas tinkered with the poem, and Eleanor Farjeon typed several versions [see CP1978, 248].
The Thrush (102)
November 1915
Thomas wrote this poem ‘the day I was in as hut-orderly while the rest went to South Weald’. The thrush may be a Londoner: ‘How I noticed the one thrush near the tip of poplar 250 yards away beyond Nightingale Lane in opening of Rusham Road – he was singing, the only one’ (1 February 1915, FNB80). The thrush is the bird that Thomas most often aligns with, or carefully differentiates from, the poet (cf. The Word and The Green Roads). Similarly, he differentiates his own thrush-poem from Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’, which proposes that the thrush’s winter song carries ‘Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware’. For Thomas, ‘awareness’ and its responsibilities are human. The Thrush may also criticise Keats’s ‘translation of a thrush’s song that told him he was “right to have no idea but of the morning”’. Keats makes the thrush say: ‘O fret not after knowledge! I have none’. Thomas comments: ‘The great odes, the poem to Autumn, and “The Eve of St Agnes” could never have been translated out of a thrush’s song’ (K, 51).
The Thrush is a choric interlude in this Keatsian sequence. It dwells on the burden of consciousness that detaches humanity (and poetry) from ‘alternation of violet and rose’ (October). The parallels with ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ are obvious. But where Keats stresses human suffering, Thomas stresses cognition, memory and language. He begins with a question about ‘reading’, and speculative syntax complicates lines that might have been songlike. Rhythmic counterpoint, including different kinds of refrain, backs up the distinction between poetry and birdsong.
5. I hear the thrush. Originally this quatrain addressed the thrush: ‘I hear you alone and see / You alone’ etc (FNB80). Besides injecting some appropriate distance, the change to the third person may have complicated the ‘you’ of the first quatrain, making it partly inner-directed or equivalent to ‘one’.
17. I know the months all. Thomas has just proved this in There’s nothing like the sun. Months feature in the title of eight poems; others incorporate their date-lines: ‘It was late June’ (Adlestrop); ‘At hawthorn-time’ (Lob); ‘This early May morn’ (The Cherry Trees); ‘the harvest blue’ (How at once). Thomas’s sense of the seasons and sense of history seem to be converging. ‘November’ in The Thrush is more time-bound than in November, written a year earlier.
Ms: B. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 22 in April [CP1920-CP1949] into April [B, LP]: the latter seems awkward in grammar and rhythm Note on title: In B the title is ‘A Thrush’.
Liberty (103)
26 November 1915
Liberty concludes Thomas’s autumnal meditation on ‘things that have an end’, his psychological and metaphysical journey from the ‘green elm with the one great bough of gold’ to ‘the tall elm’s shadow’. This soliloquy brings meditation itself centre-stage, and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ sets the scene: ‘haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne/…But here there is no light, / Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown / Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways’. Thomas may also echo Anne Finch’s ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ (see note on The Other, 160), which ends: ‘When a sedate Content the Spirit feels,/ And no fierce Light disturbs, whilst it reveals…In such a Night let Me abroad remain, /Till Morning breaks, and All’s confus’d again;/Our Cares, our Toils, our Clamours are renew’d, /Our Pleasures, seldom reach’d, again pursu’d.’ He had written similarly himself: ‘The past day is long past, the day of fighting, digging, buying, selling, writing; and if there are still men on the earth they are all equal in the trances of passion or sleep; the day to come is not to be thought of. The moon reigns; you rule. The centuries are gathered up in your hand’ (HE, 167).
5. unforgotten and lost. This phrase governs the items in the next line and a half. Cf. The Word, lines 1-9, where Thomas explores the priorities and politics of memory. Thus Liberty revisits something ‘thought’ at the time of his enlistment. John F. Danby calls ‘unforgotten’ ‘a typical surprise. It does not mean “still remembered”. It means in fact the very opposite: these things have never been even admitted into memory…The present moment is thus apprehended as a datum from a memoriless and unremembered world, the world of the other admitted into the pure now’ (Danby, ‘Edward Thomas’, Critical Quarterly 1 [1959], 310).
9-18. liberty…free or not. Here ‘liberty’ is checked by ‘dream’, and ‘free’ appears highly contingent: ‘the second half of the poem meditates on the delusoriness of freedom from involvement in delusions’ (Danby). The speaker confronts a paradox: actions that tie one down (joining an army, perhaps) may be liberating whereas too much choice can paralyse the will. A year earlier, like Hamlet envying Fortinbras, Thomas had contrasted the attitudes of ‘the men who are fighting or going to fight’ with those of ‘morbid people in whom the balance or fusion of mind and body is impossible, and who admire frantically what is impossible to themselves’ (LA, 13).
15. mind. If every hour.
A quasi-division as between two sonnets occurs here, just as something akin to a sonnet’s ‘turn’ occurs in the middle of lines 9 and 21.
24-7. And yet I still…dark within the door. Catalogue – lists of flora and fauna, naming the months – is a deep structure in these poems. Liberty ends with a comprehensive catalogue that rearranges key terms of Thomas’s poetry, and redefines an ‘inhabitant of the earth’ (see note, 161). The affirmative (on balance) tone chimes with his summation of Keats: ‘though a lover of the moon, a most sublunary poet, earthly, substantial and precise, a man, but for his intensity, singularly like his fellow-men’ (K, 39).
24. half in love with pain: cf. ‘half in love with easeful Death’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.
25. With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth. ‘[Jefferies] has learned…that things may be imperfect and yet better than the perfection of cloistered nullity’ (RJ, 227). ‘Tears and mirth’ alludes to Thomas’s two Digging poems. ‘Mirth’ and ‘earth’ are rhymed in both, and in The Other and The Source. Thomas uses (almost) every possible rhyme for ‘earth’.