by Edna Longley
Ms: B. Published text: P. Note: In l.8 CP1944 has ‘a grave’ [B].
This is no case of petty right or wrong (104)
26 December 1915
This poem returns to the roots of Thomas’s thinking about the war. On 3 September 1914 he wrote: ‘I don’t quite know what will happen. The obvious thing is to join the Territorials but I can’t leave other people to keep my family …I am slowly growing into a conscious Englishman’ (LJB, 74). On 19 September he mentioned to Frost that he was adding to an article [‘This England’] based on the experience that also generated The sun used to shine (see note, 296): ‘the new moon of August 26 & you & me strolling about in the sun while our brave soldiers &c. I doubt if I shall get nearer soldiering than I did then, chiefly for fear of leaving many tangles behind’ (RFET, 26). On 11 October he reflected: ‘I suppose writers generally have been people who tasted far more things than they ever swallowed and digested. But Shelley bothered for a time about politics…Tennyson started at any rate to join a body of volunteers to fight (I think) in Spain. And I – dig in the garden. I suppose it is something. I only feel how far too little it is to give my imagination of the lives of men reality’ (letter to Helen, NLW). At the end of October Thomas told Frost: ‘I have just made myself almost ill with thinking hard for an hour, – going up to my study & sitting there, – that I ought to enlist next week in town…I go on writing, unlike all the patriots, or rather as the patriots feel they oughtn’t to’ (RFET, 30). On 20 November he told W.H. Hudson: ‘As you will have supposed, I have not enlisted, tho I should have done if I had been in company that had encouraged me. At least I think so. Not that I pretend to be warlike or to think except with blank misgiving of any sort of life different from my past: only I can’t justify not making an effort, except by saying that if I did go it would be hard to put and leave things straight at home’ (ETFN 52 [August 2004], 10).
For Thomas’s enlistment, see Introduction (17) and general note to The Word (246). If Liberty suggests that his poetry is still reviewing that decision, This is no case reads like a polemical reprise of the decision-making process. Despite ‘Dinned /With war and argument’, the first line speaks as from the midst of an argument: an argument pursued on two fronts, against both patriots and pacifists. Thomas may also be subtextually quarrelling with himself, and thus over-egging his love for England. But one reason why he ‘hated’ jingoism was because it had stolen patriotism. He and the poet Ralph Hodgson agreed not to meet again until after the war because ‘I am not patriotic enough for his exuberant taste’ (LGB, 243). In December 1914 he told Harold Monro: ‘Hodgson flung off today labelling me pro-German. I almost enlisted afterwards in repentance’ (ETFN 42 [January 2000], 9). As for his father’s politics: ‘People get fined occasionally for speaking well of the Germans at private parties – under the Defence of the Realm Act. I don’t wonder. My father is so rampant in his cheery patriotism that I become pro German every evening’ (9 August 1915, RFET, 89); ‘In town I saw my father too…he treats me so that I have a feeling of shame that I am alive. I couldn’t sleep after it…We argued about the war & he showed that his real feeling when he is not trying to be nice & comfortable is one of contempt’ (2 January 1916, RFET, 115).
‘Argument’ brings to the poetic surface (and thus simplifies) the complex of psychological, ethical, cultural and literary factors that shaped Thomas’s commitment to the war. This is the only poem of his that proclaims its status as a war poem, but he had been pondering an aesthetic of “war poetry” since Autumn 1914. Reviewing his own literary situation, while wondering ‘whether I can in reason and decency enlist’, he told Walter de la Mare: ‘The question is what to do with spare time. It is not easy – if possible – to go on writing as if the County Council ran the world: otherwise it would be a good time for doing what one really wants to do, provided one can really discover now what that is’ (LWD, September 1914). Between October and December, while preparing his review article ‘War Poetry’, he noted: ‘Poetry: The war national but as yet dark and chaotic in brain – e.g. no good poems early in Napoleonic wars. Some writers can’t go on with old work but no reason why they should at once be able to admit war into subject matter. Poetry excepting cheapest kind shows this dark chaotic character. People expressing all sorts of views and trumping up old canting catchwords, but not yet the compact essential real truth to this occasion alone. Statesman may say “No price too high when honour and freedom are at stake” etc. But it can’t be translated into poetry’ (FNB79).
This England marks a further stage in Thomas’s thinking – or feeling: the proper ratio between thought and feeling is itself at issue. Like Lob, This is no case condenses passages from the anthology but with a bias towards explicitly “national” content. A crucial model for the poem was Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude: written in April 1798, during the alarm of an invasion’. In This England Thomas juxtaposes ‘Fears in Solitude’ with his own Manor Farm and Haymaking; and in ‘War Poetry’ he says: ‘no newspaper or magazine, then or now, would print such a poem, since a large part of it is humble’ (Poetry and Drama 2, 8 [December 1914], 341). After recording his anxieties about invasion and ‘all the crash of onset’, Coleridge appeals:
O native Britain! O my Mother Isle!
How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy
To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills,
Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas,
Have drunk in all my intellectual life,
All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts,
All adoration of the God in nature…?
There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul
Unborrowed from my country!
This is no case also takes concepts from Thomas’s prose reflections on ‘England’: from the pre-war Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans; from essays commissioned by the English Review in August 1914 (‘Tipperary’, ‘England’, ‘It’s a Long, Long, Way’); and from ‘This England’. The English Review commission entailed research. From 29 August to 10 September 1914 Thomas ‘travelled through England, from Swindon to Newcastle-on-Tyne, listening to people, in railway carriages, trams, taverns, and public places, talking about the war and the effects of it’ (‘Tipperary’, LS, 113). This exceptional field trip may have contributed to his becoming a poet. It is interesting that Thomas should now return to that moment, to his first thoughts about the war, and (in the final lines) to the rhyming couplets he had favoured in July 1915, his month of decision (see note, 251). A letter to Eleanor Farjeon reveals that he wrote the couplets several weeks after the earlier lines (EF, 180). Uniquely in his work, the couplets of This is no case serve discursive purposes – a package Thomas disliked in eighteenth-century poetry. He thus courts his own censure of those who write ‘under the direct pressure of public patriotic motives’ (‘War Poetry’, 341). But if he slips into rhetoric (as in the final gloss on ‘hate’), or strays into Rupert Brooke territory, at least he tries to make the patriotic poem inner-directed rather than aggressive. Thomas published This is no case in SP, which may explain its absence from P; although Cock-Crow appears in both, and Farjeon seems to think the omission significant.
This is no case may show signs of strain partly because it adapts to England/Britain at war a patriotic idea predicated on Wales. Before the war Thomas had noted: ‘what with Great Britain, the British Empire, Britons, Britishers, and the English-speaking world, the choice offered to whomsoever would be patriotic is embarrassing’ (SC, 71). Some years earlier, he had ‘walked to Wimbledon’ with his friend Arthur York Hardy, who was about to join the South African police, ‘talking of patriotism of which I never felt a spark unless it be [?]perhaps to love a few acres in Wales. A Frenchman is to me the same as an Eng[lishman]’ (Diary, 29 September 1901, NLW). Similarly, he writes: ‘I do not easily believe in patriotism, in times of peace or war, except as a party cry, or the result of intoxication or an article in a newspaper, unless I am in Wales’ (BW, 174); and he says of ‘Land of My Fath
ers’: ‘It was exulting without self-glorification or any other form of brutality. It might well be the national anthem of any nation that knows, and would not rashly destroy, the bonds distinguishing it from the rest of the world without isolating it’ (HGLM, 224-5). Thomas’s reading of “England” through Wales or Ireland may work best where it bases itself on ‘a few acres’. The following extracts suggest the poetic possibilities (Adlestrop, Lob) and limits (This is no case) of “nationality”:
Someone with a precocious sneer, asked if England was now anything more than a geographical expression, and Mr Stodham preached a sermon straight away: ‘A great poet [Wordsworth] said once upon a time that this earth is “where we have our happiness or not at all”. For most of those who speak his language he might have said that this England is where we have our happiness or not at all. He meant to say that we are limited creatures, not angels, and that our immediate surroundings are enough to exercise all our faculties of mind and body: there is no need to flatter ourselves with the belief that we could do better in a bigger or another world. Only the bad workman complains of his tools…[after a quotation from Wordsworth’s ‘To a Skylark’, “Type of the wise who soar but never roam, /True to the kindred points of heaven and home”] Well, England is home and heaven too. England made you, and of you is England made. Deny England – wise men have done so – and you may find yourself some day denying your father and mother – and this also wise men have done. Having denied England and your father and mother, you may have to deny your own self, and treat it as nothing, a mere conventional boundary, an artifice, by which you are separated from the universe and its creator…He is a bold man who hopes to do without earth, England, family, and self.’ (HGLM, 220-2)
I should like to know what the old soldier meant by ‘England’, if it was anything more than some sort of a giant with Gloucestershire for its eyes, its beating heart, for everything that raised it above a personification. His was a very little England. The core and vital principle was less still, a few thousand acres of corn, meadow, orchard, and copse, a few farms and cottages; and he laughed heartily over a farmer’s artfulness who had hid away some horses wanted by the War Office. If England was against Germany, the parish was against Germany, England, and all the world. (‘It’s a Long, Long, Way’, LS, 136)
In times of peace and tranquillity the vocabulary of patriotism is not much used…If England lies like a vast estate calm around you, and you a minor, you may find faults without end. If England seems threatened you feel that in losing her you would lose yourself…
I believe the man who thought it a ‘quaint’ idea to love England would feel very much as I do about these passages and about Walton altogether. I believe that England means something like this to most of us; that all ideas of England are developed, spun out, from such a centre into something large or infinite, solid or aëry, according to each man’s nature and capacity; that England is a system of vast circumferences circling round the minute neighbouring points of home. (‘England’, LS, 91, 111)
At one stroke, I thought, like many other people, what things that same new moon sees eastward about the Meuse in France…I was deluged, in a second stroke, by another thought, or something that overpowered thought. All I can tell is, it seemed to me that either I had never loved England, or I had loved it foolishly, aesthetically, like a slave, not having realised that it was not mine unless I were willing and prepared to die rather than leave it as Belgian women and old men and children had left their country. Something I had omitted. Something, I felt, had to be done before I could look again composedly at English landscape…(‘This England’, LS, 221 [see general note to The sun used to shine, 296])
2-3. That politicians or philosophers / Can judge. In l.17 the capacity of future ‘historians’ to make judgments about the war is also doubted. Cf. the limitations of ‘naturalists’ in The Unknown Bird. ‘Philosophers’ may allude to Bertrand Russell’s pacifist campaigning.
4. to please newspapers. The speaker is both ‘reading’, and refusing to write for, the jingoistic press. ‘In print men become capable of anything. The bards and the journalists say extraordinary things…They feel they are addressing the world; they are intoxicated with the social sense’ (‘England’, LS, 92). ‘It is the hour of the writer who picks up popular views or phrases, or coins them, and has the power to turn them into downright stanzas. Most newspapers have one or more of these gentlemen’ (‘War Poetry’, 344).
12. Two witches’ cauldrons roar. In ‘Fears in Solitude’ Coleridge hopes that ‘the vaunts / And menace of the vengeful enemy’ may ‘Pass like the gust, that roared and died away / In the distant tree’. As with ‘gong’ (l.7) and ‘Dinned’ (l.9), Thomas continues to associate war, and its rhetoric, with noise. Cf. the opening of Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ (1919): ‘Once more the storm is howling’.
15-26. like her mother…She…her foe. ‘The old phrases come back alive in wartime. I have heard a farmer’s wife refer to England as She’ (‘England’, LS, 92). Thomas himself calls England ‘her’ in the same essay (see quotation above). Despite damning ‘Britannia’ as ‘a frigid personification’ (see Introduction, 21), he may have felt that such gendering fleshed out ‘ideas of England’. This England is subtitled: ‘An Anthology from her Writers’.
19. serene…ken: a slightly odd echo of Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’.
20-6. But with the best…foe. The epigraph to the ‘This England’ section (the first section) of This England is Prince Arthur’s patriotic outburst in the Faerie Queene (II. x. 69) after reading ‘Briton moniments’:
Dear Country, O how dearly dear
Ought thy remembrance and perpetual band
Be to thy foster Child, that from thy hand
Did common breath and nouriture receive?
How brutish is it not to understand,
How much to her we owe, that all us gave,
That gave unto us all, what ever good we have.
21. I am one in crying, God save England. ‘One’ is at odds with Thomas’s criticism of the ‘writer of hymns or patriotic verses…who feels himself always or at the time at one with [a] class, perhaps the whole nation, or…who can simulate or exaggerate this sympathy’ (‘War Poetry’, 343).
22. what never slaves and cattle blessed. A draft of lines 21-2 is: ‘Cry God save England else we lose our souls / And shall [be] live clothed and fed like animals’ (26 November 1915, FNB80). Cf. ‘like a slave’ in the passage quoted above from ‘This England’, and ‘brutish’ in the quotation from The Faerie Queene. This England contains several celebrations of English ‘liberty’ by Milton and others, including Lord Mansfield’s claim: ‘The air of England has long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it’.
23. The ages made her that made us from the dust: ‘But do know that bone of her bone I am’ (FNB80 draft). Eleanor Farjeon writes: ‘when we were walking in the country…I asked him the question his friends had asked him when he joined up, but I put it differently. “Do you know what you are fighting for?” He stopped, and picked up a pinch of earth. “Literally, for this.” He crumbled it between finger and thumb, and let it fall’ (EF, 154).
Ms: B. Published text: SP, LP. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.
Rain (105)
7 January 1916
For Thomas and rain, see general note to After Rain (154). A passage in The Icknield Way is perhaps best known of ‘the uncut stones which are scattered about his books’ (VS, 12):
I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out
summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more…I am not a part of nature. I am alone. There is nothing else in my world but my dead heart and brain within me and the rain without…There is nothing to be seen or heard, and there never was. Memory, the last chord of the lute, is broken…Now there is neither life nor death, but only the rain…the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I
knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.’ (IW, 280-3)
Cooke discusses the development from prose to poem (WC, 177-82). Thomas’s incantatory prose already aspires to the condition of poetry: ‘finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol’. Rain does what this says. Its seamless symbolism blends sound, image, cadence and the voice of the ‘ghostly double’ into a prospect of ‘annihilation’ or nihilism now intensified by war. The repeated ‘rain’ (rhyme, refrain, rhetoric, onomatopoeia) fuses outward bombardment with inner dissolution. Here the apocalyptic waters of A Dream and The Mill-Water reach a new pitch. Rain relates dialectically to the poems that precede it: to Liberty as a darker soliloquy; to This is no case of petty right or wrong as a ‘bleaker’ war poem. Noting Frost’s response to ‘some verses I had sent – dismal ones, I gather’, Thomas says: ‘Perhaps one was called “Rain”, a form of excrement you hoped it was when you said “work all that off in poetry & I shan’t complain”’ (RFET, 126).