by Edna Longley
In criticising Pater and Hearn, Thomas was exorcising an earlier literary self. His spectatorial Horae Solitariae (1902) includes an essay that represents rural people as ‘the Caryatids of life’ (HS, 115). The war added a further edge to his critique, as when he rebukes himself for loving England ‘aesthetically’ (LS, 221). The letter to Helen in which Thomas reflects on writers and the war, along with his own failure ‘to give my imagination of the lives of men reality’ (see note, 262), begins by describing his room in a Welsh inn: ‘dignified by a black [?] cock in a glass case as well as a fantastic heavy armchair, presumably for a president to sit in, a fretwork ship in a glass case and a portrait of a pointer (I think)’ (10 October 1914, NLW). Thus a subtext of The Watchers may be his desire for more active service. On reaching France, he told Helen that it was ‘impossible’ to write ‘in this new disturbing world where I am so far only a spectator’ (quoted JM, 253).
3-4. The carter smokes…Watching the water press in swathes about his horse’s chest. ‘It may be going to far to give [symbolic value] to the fire the visitor’s world lacks (and the smoking carter possesses); but certainly the fourth line’s qualities are to be contrasted with the dry catalogue-effect of line eight’ (Emslie, 68). Pater’s ‘hard visual treatment of life and nature’ (WP, 150) has points of contact with Imagist poetry, which Thomas and Frost criticise as being written by, and for, the eye (see Introduction, 20). Here, the onomatopoeic and kinetic fourth line exemplifies sensory life pressing into literature; rhythm created by the mutual pressure between speech and form; poetry written by, and for, the ear.
8. And many cases of stuffed fish, vermin, and kingfishers: ‘grown men with dictionaries are as murderous of words as entomologists of butterflies’ (FIP, 85-6). ‘Pater was, in fact, forced against his judgment to use words as bricks, as tin soldiers, instead of flesh and blood and genius…Pater’s influence has tended to encourage meticulosity in detail and single words, rather than a regard for form in its largest sense’ (c, 215).
Ms: M2, B. Published text: TP, CP1928. Note on title: The Watchers and The Lane may have been given their titles when they were published together in TP. CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.
I never saw that land before (120)
5 May 1916
Like The Mountain Chapel and A Dream, this poem may recall Thomas’s visit to Wales in October 1914, and the essay ‘Penderyn’: ‘Excepting when I crossed it the river Neath was generally hidden either by oak, ash or elder lining it…Then I came to a village…As the river was now little more than a brook, the hills of its valley sides were now mountains…The fields down by the river were very green, enclosed and protected by a few farmhouses and trees’ (COE, 23-4). As in Home (81), which starts with a precisely contrary line (‘Often I had gone this way before’), epiphany takes a traveller by surprise. As in The Bridge and The Ash Grove, the rhyme scheme (here ABABA) befits a moment prolonged between past and future, expectation and memory: in part, the creative moment. But, compared with these poems, I never saw that land before is the most harmonious in mood and form. The last stanza draws out the implication that the speaker has come upon a ‘land’ that symbolises poetry itself – strangely foreknown, instantly “home”. On one level, Thomas’s journey from poem to poem repeats his unknowing search for its starting-point. The phrase ‘equal interval’ could allude to verse, and the poem’s syntax underlines its own poise: the chiasmus ‘hinted all and nothing spoke’; the placing of ‘Endeared’ amid the prepositions it governs, of ‘anything’ amid the verbs that govern it. The initial three-stanza sentence allows the catalogue of the landscape to unfold without check – thus reversing the syntactical and emotional trajectory of For These. The relation between the first three stanzas and the last two (also one sentence) corresponds to the structural ratio of sonnet-form.
17-18. some goal / I touched then. Cf. The Other (‘the unseen moving goal’) and Some eyes condemn (‘I had not found my goal’). Coombes finds ‘something relatively immature in the way Thomas…refers to happiness and beauty as “goals” that can conceivably be reached and retained, as if he hoped a golden land existed at the end of a journey’ (HC, 209). But the ‘goal’ seems provisional and strategic. It discloses itself only in its fleeting realisation: perhaps as a poem.
22. A language not to be betrayed. This reflexive phrase seals the reciprocity between mind and world that the poem manifests, and which the ‘aesthetic spectator’ of The Watchers can neither experience nor express. As in Aspens, recalled by ‘whisper’, such reciprocity ultimately depends on the ear rather than the eye: the inspirational ‘breeze /That hinted all and nothing spoke’. Thomas sets the bar high for the ‘language’ that poetry constitutes. The repeated ‘what’, ‘whisper’ and ‘hid’, together with ‘betrayed’, challenge the reader.
Ms: M2, B. Published text: LP. Note on title: CP1978 brackets the title; CP2004 drops it. See Note on Text.
The Cherry Trees (120)
7, 8 May 1916
See note on Thomas’s short poems (284). Myfanwy Thomas traces this poem’s source to a walk with her father when she said of scattered cherry petals: ‘Someone’s been married’ (MT, 43). Written a year after In Memoriam (Easter, 1915), The Cherry Trees echoes its form, imagery of paradoxical flowers, reminder of peacetime custom. Taken together, the poems move between courtship and funeral with no intermediate ‘wedding’. Elegiac cadences accelerate as ‘old road’ folds the war dead into the death of rural England. A likely literary context for The Cherry Trees is ‘1887’, the poem with which A.E. Housman begins A Shropshire Lad (1896). The first part of the poem celebrates Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee by ‘remembering friends of ours’ who died for the empire: ‘It dawns in Asia, tombstones show/And Shropshire names are read’. The better-known second part celebrates the cherry tree: ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough’. The Cherry Trees breaks down Housman’s bipartite structure.
1. The cherry trees. B begins: ‘The cherry tree leans over and is shedding’. In later opting for the plural, Thomas may have sought to differentiate his poem from Housman’s.
4. when: ‘though’ in B.
Ms: B. Published text: P.
It rains (121)
11-13 May 1916
For Thomas and rain, see general note to After Rain (154). ‘One shower I remember that wrought marvels in a London garden…At the bottom of the garden, beyond the lawn, was an enclosed space of warm rank grasses and rising over them a vapour of cow-parsley flowers. A white steam from the soil faintly misted the grass to the level of the tallest buttercups. Rain was falling, and the grasses and overhanging elm trees seemed to be suffering for their quietness and loneliness…For the time, that garden was the loneliest place on earth, and I loved and feared its loneliness’ (RAP, 46-7). ‘Far away a gate is loudly shut, and the rich blue evening comes on and severs me irrevocably from all but the light in the old wood and the ghostly white cow-parsley flowers suspended on unseen stalks. And there, among the trees and their shadows, not understood, speaking a forgotten tongue, old dreads and formless awes and fascinations discover themselves and address the comfortable soul, troubling it, recalling to it unremembered years not so long past but that in the end it settles down into a gloomy tranquillity and satisfied discontent, as when we see the place where we were unhappy as children once’ (HE, 55). ‘The white cow-parsley flowers hovered around me on invisible stalks’ (HE, 217).
Evidently cow-parsley was an image that haunted Thomas – an image of haunting. ‘Fallen petals’ also seem to be pursuing him from The Cherry Trees. Eerily insubstantial, It rains is a landscape of memory as distinct from a remembered landscape. In ‘searching the wilderness’, crossing a psychic threshold, the speaker haunts his past rather than vice versa. Similarly, the poem re-enters its own pre-history: the mood of fin-de-siècle ‘loneliness’ in Rose Acre Papers, the troubling ‘forgotten tongue’ discovered in The Heart of England. Smith calls the first
stanza of It rains ‘a whole complex of negatives…What is there is defined in terms of what is not – “nothing stirs…/Anywhere”, “untrodden”, “there is none to break”, just as, later, the poet is defined by the absence of the loved one or all those other absences implicit in the qualification “Unless alone”. A large number of Thomas’s poems open thus, with a negative construction in the first sentence which inserts absence right into the heart of an achieved and actual world’ (SS, 99-100).
8-9. To think of two walking, kissing there, /Drenched. This effect strangely combines elements from Like the touch of rain and When we two walked. If It rains shakes up the kaleidoscope of the Hope Webb affair (see notes, 238, 279), or recalls other lost loves or Thomas’s courtship of Helen, it may do so under the influence of Hardy’s love poems to his dead wife. There are parallels (rain, lovers walking, ghostliness) with Hardy’s ‘At Castle Boterel’:
As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet
Myself and a girlish form benighted…
I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love’s domain
Never again.
13. the parsley flower: a phrase appropriately ‘suspended’ at the end of one of the mid-stanza unrhymed lines. This five-line stanza contrasts with that of I never saw that land before.
14. ghostly white: see note on Thomas’s ‘ghosts’ (202).
Ms: M2, B. Published text: P.
Some eyes condemn (121)
13, 14 May 1916
‘I am glad you liked the sonnet, I suppose it was one. My fear was that it ended with a click. “One” is, I suppose, a weakness’ (EF, 198). ‘I suppose it was one’ seems disingenuous: more than Thomas’s other sonnets, Some eyes condemn calls attention to itself as such. He wrote only six sonnets (seven, if If I should ever by chance is counted), but secretly flirts with the form by writing double or even treble sonnets (The Glory, Haymaking) and non-stanzaic poems of between ten and eighteen lines. In other ways, too, his poetry reproduces the sonnet’s structural importance in the history of English lyric. But Thomas’s wariness of the ‘click’ has roots in Romantic doctrine; in his view of the sonnet as an invader that displaced the folk tradition; in his boredom with Victorian auto-pilot sonneteering. When (November 1902) he wrote a tough critique of a sonnet sequence sent to him by Jesse Berridge, he partly blamed the form for encouraging Berridge’s ‘aerial tendency’:
Personally, I have a dread of the sonnet. It must contain 14 lines, & a man must be a tremendous poet or a cold mathematician if he can accommodate his thoughts to that condition. The result is – in my opinion – that many of the best sonnets are rhetoric only. I think most of Rossetti’s are. Rossetti too is responsible for introducing the sesquipedalian-word sonnet…Sesquipedalian [polysyllabic] words are all very well…But once under the spell, sense & concreteness are apt to disappear…[Rossetti’s] sonnets are often like big men in pompous clothing. They are impressive without saying anything…I don’t mean that every sonnet should contain a fresh & striking idea that would look well in a leading article. I mean that if a sonnet fails to produce an impression of strength and unity, & if, on analysis, it still seems to lack unity & strength, then it is inconsiderable. (LJB, 36)
As a reviewer, Thomas had to endure interminable sonneteers: ‘Many of [Lloyd Mifflin’s] sonnets are so long that we can scarce believe our eyes which see only fourteen lines’ (Daily Chronicle, 16 February 1904); ‘It had become, thanks to Canon Rawnsley’s industry, almost impossible to read a new sonnet without a slight measure of contempt’ (Morning Post, 9 August 1909). Sending Digging (99) to Eleanor Farjeon, he remarked: ‘I suppose it should have been a sonnet, but I can’t Rawnsleyise yet’ (EF, 154). In Feminine Influence on the Poets he hedges his bets: ‘The sonnet had, in fact, become so powerful a thing of itself [in Elizabethan England] that the chances were against a man who set out to use it as a medium of “emotion remembered in tranquillity”. He might as well hope to be the saviour of mankind in a well-ironed silk hat’; ‘As the sonata can be true-hearted as the folk-song, so the elaborate sonnet or epithalamium can be no less so than “Whistle and I’ll come to ye, my lad”’ (FIP, 98, 104).
Two of Thomas’s sonnets are written in couplets (A Dream, The Wind’s Song); two are Petrarchan (February Afternoon, Some eyes condemn [with variation in the octet]); his last two are Shakespearean (It was upon, That girl’s clear eyes): he took Shakespeare’s sonnets with him to France. Some eyes condemn proclaims its form by ending with ending-tropes of the Elizabethan love sonnet: the lover-poet’s consuming obsession; the beloved’s eyes doing damage; her power over his mind and utterance. Cf. ‘alas the race / Of all my thoughts has neither stop nor start, / But only Stella’s eyes and Stella’s heart’ (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, XXIII). The sonnet as a whole mimics an Elizabethan or Jacobean conceit. The slightly grotesque focus on the ‘eye’ is a synecdoche for diverse perspectives and philosophies. Notably, eyes never meet.
3-7. some laugh…waking. Cf. When he should laugh. In Thomas’s poetry ‘laughter’ usually has a mirthless implication, as does ‘mirth’.
10. many I have loved watching. As his prose indicates, voyeurism played a part in Thomas’s somewhat vicarious love life: ‘My thoughts were much on a girl whom I saw for half a minute at Horsmonden…pale and fragile, holding up a pink muslin skirt with one hand…But I cannot now be excited except sentimentally by young women. My affections are grown those of a troubadourish eunuch, and I want merely freedom to admire and not to possess them’ (Diary, 22 July 1901, NLW). Helen worried about ‘dream girls’ (SL, 124).
13. thinking of your eyes, dear. Thomas may again allude to Hope Webb (see notes 238, 279). His portraits of her dwell on her grey eyes.
Ms: M2, B. Published text: P.
The sun used to shine (122)
22 May 1916
In August 1914 the Thomases holidayed at Oldfield House (now Old Fields), Le[a]dington, Dymock, on the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border. Robert Frost and his family occupied a nearby house, Little Iddens. On 25 August Thomas wrote: ‘Purple crocus with white stem and a sharp division between it and the pale but not unwholesome purple of the mostly folded bloom among short grass just up to flower’s base’; on 26 August: ‘a sky of dark rough horizontal masses in N.W. with a 1/3 moon bright and almost orange low down clear of cloud and I thought of men east-ward seeing it at the same moment. It seems foolish to have loved England up to now without knowing it could perhaps be ravaged and I could and perhaps would do nothing to prevent it’ (FNB77). The next stage was an essay, ‘This England’ (The Nation, 7 November 1914), about ‘the new moon of August 26 & you & me strolling about in the sun while our brave soldiers &c.’ (RFET, 26):
The sun shone, always warm, from skies sometimes cloudless, sometimes inscribed with a fine white scatter miles high…Three meadows away lived a friend, and once or twice or three times a day I used to cross the meadows, the gate, and the two stiles…
How easy it was to spend a morning or afternoon…strolling with my friend, nearly regardless of footpaths, in a long loop, so as to end either at his house or my lodging. It was mostly orchard and grass, gently up and down…many [of the meadows] had several great old apple or pear trees. The pears were small brown perry pears, as thick as haws, the apples chiefly cider apples, innumerable, rosy and uneatable, though once or twice we did pick up a wasp’s remnant, with slightly greasy skin of palest yellow, that tasted delicious. There was one brook to cross, shallow and leaden, with high hollow bare banks…
If talk dwindled in the traversing of a big field, the pause at gate or stile braced it again. Often we prolonged the pause, whether we actually sat or n
ot, and we talked – of flowers, childhood, Shakespeare, women, England, the war – or we looked at a far horizon, which some dip or gap occasionally disclosed…
Then one evening the new moon made a difference…The sky was banded with rough masses in the north-west, but the moon, a stout orange crescent, hung free of cloud near the horizon. At one stroke, I thought, like many other people, what things that same moon sees eastward about the Meuse in France. Of those who could see it there, not blinded by smoke, pain, or excitement, how many saw it and heeded? 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, at the elms and poplars about the houses, at the purple-headed wood-betony with two pairs of dark leaves on a stiff stem, who stood sentinel among the grasses or bracken by hedge-side or wood’s-edge. What he stood sentinel for I did not know, any more than what I had got to do. (LS, 216-21)
A trope of Great War literature is the incongruity between 1914’s golden summer, a symbolic last or lost summer, and the outbreak of war on 4 August. For Thomas, the birth of his poetry, latent in ‘This England’, obliquely celebrated by The sun used to shine, provides a further twist. The poem implies that his creative matrix – Frost, English landscape, ‘poetry’, war – cohered in August 1914. A year later, three weeks after enlisting, Thomas told Frost: ‘I am a real soldier now, inoculated and all…Ledington & White leaved Oak seems purely paradisal, with Beauty of Bath apples Hesperidean lying with thunder dew on the warm ground. I am almost old enough not to make any moan of it’ (RFET, 88-9). On 21 May 1916 the war and Frost again coincided. Having been upset by not hearing from Frost, Thomas received a letter, now lost, enclosing ‘Not to Keep’: a poem about a dead soldier. His reply (the same day) anticipates becoming more deeply involved in the war: ‘Something may happen. A pension or grant is still just possible [in June the Royal Literary Fund gave him a £300 grant]…Also I may possibly get a job which will take me out into the firing line yet not into the worst risks & give me more money – as an officer’ (RFET, 133). Written next day, from the future that its notebook origins conceive, The sun used to shine has an intricate time-frame. The speaker mediates between the embryonic poet who hears ‘rumours of the war remote’ and the soldier poet for whom the war, ever less remote, has come ‘back to mind’ in a different sense. The sun used to shine recreates/creates an epiphany, an Eden, where time is on hold but also running out: ‘an apple wasps had undermined’. Images in the landscape remember the ‘to be’ as well as the ‘late past’.