The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  1. parleying starlings: ‘4 February 1915. Sometimes dozens of starlings – separately in hedge and in oaks of meadow behind are talking at same time – the sweetest voiced democratic crowd imaginable. The sweetest democracy imaginable’ (FNB80).

  4-5. first are last…last are first. ‘But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first’ (Matthew XIX, 30).

  8. shaw: a strip of wood or underwood forming the border of a field.

  10-11. the broad ploughland oak / Roars mill-like. This emblem evokes several oppressive forces: ‘the roar of towns’ (Roads) and of industry; the ‘dark Satanic mills’ in Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’; ‘the mills of God’.

  13-14. And God…stone-deaf and stone-blind. The last two lines bring an anti-religious undercurrent to the surface. The only positive mentions of God in Thomas’s poetry occur at moments of untypical sentiment: ‘God bless you’ (April) and ‘God save England’ (This is no case of petty right or wrong). Here Thomas queries the latter. He had deplored Hardy’s ‘most tyrannous obsession of the blindness of Fate, the carelessness of Nature, and the insignificance of Man’ (IPS, 194), but war may have made Hardy’s ‘God’ more credible: ‘He sank to raptness as of yore, / And opening New Year’s Day /Wove it by rote as theretofore, /And went on working evermore / In his unweeting way’ (‘New Year’s Eve’, 1906). Cf. Thomas’s fable, ‘The Chessplayer’, in which an old man sits alone in a mountain cave above the earth, playing ‘with chessmen of ivory and ebony’, and thus ‘making the days and nights and all the hours, and never looking out to behold his handiwork’ (COE, 12). In depicting the war as conditioned by Judaeo-Christian patriarchy, Thomas parallels Wilfred Owen. While Nature’s ‘law’ may itself be territorial, it has its checks and balances, and only human beings wrap violence in transcendental ‘array’. Thomas’s mother had been ‘reading Revelations’ to him while he was ill in London (CP1978, 409). February Afternoon may specifically dispute Revelation XX, which dwells on Satan’s ‘thousand years’ of imprisonment: prelude to ‘a new heaven and a new earth’. Thomas’s vision of blind recurrence holds out no such millenarian prospect. Before the war, he had written: ‘What they worshipped at Avebury temple, no one knows, but the human mind is still fertile in fantasy and ferocity – if it no longer draws blood – when it worships within walls’ (RJ, 8).

  Thomas was a cradle agnostic, son of generally secular parents, a Darwinian. In Swindon his ‘bigoted, worldly, crafty, narrow-minded, and ungenerous’ grandmother ‘first took me to church. Clad in those uncomfortable clothes, I walked beside her, who looked more uncomfortable in her layers of black. I felt that everyone enjoyed being stiff, solemn, black, except myself. On entering the church she bent down to pray, dragging me down with her to blur my sight for a similar period…It was an inexplicable conspiracy for an hour’s self-torture. The service was a dreary discomfort in which the hymns were green isles’ (CET, 47-8). Later, his parents attended a Unitarian chapel: ‘Perhaps my weariness in chapel was mingled with something that specialists would label as religious. I only know that where people were sad and solemn I was overcome, half-suffocated by the sadness and solemnity. What was read and preached was to me airy nothing’ (CET, 75). Before going up to Oxford, Thomas thought of joining the Church of England because he felt he needed ‘religion…an informing spirit in all I do and am…I want, as Milton says in those pathetic closing lines of his Epic, “a place to rest”’ (letter to Harry Hooton, LTH, 128). Nothing came of this plan, although he later regretted not attending the college chapel. In 1902, writing to Jesse Berridge (who became an Anglican clergyman in 1906), Thomas called himself ‘a devout agnostic’ (LJB, 34). In 1912 he warned Berridge: ‘don’t label me anima naturaliter christiana while I am alive. It seems so particularly a privilege of the unresisting dead to have someone come down upon them & pin that order onto their breasts. It won’t matter then’ (LJB, 67). On 23 March 1917 Thomas recorded in his ‘War Diary’: ‘Rubin…believes in God and tackles me about atheism – thinks marvellous escapes are ordained. But I say so are the marvellous escapes of certain telegraph posts, houses, etc’ (CP1978, 478).

  Ms: B. Published text: LP. Note: in l.11 B has ‘or bear’. Note on title: Title is given in B.

  I may come near loving you (109)

  8 February 1916

  Addressed, but never posted, to Thomas’s father Philip Henry Thomas (1854-1920), I may come near loving you remained unpublished until CP1949. It is interesting that this poem should follow the hostile portrayal of God the Father in February Afternoon. R. George Thomas comments: ‘The relation between father and son was a difficult one but not as implacable as this poem suggests’ (CP1978, 409). John Pikoulis, however, charges him with softening the poem’s impact for the family’s sake (JP, 53). Thomas’s recent arguments with his father about the war – ‘He treats me so that I have a feeling of shame that I am alive’ (RFET, 115) – may have re-activated deeper-seated problems (see note on This is no case of petty right or wrong, 263). They had quarrelled bitterly over Thomas’s comparative academic failure, his refusal to follow his father into the Civil Service, his early marriage, his decision to write: ‘bad words with father who takes every chance of insulting me’ (Diary, 28 February 1901, NLW). Thomas’s older male friends, like the writer James Ashcroft Noble (Helen’s father, who died in 1896) and ‘Dad’ Uzzell, can be seen as surrogate fathers. Yet his father did come round to the marriage, and Thomas often stayed in his parents’ London home. Again, some childhood memories seem warm enough; although, in depicting his parents as opposites, Thomas implies their role in his psychological conflicts: ‘He was eloquent, confident, black-haired, brown-eyed, all that my mother was not…I can hear but never see him telling me for the tenth or hundredth time the story of the Wiltshire moonrakers…and many another comic tale or rhyme’; ‘My father and I made merry over the Devil and the folly of believing in him as we supposed many did. He used to try different chapels or different preachers, sometimes taking me with him, more especially when he had become an almost weekly attendant at a Unitarian Chapel’ (CET, 17-18, 31). The poem’s succinct plain-speaking may target paternal ‘eloquence’.

  Thomas’s entire career might be read as a reaction against his father’s values. ‘Undo’ (l.11) represents those values as destructive. Thomas senior, who liked ‘directly elevating philanthropic and progressive literature’ (CET, 104), was disappointed by his son’s lack of worldly ambition. A Liberal Party activist and skilled public speaker, he knew Lloyd George, and stood (unsuccessfully) for parliament after retiring from the Civil Service. His interests were philosophical as well as political: ‘he became prominent in Positivist circles’ (see RGT, 4-5). His father’s jingoism caused Thomas to dub him the ‘Public Man’ or PM. After Thomas’s death, a reviewer criticised his ‘dislike of committing himself’, calling him ‘a non-combatant of letters’. His father riposted in terms that might have annoyed Thomas: ‘Just as little was he non-combatant in literature as in war’ (The Nation 13 [20 October 1917]).

  3. nothing to do. ‘Do’, as in l.11, obliquely contrasts the ‘Public Man’, the man of action, with the truth-telling poet who gets the last word.

  10. impotence. Here Thomas may consciously invoke, rather than unconsciously substantiate, Freud’s theory of the ‘Oedipus Complex’.

  Ms: B. Published text: CP1949. Differences from CP1978: title: I may come near loving you [P.H.T.] 7 you [B, CP1949] you, [typescript given to R. George Thomas by Helen Thomas] Note on title: This edition names the poem for its first line. In CP2004 the poem has no title. See Note on Text.

  Those things that poets said (110)

  9 February 1916

  What poets say ‘Of love’ is a central theme in Feminine Influence on the Poets (see general note to The Unknown, 279). Here, between poems of ‘loving not’, Thomas raises theoretical questions about ‘love and poetry’. For the speaker, love poetry’s truth-claims have been discredited. Yet he proceeds to ‘prove’ love’s existence by a nega
tive. Despite his ironical tone, the felt ‘difference’ between loving and not loving extends the definition of love (and love poetry) to ‘something varying infinitely’ (see note on l.7). Thomas uses the trope of a poem that denies its own genre.

  4. love and poetry equally. ‘How many times has Shelley – Shelley and the daffodils of Devon or the wild thyme of Wiltshire – been the half of a first love? To how many does his poetry not seem, during a great lovely tract of life, to have been the half of spring and summer and autumn, of night and dawn and noon, and of youth enjoying these things? At the time when youth is most exultant, this poetry is thumbed night and day; a page is opened at random, as Virgil used to be, for a word big with fate’ (FIP, 78).

  7. Or if mine were the true. See letter to Helen Thomas, 24 February, quoted with reference to the next poem: ‘You know how unlike I am to you, and you know that you love, so how can I? That is if you count love as any one feeling and not something varying infinitely with the variety of people’ (SL, 119).

  16. loving not. Again, see letter to Helen: ‘you know that my usual belief is that I don’t and can’t love and haven’t done for something near 20 years’ (SL, 119).

  Ms: B. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: title and l.1: Those These Note: In all editions from LP to CP1978 the title is These things that poets said. But the first line of B [where the poem is untitled] begins with ‘Those’. No other ms. or typescript survives, and the LP editors may have misread ‘Those’ [which seems more appropriate to the tense of the first quatrain] as ‘These’. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.

  No one so much as you (110)

  11 February 1916

  This poem was first published in CP1928 under the above title. In CP1978 R. George Thomas titles it ‘[M.E.T.]’, citing ‘Helen Thomas’s statement to me that the poem was about the poet’s mother [Mary Elizabeth Thomas]’ (CP1978, 276). Presumably, Helen based this statement on Thomas’s letter of 24 February:

  Fancy your thinking those verses [I may come near loving you] had anything to do with you. Fancy your thinking, too, that I should let you see them if they were. They are not to a woman at all. You know precisely all that I know of any woman I have cared a little for. They are as a matter of fact to father. So now, unless you choose to think I am deceiving you (which I don’t think I ever did), you can be at ease again. Silly old thing to jump so to conclusions. You might as well have concluded the verses to Mother were for you. As to the other verses about love you know that my usual belief is that I don’t and can’t love and haven’t done for something near 20 years. You know too that you don’t think my nature really compatible with love, being so clear and critical. You know how unlike I am to you, and you know that you love, so how can I? That is if you count love as any one feeling and not something varying infinitely with the variety of people. (SL, 119)

  Yet, as John Pikoulis notes, ‘most readers have assumed’ that the poem is ‘about Helen herself’ (JP, 53). Did Thomas ‘deceive’ Helen, or even himself, as to the source – or one source – of the emotional scenario that his letter paraphrases? Their marriage was put under huge stress not only by the economic need for Thomas to keep writing, but also by his need for child-free peace in which to do so and to develop his own talent. Hence his frequent working absences from home, during one of which he formed an unwise passion (see note on The Chalk-Pit, 238, and general note to The Unknown below). But strains may have predated the marriage (June 1899). A letter to Harry Hooton (8 May 1898, LTH, 126-8) included a poem that anticipates No one so much as you in more than form:

  Weary of April’s over-sweet –

  Anemone and marigold –

  I turned my feet

  To her the meek and bold.

  ‘Let me but speak to thee, or thou

  To me unhastily, of naught:

  Of love not now,’

  I moaned with heart distraught (!)

  Wistfully smiling, then, she stept

  To lift me with love’s best, though I

  Unheeding wept

  And cared not to reply.

  Ah! when repose came – cruel bliss –

  To her sweet toil she turned and wove,

  And bitter ’tis

  We cannot always love.

  The bracketed exclamation mark is Thomas’s own, and he offers an alternative version of the last two lines: ‘And would not kiss: / Twas she owned pain I could not move’. In 1903 he recorded in his diary: ‘No one knows how difficult I find it to live with Helen, though I admire her, like her, perhaps love her’ (SL, 31). In 1904 he wrote to Helen: ‘If I could only love you and show my love as much as you deserve how happy would you (and I) be! But with all my silly head and trembling body and rotten soul I do love you’ (SL, 35). In 1905 he told Jesse Berridge: ‘What I really ought to do is to live alone. But I can’t find courage to do the many things necessary for taking that step. It is really the kind H[elen] & the dear children who make life almost impossible’ (LJB, 47).

  On 24 January 1916 Thomas had already tried to deflect Helen’s anxieties about The clouds that are so light (see note, 269). Besides exclaiming ‘Fancy your thinking I might have someone in view in those verses’ (‘Fancy’ also seems uneasy in the letter of 24 February quoted above), he says: ‘Oh, you needn’t think of another lady. There would have to be 2 to make a love affair and I am only one. Nobody but you would ever be likely to respond as I wished. I don’t like to think anybody but I could respond to you. If you turned to anybody else I should come to an end immediately’ (CP1978, 409). Here, verbal anticipations of No one so much as you suggest, at least, that the perspectives dramatised in this series of love poems closely mesh with Helen’s reactions to the poems, and with Thomas’s reaction to her reactions. See, too, And you, Helen. As for his relations with his mother: he wrote to Frost in July 1915: ‘There is no one to keep me here [in England] except my mother. She might come too’ (RFET, 82). In October 1913, when Thomas decided against suicide: ‘The final argument was my mother who has received nearly all the other blows possible’ (LWD). Nonetheless, his letters to Helen until the end are signed off ‘All and always yours’.

  1-3. you…you. Thomas repeats this form of rhyme in the third and fifth quatrains. The vocative that separates ‘I’ from ‘you’ becomes a refrain at once tender and relentless.

  33-6. Till sometimes…here. This partly unrhymed, partly off-rhymed quatrain lends emphasis to the full rhymes of the final quatrain, as if the speaker, at some subterranean level, is moving towards a decision.

  36. linger here. Arthur Ransome remembers Thomas saying: ‘I run away from home every day, but I always come back for tea’ (The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome [London: Cape, 1976], 99).

  Ms: B. Published text: CP1928. Differences from CP1978: title [see general note above]: No one so much as you [M.E.T.] 17 My eyes scarce Scarce my eyes 25 For I at most I at the most 28 Only a fretting A helpless fretting Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [retained by Eleanor Farjeon] rather than B and CP1928, but the phrasing in B seems more likely to be the revised version. Note on title: In CP2004 the poem has no title.

  The Unknown (112)

  14 February 1916

  In a rather obvious dialectical move, Thomas reworks Richard Crashaw’s love-and-Muse poem, ‘Wishes to His Supposed Mistress’:

  Whoe’er she be –

  That not impossible She

  That shall command my heart and me…

  Thomas calls Crashaw’s poem ‘remarkable for its grave original beauty and its being apparently inspired by the thought of a woman who may some day appear before him, and also because the woman is to be not merely beautiful and virtuous, but intelligent’ (FIP, 264). His own stanza (rhymed ABCBA) differs from Crashaw’s, but echoes its slow tempo and self-enclosed rhyme-scheme. All this befits a dream vision as opposed to the valedictory momentum of No one so much as you.

  The poems in which Thomas speaks as lover are poems of desire or lost love or
both. His self-representations to Helen, including the idea that his nature is not ‘compatible with love’ (SL, 119), appear disingenuous. For instance, Hope Webb, the young girl he met in 1908, when working on Richard Jefferies at Minsmere, Suffolk, and with whom his relationship was abruptly terminated, seemingly haunts his love poetry (see note on The Chalk-Pit, 238). In this set of poems, The Unknown and Celandine bear or track her traces, proving Bottomley astute when he ‘propos[ed] the consolation of an unassailable vision of her’ (LGB, 160). Before being forbidden to write to Hope (who had gone to boarding school), Thomas told Walter de la Mare: ‘She is 17 [actually 18], a particularly lovely age to me because when I was that age I knew only two of my coevals, one I married and the other is in South America, and in the presence of this new one I had the sharpest pains and pleasures of retrospection, longing and – I am now making absurd attempts to return to that period by means of letters’ (SL, 50). This implies that an aspect of his sexuality remains arrested at, and hence fixated on, the adolescent moment – also, that premature domesticity caused the arrest. ‘The Fountain’ is one of several prose sketches that evoke Hope in a Suffolk moorland setting, and identify her beauty with Nature’s (cf. ‘A Return to Nature’, SC, 81-3; ‘The End of a Day’, LAT, 52-7). The idealisation or sublimation in these writings survived Thomas’s switch to poetry: