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Starting Points – How Poems Emerge

that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it don’t even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.

Russell Hoban¹

Much of Thomas’s life was spent not writing poetry. From 1897 to 1913, he produced extensive criticism on poetry and poetic prose but practically no poems. His mature poems surfaced only in his last two years. Poised, for several years, at the brink of poetic composition, his writing career is like an analogy, writ large, of the process of composing a poem. Andrew Motion notes of the development of Thomas’s prose writing style: ‘With hindsight it is obvious that he was clearing the ground for his poems.’²

As a result, an obvious place to start observing Thomas’s poetic process is the point at which a poem emerged in his awareness. The importance this initial phase in poetic composition held for him is suggested in his continued exploration, in his criticism, prose books and poetry, of the beginnings of articulation. However, it is possible that he took so long to embark on his later poetry, as opposed to his early juvenilia, because his poetic composing processes began prior to that point of awareness. Perhaps a protracted composing process, leaving little visible trace, was long underway before the poem appeared in his mind and on the page. Investigation of the external conditions in which his composing processes took place is necessary to establish whether such conditions were a contributing factor.

The unusually large proportion of critical biographies in Thomas’s critical heritage demonstrate scholarly recognition of the importance external conditions held for Thomas. These works make several connections between his writing and life, including the outburst of poetry in his late thirties and the onset of the First World War, and, more proleptically, his impending death in that war. The implication is that foreknowledge of this fate spurred him on to write his lyrics, a suggestion a number of his poems appear to confirm.

Similarly, the context in which Thomas wrote seems, like his writing career, to act as an analogy for the emergence of a poem. Thomas published his writings from 1895 to 1917, a period of rapid urbanization leading up to the First World War, and on the cusp between the grand traditions of the Romantics and the Victorians, and modernist experimentation. This was a period also of revolution in fine arts; in linguistics and philology; in studies of the mind in psychology and in the new ‘science’ of psychoanalysis. Language itself was under severe scrutiny, evident in Oscar Wilde’s earlier experiments with the spoken voice; the Georgian poets’ attempts to revitalize poetic language; the multiple manifestos on poetic writing produced by the various movements of the Imagists, Vorticists and Futurists; and the keen interest shown by poets of this time in Japanese literary aesthetics. Japanese aesthetics were an important influence on the creative work of W.B. Yeats; Thomas’s close friend and collaborator, Gordon Bottomley; and the Imagist poets. Thomas, the major critic of contemporary poetry of his day and reviewer of most of these writers, also wrote about Japanese writers and showed himself keenly aware of Japanese aesthetics.

Just as a poem before it emerges may hover on the cusp of articulated form and structure, so Thomas himself was on the peripheries of, but not fully allied to, the literary movements of his time. He was closely connected with writers in Edward Marsh’s Georgian anthologies, particularly Bottomley and Walter de la Mare, exchanging criticism and ideas on writing with them. However, his work never appeared in these anthologies and he remained to some extent critical of them. Similarly, his opinion of early modernist work was muted, although features of his writing very much anticipated later modernist writings and, in particular, strong parallels exist between his work and Virginia Woolf’s later writings. Julia Briggs observes how Woolf’s later work is like Thomas’s writing in its revelation of ‘disruption quite as much as continuity’.³ Thomas, therefore, mirrored the conflicts of his time, as Edna Longley recognizes, calling him a ‘radical continuator’ who stands ‘“on a strange bridge alone” (‘The Bridge’) between Romantics and Moderns’.⁴

This image of a man on a bridge is typical of Thomas. The speakers of his poems express and inhabit indecision and indeterminacy. D. J. Enright calls the slippery syntax of his poetry ‘unamenable to high-level exegesis’.⁵ Other Thomas scholars emphasize the lacunae, contradictions and ambiguities in his writing. John Lucas refers to the ‘carefully weighed qualification of utterance – the brooding hesitancies that are unique to Thomas’s mode of spoken verse’.⁶ These qualities reflect crucial elements in the composition process, re-enacted by Thomas in his poetic work, which itself remains in some sense in process, cut short by his early death.

IN THE PHYSICAL CONTEXT: NOTES FROM THE ENVIRONMENT

the water over green rock & purple weed in a cove near Zennor where I bathed & the little circle of upright stones at Boscawen Inn

Edward Thomas⁷

Analysis of the context in which Thomas is writing or not writing his poetry is most easily quantifiable as the physical environment. This is most evident in the note-taking that preceded his prose writing. These notes recorded impressions of his immediate physical environment that were later worked into creative pieces.

He showed concern that this reliance on notes was affecting his writing processes detrimentally, writing to de la Mare on 9 October 1909:

There may be excuses for inconclusiveness but not for negligence. I didn’t realise, till I saw these in print, what a hurry I had been in. Probably at the back of it all is my notebook habit. Either I must overcome that or I must write much more laboriously – not mix the methods of more or less intuitive writing & of slaving adding bits of colour and so on. Bottomley sternly advises me to burn my notebooks & buy no more.⁸

In ‘How I Began’, Thomas recorded how this ‘notebook habit’ reached back to his childhood:

At that age [eight or nine] I was given a small notebook in a cover as much like tortoiseshell as could be made for a penny. In this I wrote down a number of observations of my own accord.⁹

The habit continued throughout his writing life. His topographical or ‘travel’ books were regularly preceded by periods of walking the ground to be covered, accompanied by copious note-taking. As the eighty preserved notebooks that he used on his walks indicate, it became Thomas’s constant practice to write his prose works from such notes, so much so that his early mature poetry was created out of prose versions of the same material as if these prose versions too were notes, sources of creative material. R. George Thomas’s edition of Thomas’s poems cites the first lines of one source of ‘Old Man’ as a prose piece, ‘Old Man’s Beard’:

Just as she is turning in to the house or leaving it, the baby plucks a feather of old man’s beard. The bush grows just across the path from the door. Sometimes she stands by it squeezing off tip after tip from the branches and shrivelling them between her fingers on to the path in grey-green shreds.¹⁰

In her Annotated Collected Poems, Longley notes that ‘“Old Man’s Beard” sounds like a prose poem or prose from which poetry is trying to get out.’¹¹ She instances ‘Up in the Wind’ and ‘March’ as poems worked up from previous prose sources, and ‘November’ and ‘After Rain’ as poems worked up from notebooks.

Thomas admitted to a heavy reliance on notes as a writer, ‘I go about the world with a worried heart & a notebook’, and instructed his wife to file or return his letters for use as notes, ‘I hope you won’t mind if I make this a notebook as well as a letter’.¹² When burning his correspondence prior to setting out for the front, he chose to retain these notebooks.

He received authoritative confirmation of the value of notes early in his writing career. At the suggestion of the publisher Blackwood, his first book The Woodland Life concluded with a selection of in situ field notes, ‘A diary in English fields and woods’. Blackwood therefore set Thomas’s notes on an equal footing with his more worked creative pieces.¹³ Subsequently, in 1907, Thomas made use of ‘open-air’ diaries when editing The Book of the Open Air.

After his death, Thomas’s editors continue to recognize the importance of notes in his creative oeuvre. In Edward Thomas: Selected Poems and Prose, David Wright separates Thomas’s war diary from other prose items, placing it next to the poems. R. G. Thomas included the same diary as an appendix to his edition of Edward Thomas’s Collected Poems, observing that it ‘is carefully phrased and Thomas corrects words and phrases as in all his working drafts’.¹⁴ R. G. Thomas also wrote that the diary

seems to contain the germs of ideas, books, and poems that were never to be written but that were surely present in his mind. Even more clearly it reveals the consistency of the poet’s entire writing life grounded as that was upon his powerful sensuous response to the world of living and natural things.¹⁵

In the preface to The Icknield Way, Edward Thomas makes clear that his notes, taken while travelling along the Icknield Way, are not merely preparatory but integral to the composition process. He observes how, in the course of writing the book, both the ancient road and his physical journey along it become images of the book’s composition process. The Icknield Way is ‘in some ways a fitting book for me to write. For it is about a road which begins many miles before I could come on its traces and ends miles beyond where I had to stop.’¹⁶ His composing process starts, literally as well as metaphorically, ‘many miles’ before he actually begins to write the book, initiating with his travels along the road; the notes he takes during this journey; and the ways in which the subject matter and style of those notes are affected by the journey. The environment and the composing process are closely entwined. Thomas’s awareness of this comes to fruition in A Literary Pilgrim in England, written in 1914 although not published until 1917. This book observes the close relation between the composing activity of a disparate number of poets and their environment. They include, among others, Matthew Arnold, Hilaire Belloc, William Blake, George Borrow, Emily Brontë, Robert Burns, William Cobbett, S. T. Coleridge, Thomas Hardy, William Hazlitt, Robert Herrick, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, William Morris, P. B. Shelley, A. C. Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson and William Wordsworth.

Thomas’s poems also relate closely to the environment. They refer to journeys, roads and the dark, conditions in which many were drafted. He told Frost that ‘I sometimes write in [sic] the train going home late’, and described to Farjeon the ‘long slow’ train journeys from military camp.¹⁷ The length of these journeys is mirrored in the winding, clause-ridden sentence constructions of poems such as ‘The Owl’, ‘Good-night’, ‘It rains’, ‘It was upon’ and ‘I never saw that land before’. The rapidly changing perspectives in ‘The Barn and the Down’ also suggest a train journey:

Then the great down in the west

Grew into sight,

A barn stored full to the ridge

With black of night;

And the barn fell to a barn

Or even less

Before critical eyes and its own

Late mightiness. (pp. 68–9)

Similarly, Thomas wrote ‘Roads’, an exploration of roads, while travelling home.

R. G. Thomas recognized the connection in Edward Thomas’s work between physical environment and poem when he observed that the ‘train journey home [from military camp] was long and roundabout and two poems at least, “The Child in the Orchard” and “Lights Out”, were worked on in semi-darkness’.¹⁸ As Thomas told Farjeon, he began writing ‘Lights Out’ while ‘coming down in the train on a long dark journey when people were talking and I wasn’t’.¹⁹ Lack of light is present not only in the poem’s title, but in the sense of blurred vision and silent isolation in stanzas that describe entering a dark forest,

the unknown

I must enter and leave alone, (p. 136)

The almost mnemonic repeated lines and nursery-rhyme-like echoes of ‘The Child in the Orchard’ also reflect external writing conditions. The darkness of a train journey forces the composing poet to depend more on memory than on the written page.

Thomas’s habit of composing poems on train journeys from military camp to his home resulted in work that refers constantly to the search for a home. The word ‘home’ forms the title of three poems, and references to buildings occur in at least eleven other titles. The poems allude frequently to lost, present, ideal or fleeting senses of home. The opening and ending lines of ‘The Ash Grove’ run:

Half the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made Little more

than the dead ones made of shade.

If they led to a house, long before had they seen its fall:

But they welcomed me;

At the end of the poem, a snatch of song signals a brief rediscovery of a paradoxically fleeting sense of rootedness:

The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,

And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,

But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die

And I had what I most desired, without search or desert or cost. (p. 108)

Thomas’s care in noting the conditions of composition of eleven of the poems in the fair handwritten copy of sixty-seven poems in the Bodleian manuscript of 1917 Poems indicates the important connection he saw between physical conditions experienced in the composition period, such as travel, direction of travel and a strong sense of home, and the completed poem. In each case he observed that the poem was composed in transit and, apart from once, when the note does not specify the destination, he recorded that he was ‘going home’ or ‘coming home’, mainly from military camp.

Early versions of ‘Liberty’ and ‘Rain’ are among the drafts including indications of composing conditions. Both poems focus on solitude, loneliness and homelessness, at night, the time when Thomas often travelled. Other poems refer to a longing for home. ‘No one so much as you’ suggests separation from home in its emphasis on the distance in an apparently close relationship. ‘I never saw that land before’ describes a search for, and loss of, an ideal home: ‘some goal / I touched then’, and ‘Some eyes condemn’, written eight or nine days later, echoes this in ‘I had not found my goal’ (pp. 120, 121). ‘What will they do?’ revolves around the sense of a lost home, while ‘The Sheiling’ celebrates the discovery of a spiritual home. In the case of ‘The Sheiling’, the composition process begins while ‘travelling back from Gordon Bottomley’s (Silverdale)’, a spiritual home or place of sanctuary for Thomas, as the poem’s content declares.

‘Some eyes condemn’ and ‘What will they do?’ reflect physical conditions particular to train journeys. The traveller, stationary in a moving vehicle, watches through the window people apparently moving away from him. In ‘Some eyes condemn’, composed in Hare Hall military camp, ‘Hare Hall & train’, the speaker appears passive, while the ‘eyes’ he observes move restlessly, the movement emphasized by a twisting enjambement:

Others, too, I have seen rest, question, roll,

Dance, shoot. And many I have loved watching. Some

I could not take my eyes from till they turned

And loving died. I had not found my goal. (p. 121)

A draft of ‘What will they do?’ includes the note ‘going home to Steep’. The speaker’s observations in this poem also suggest a position behind a glass window, echoing the conditions of composition on a long, slow train journey:

I have but seen them in the loud street pass;

And I was naught to them. I turned about

To see them disappearing carelessly. (p. 133)

Physical conditions of composition have a strong effect on ‘The Lofty Sky’, composed while Thomas was confined inside at home with an injured ankle. On the same day that ‘The Lofty Sky’ was composed, Thomas wrote, ‘I am downstairs but worse off because I know how helpless I still am. I can only hop.’²⁰ Confinement and the desire to escape it form the subject of ‘The Lofty Sky’, which focuses on the outdoor environment to which the poet and speaker are denied access.

Coleridge’s ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’ was composed under similar restraints. In his chapter on Coleridge in A Literary Pilgrim in England, written the summer before the composition of ‘The Lofty Sky’, Thomas clearly linked Coleridge’s completed poem to its conditions of composition, observing how Coleridge,

disabled from walking, sat in ‘this lime-tree bower my prison,’ and followed in imagination the walk which his friends were taking, and wrote a poem on it, half ‘gloomy-pampered’ at his deprivation, half happy both with what he imagined and with the trees of his prison.²¹

The echo of ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’ in ‘The Lofty Sky’ indicates another condition of composition: the strong influence of the Romantic legacy on Thomas as poet and critic. His admiration for Coleridge in particular was unequivocal. For Thomas, the Biographia Literaria contained ‘the most profound literary criticism which has so far been written in English. His [Coleridge’s] scattered pages on poetic diction, due to his disagreement with Wordsworth’s theory, are all that can at present form the basis of any true criticism of Poetry.’²²

‘Words’ is another poem directly affected by its physical conditions of composition. Thomas’s letters reveal that it was composed on a bicycle, scribbled on various ‘scraps’ at intervals on a cycling trip up and down the steep hills of Gloucestershire.²³ This external environment is reflected in the content, form and rhythm of the poem. In ‘“The shape of the sentences”: Edward Thomas’s tracks in contemporary poetry’, Lucy Newlyn points out that the shape of ‘Words’, formed from a series of very short lines, is recognizably that of a long, thin path, a visual form also used in Henry Thoreau’s ‘The Old Marlborough Road’, a poem Thomas knew.²⁴ The typical short up-down rhythm created by cycling also has a partner in the accumulation of brief phrases that make up the short lines of ‘Words’. More pragmatically, short lines are easier to hold in the head, which is helpful when composing while cycling.

Earlier in the same essay, Newlyn observes how the rhythm of Thomas’s writing on walking reflects his tendency to navigate away from prescribed pathways. His sentences ‘follow an easy, meandering pattern, accommodating obstacles and pauses, as well as distractions en route’. She refers to ‘Thomas’s development of a “pedestrian” prose style – one that explored the three-way connection between walking, talking, and sentence structure’, and discusses in detail the way Thomas’s skilful use of complicated sentence structure in ‘Women he liked’ forces readers to re-trace their steps in an effort to disentangle the sentence, the process enacted being ‘remarkably like a walk that ends in a clearing – one of Thomas’s favourite experiences’.²⁵

Thomas showed acute awareness of how physical conditions impinge on composition in his introduction to George Borrow’s Zincali. Zincali was ‘written, as he [Borrow] tells us, chiefly at Spanish inns during his journeys’, and Borrow’s subsequently published letters from Spain,

which formed the basis for a great part of The Bible in Spain, show us that he wrote his portly but vigorous prose fresh from the saddle and from the scenes depicted; and upon some of these letters or the journals, their sources, he drew for the earlier book.²⁶

In his critical biography of Borrow, Thomas measured the success of The Bible in Spain by its ability to conjure up the environment and conditions in which it was written. He praised the book for being ‘just as fresh as the letters’.²⁷

Thomas did not always take notes with particular pieces of writing in mind. He often discovered composition subjects when re-reading his notes, writing in 1903 that ‘I sit down with my abundant notebooks and find a subject or an apparently suggestive sentence.’²⁸ At the point of making those notes, he was unaware of the eventual creative form or forms that they would take. Similarly, some initial prose versions of his mature poems exist in texts written long before he conceived of himself as a poet and before he worked them into a poetic form.²⁹

Other details of the conditions of composing indicate the unplanned onset of that process. Thomas wrote ‘Words’ on whatever scraps of paper he could find. This resulted in ‘2 lines that got left out owing to the scraps I wrote on as I travelled’.³⁰ His lack of appropriate writing material suggests the unexpected advent of the composing process. He did not choose the moment of composition but was instead compelled to write, despite unfavourable conditions. The poem hijacked the poet.

The content of ‘Words’ reflects the unplanned onset of its composing process. Words choose the poet, or to be more precise, the poet pleads with words to choose him, placing himself at their mercy:

Choose me,

You English words? (p. 92)

Similarly, the very short lines in ‘Words’ suggest uncertainty and a lack of preparedness, echoed in the way the lines break across syntactical pauses, fragmenting the text, and in the quick reversals of point of view:

And as dear

As the earth which you prove

That we love.

Emphasis on uncertainty of cause and outcome is also present in Thomas’s unorthodox use of rhyme and metre. As Ian Sansom suggests in a review of Collected Poems (2004), Thomas’s completed poems tend to reflect the uncertainty accompanying their beginnings:

[M]any of the poems read like echoes of themselves, like broken-up, vaguely blank-verseish prose (and indeed, in many instances, that’s exactly what they are).

If anything explains the continuing appeal of his poems, it’s probably that Thomas seems to have no clear idea of what he’s doing or where’s [sic] he’s going; the effort is all.³¹

Sansom implies that this uncertainty is unintentional and is linked to an essential lack of clarity in Thomas. However, Thomas’s continued emphasis in poems on beginnings or endings, and on moments that precede or mark the close of a period of articulation, suggest deliberate decision. This is evident in ‘Adlestrop’, where the celebration and analysis of a moment of epiphany is heralded both by a pause in a train’s unscheduled stop and by the regular accompanying litany of sounds. The effect is that of a considered and strong evocation of the moments just before or after an event, such as preparation for speech, cessation of mechanical action and arrival or departure of people:

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. (p. 51)

Thomas’s dealings with contemporaries’ criticism of his poetry similarly show deliberate, intended and knowing striving after uncertainty of effect. The response of Blackwood, one of the first publishers to whom he sent his poetry, was typical of Thomas’s early readers:

The poems are to me somewhat of a puzzle, and I do not think I could venture upon them. They are, however, exceedingly interesting, and I shall be very pleased indeed to consider anything else which Mr Eastaway may write at any time.³²

Thomas’s reaction, recorded in a letter to Farjeon, was perceptive and defiant: ‘I suppose Blackwood just thought it looked very much like prose and was puzzled by the fact that it was got up like verse. I only hope the mistake was his and prefer to think it likely.’³³ A few weeks later, Thomas wrote,

Did I tell you that I sent Monro a lot of verses in hopes he would make a book of them? Well, he won’t. He doesn’t like them at all. Nor does Ellis – he says their rhythm isn’t obvious enough. I am busy consoling myself. I am not in the least influenced by such things: but one requires readjustment.³⁴

These reactions to negative criticism of his poetry show Thomas resisting, despite his acute sensitivity to the reception of his poems, the pressure to make them and their rhythms more ‘obvious’ or certain. He rarely bowed to a plea for more clarity. The compromise he reached in ‘Digging (“What matter makes my spade”)’ is unusual: ‘I have a laugh at you for not detecting the rhyme of soldier and bear. However to please you I bring the rhyme nearer.’³⁵ Most often he seemed bent on widening the gap between his work and conventional expectations of rhythm and rhyme, as if celebrating the ambiguous inception of this work, which remained beyond his control, dependent on the physical environment in which he happened to be placed.

IN THE PHYSICAL CONTEXT: THOMAS ON HOW HIS POEMS EMERGE

I need to be in a position to write when writing comes.

Carol Ann Duffy³⁶

Thomas’s poems and their composing processes have an unplanned air, an air he courted and fostered, as suggested in his references to his habit of note-taking. He stressed the primacy of the environment and its role in dictating the form and style of notes made within it. The notes were written as responses, and he re-read them because of their ability to evoke the environment. This allowed him to write further and produce a completed creative piece. Their main purpose is revealed in his lament: ‘One little note used to recall to me much of the glory or joy of former days out of doors. Now it is barren.’³⁷

Thomas’s words suggest that he saw the beginnings of the composing process as lying in the experience of the environment, not in notes on it. He was moving towards the extreme claim that human language has developed from man’s relation with his environment and depends upon that relationship. In terms of poetic composition, this implies that the composing process commences with the poet’s interaction with the environment. In ‘Reading out of doors’, he developed this idea, tentatively positing not man but the environment as the initiator of the creative process:

I have ever found that my own thoughts, or those which the landscape and the air thought for me, were far beyond the range of such as they [Spenser, Wordsworth, Thoreau]. There is more wisdom in the amber maple leaf or the poise of a butterfly or the silence of a league of oaks than in all the poems of Wordsworth.³⁸

This passage implies that the ‘landscape and the air’ are not merely conditions existing before language and from which language springs. They offer the first moments of the creation of that language. To some degree they write the creative work that follows, thinking the writer’s thoughts for him with a ‘wisdom’ to be favoured over that in a Wordsworth poem, the writer’s role in this process being that of amanuensis.

If, as Thomas suggested, the composition processes begin in the environment, then further examination of such processes necessarily entails focus upon experience of the environment. This is exactly what happens in his account of poetic composition in the essay ‘Insomnia’.

Comparison with a letter Thomas wrote to Walter de la Mare in 1913 makes clear that the account of composing in ‘Insomnia’ is to a great degree autobiographical. It matches detail for detail the description of attempted poetry composition in the de la Mare letter.³⁹ In both, the speaker is a ‘non-poet’ who, suffering insomnia, finds himself trying to write a poem that reflects his mood. Failing to complete the first verse, he remains plagued by the rhyme of ‘ember’ and ‘September’.⁴⁰

The significance of ‘Insomnia’ to Thomas’s composition processes and to a more accurate understanding of the chronology of those processes is so crucial that it will be examined from several angles in the course of this book. It is worth therefore spending some time detailing the conditions and date of composition of this essay.

Most critics and biographers of Thomas date the inception of his mature poetry to late 1914. However, an examination of the accounts of composing in ‘Insomnia’ and the related letter to de la Mare point to an earlier start date for his first mature attempt at poetry. This is an incomplete attempt since the poet gives up after three lines. Nevertheless, it comprises a highly significant record of his first moments of poetic composition.

The exact date of ‘Insomnia’ remains unknown. However, it can be assumed that it was written after the de la Mare letter, since the letter contains the germ of the essay. The letter, although undated, was almost certainly written in the later months of 1913. Penned on notepaper headed ‘Selsfield House’, it has been filed in the Bodleian manuscripts between letters dated end of October 1913 and 2 January 1914, a period when Thomas was staying at Selsfield House. However, a much more likely date lies between 5 and 13 September 1913, since both letter and essay refer to the month of September, and letters to Farjeon confirm that Thomas was also staying at Selsfield House at this time. Discussion in the de la Mare letter of Thomas’s arrangements to meet de la Mare suggest it was written on Sunday, 7 September, the date mentioned at the end of ‘Insomnia’: ‘And so I fell asleep again on the seventh of September’.

This proof that Thomas’s first foray into mature poetry occurred in late 1913 affects the commonly accepted view that his attempts at mature poetry were largely instigated by Robert Frost in the summer of 1914. Instead, it acknowledges the contributory influence on Thomas of other poet friends, such as de la Mare.

In a letter to W. H. Hudson, Thomas named November 1914 as a start date for his mature poetic compositions. He appeared to have forgotten or to discount his earlier failed experience of poetic composition, writing of his first successfully completed poems that they had

all been written since November [1914]. I had done no verses before and did not expect to and merely became nervous when I thought of beginning. But when it came to beginning I slipped into it naturally whatever the results.⁴¹

The unsuccessful attempt recorded in ‘Insomnia’ and the de la Mare letter has been relegated to an experience of feeling ‘nervous when I thought of beginning’. This dismissive reference, however, was written in 1915 after Thomas had successfully completed many poems. The 1913 letter to de la Mare, written before Thomas’s poetry had begun to flow, records in detail the earlier attempt at poetic composition, suggesting that at the time he saw it as highly significant.

A second indication of Thomas’s awareness of the significance of this attempt lies in his decision to communicate it to de la Mare. He held de la Mare in very high regard, particularly esteeming his poetry collection Peacock Pie, which he was reading in the summer of 1913, and later rated him ‘second [to Frost] among all living poets’.⁴² Thomas had long been in the habit of sharing his writing ideas with de la Mare. They worked closely on creative compositions, de la Mare sending Thomas his own poetry for comments and advice. Theresa Whistler records how they agreed to write stories on the same topic of time, Thomas publishing his story in 1911 and de la Mare writing his in 1917.⁴³ They shared creative material, such as accounts of dreams, a frequent source of creativity for de la Mare, and also for Thomas, as his 1915 poem ‘A Dream’ bears witness. A 29 March 1911 letter to de la Mare, describing a dream, concludes with the words ‘this is my copyright’, showing a keen awareness in Thomas of the potential of dreams as creative material.⁴⁴

Although in 1913 Thomas was in awe of de la Mare’s poetic gift, in the following approximation of the spacing in the handwriting of the September 1913 letter, Thomas described his friend, in a rephrasing of Pope’s words, as one of those

mob of gentlemen that rhyme

with ease. ⁴⁵

The word ‘rhyme’ is Thomas’s choice, not Pope’s, and the idiosyncratically spaced handwriting emphasizes this word, as does its position at the end of the line. The spacing frames, and therefore isolates, the word ‘gentlemen’, which, presented thus, suggests an apparently select group of poets, a group from which Thomas excluded himself.⁴⁶

Previously, this sense of exclusion as a writer was very strong in Thomas. In 1909 he wrote to Bottomley: ‘By comparison with others that I know – like de la Mare – I seem essentially like the other men in the train & I should like not to be.’⁴⁷ However, by 1913, Thomas’s view of himself had changed subtly. He showed greater confidence in his writing abilities, as indicated by the fact that he replaced Pope’s ‘wrote’ with ‘rhyme’, suggesting awareness of his own possible gift as poet. Also, these lines denigrate not Thomas but the ‘mob of gentlemen’. Thomas’s exclusion has become a position of choice, not regret. The ‘ease’ with which the ‘mob of gentlemen’, poets such as de la Mare, ‘rhyme’ is perhaps too easy and not altogether admirable. This emphasis on subtlety in rhyming manifested just over a year later in reference to Thomas’s poetry, when he discussed the rhymes of ‘inlaid’ and ‘played’ in his poem ‘After Rain’ (p. 38) with Farjeon, allowing them to stay because ‘neither is a rhyme word only’.⁴⁸

Thomas’s awareness of the significance of his early attempt at composing poetry is also indicated in the graphology and layout of the letter. He placed brackets around the words ‘for the first time’. The positioning of ‘trying’ at the end of the page delays the crucial word ‘rhyme’ – which, significantly, rhymes with ‘the first time’ – to the following sheet of the letter. The result is an emphasis on the difficulty of this attempt at poetic composition. The dramatic delay of this first mention of ‘rhyme’ is also strengthened by the fact that when it finally appears, it is underlined:

I found

myself (for the first time) trying

[new page]

hard to rhyme my mood &

failing very badly indeed, in

fact comically so,

As if to reiterate the importance of this attempt, both uses of the word ‘rhyme’ in the letter occur in emphatic positions, either at the end of a line or underlined near the start of a new page. This stress on the difficulty in rhyming ‘with ease’ also points the way to later daring experiments with the loosened, and therefore uneasy, rhyme schemes.

The account of the would-be poetic attempt in ‘Insomnia’ emphasizes links between the experience of composing and the conditions of composition. It begins with a description of the would-be poet’s experience of the external environment, particularly of the song of a robin:

I strove to escape out of that harmony of bird, wind, and man. But as fast as I made my mind a faintly heaving, shapeless, grey blank, some form or colour appeared; memory or anticipation was at work.

Gradually I found myself trying to understand this dawn harmony. I vowed to remember it and ponder it in the light of day. To make sure of remembering I tried putting it into rhyme.

The narrator’s attempts first to avoid and then to record the birdsong appear to trigger the composing process and also to provide a subject for it. The outcome is only three lines, consisting of

The seventh of September

and

The sere and the ember

Of the year and of me.

Although these lines include references to the season, the date and the speaker of the poem, they omit to mention the birdsong that was their initial impetus. They are as a result completely distanced from the experience of the environment that prompted their inception. Their failure as a poem suggests therefore a possible relation between success in composing and specific reference to the external environment in which the composition occurred. This is borne out by the many successfully completed poems by Thomas, such as ‘Good-night’, ‘It rains’, ‘Words’ and ‘Lights Out’, which contain circumstances of their composition. Long, dark train journeys or hilly cycle rides are indirectly reflected in sentence structure and shape.

IN THE PHYSICAL CONTEXT: THE VERNACULAR OF BIRDSONG

chack, chack –

what a note – what a note!

the sharp wet snap of a pebble on slate:

Geoffrey Winthrop Young⁴⁹

Birdsong frequently appears in Thomas’s writing. In his growth as a poet, he showed awareness of its importance for poetry as a means of connecting with the environment in which both birdsong and poems are situated and composed or performed. Such awareness is already implicit in ‘Insomnia’, in which the attempt at composition is fired by the sound of birdsong.

However, the later poems indicate a gradual but significant shift in his attitude to birdsong. Coinciding with this change is an increased confidence: ‘I think perhaps the Ash Grove is really better and I know the sonnet is (you didn’t realise it was a sonnet I suspect).’⁵⁰ The fact that his new confidence in his poetry ran parallel to his changing approach to birdsong suggests a study of birdsong in ‘Insomnia’ and his drafted and completed mature poems may illuminate his development as a poet and track his progression from failed attempts at poetry to successfully completed works.

The thrushes in ‘March’ are ‘unwilling’ singers, just like the robin in ‘Insomnia’ (p. 35). The robin’s song occurs in the moments between night and day, in the transitions in light, and the thrush’s song is placed in intervals between different weather patterns. However, in ‘March’, the interaction between the birds and the weather and light patterns is made more explicit, as an examination of its sources indicates. In the Annotated Collected Poems, Longley points to the start of Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring, written in early 1913, as a source of ‘March’. The opening of In Pursuit of Spring emphasizes close interaction with the weather, and suggests an ultimate potency of birdsong:

The missel-thrush sat well up in a beech at the wood edge and hailed the rain with his rolling, brief song; so rapidly and oft was it repeated that it was almost one long, continuous song. But as the wind snatched away the notes again and again, or the bird changed his perch, or another answered him or took his place, the music was roving like a hunter’s

and

with the day came snow, hail, and rain, each impotent to silence the larks (p.148)

In ‘March’, this potency also infects silence. Although the song of the thrushes is set in direct combat with adverse weather conditions, ‘Rain, snow, sleet, hail, / Had kept them quiet’, and, in a moment of meteorological calm, the thrushes earnestly sing to ‘keep off / Silence and night’, silence itself is then depicted as ‘Rich with all that riot of song’. The birdsong not only wards off the silence, but adds to it, inhabiting it, merging with it, surrounded by it. Reminiscent of the ‘harmony of bird, wind, and man’ in ‘Insomnia’, this poem includes an essential ingredient of silence, previously lacking. ‘March’ shows birdsong holding some undefined inexplicable knowledge that the listener, both while listening and for a short period afterwards, is enabled to share, if uncomprehendingly: ‘Something they knew – I also, while they sang / And after’ (p. 35) or, as an earlier draft of ‘March’ puts it, ‘And for a little after’.⁵¹

‘The Other’, written about three to five days later than ‘March’, explores further the relation between birds and silence, depicting birds as struggling less triumphantly with silence:

The latest waking blackbird’s cries

Perished upon the silence keen. (p. 42)

The importance of ‘silence keen’ and its primacy over bird or human song or speech is suggested in ‘The Combe’, written a few days later. The mouth of the combe is ‘stopped with brambles’, and it is ‘ever dark, ancient and dark’. All singing birds, except for the missel thrush, ‘are quite shut out’ (p. 48).

Further lines in ‘The Other’ indicate another development in Thomas’s treatment of birdsong. These lines describe birds as imitative: starlings ‘wheeze and / Nibble like ducks’ (p. 42). This characteristic is also implied in the disturbing exchanges in attributes between birds, men and fish in ‘The Hollow Wood’, composed a day later than ‘The Combe’, on 31 December 1914.

A comparison of ‘Adlestrop’, written on 8 January 1915, with a passage in its source notebook, dated 24 June 1914, shows another change in Thomas’s treatment of birdsong. One of his field notebooks refers to a ‘chain of blackbirds [sic] songs’ (p. 176), reminiscent of his description of birdsong in ‘Insomnia’ as a song ‘absolutely monotonous, absolutely expressionless, a chain of little thin notes linked mechanically in a rhythm identical at each repetition’. However, in ‘Adlestrop’, the birdsong coincides with a sense of epiphany. The focus is on not an ‘identical’ and ‘monotonous’ chain-like rhythm but on a specific moment, with the many blackbirds of the notebook becoming one: ‘for that minute a blackbird sang’ (p. 51).

References to birdsong in Thomas’s poems frequently evoke not only the close relation of song and land, weather and silence, but also the emotional charge of that environment for the listener and the singing bird. ‘The Hollow Wood’ emphasizes the effect of sunlight and darkness on birdsong: ‘Out in the sun the goldfinch flits’ (p. 48). The goldfinch has a ‘bright twit’, while the birds in the dark forest are ‘Fish that laugh and shriek’. The word ‘drop’ in ‘the bright twit of the goldfinch drops’ into the wood suggests both downward movement and a drop in mood as the bird enters the darkness.

Thomas’s first mature poem, ‘Up in the Wind’, written on 3 December 1914, investigates connections between the song of the stone curlew and the land. The song speaks with, if not for, the land. The lines relate the song to wildness and a lack of man-made boundaries, and show the bird nesting in half-cultivated fields that hark back to the communality of land:

the land is wild, and there’s a spirit of wildness

Much older, crying when the stone-curlew yodels

His sea and mountain cry, high up in Spring.

He nests in fields where still the gorse is free as

When all was open and common. (p. 31)

This stress on the link between birdsong and the land is countered by an awareness of the distance between human song or poetry and land and birdsong. Such an awareness of, in particular, the inaccessibility of birdsong is already evident in Thomas’s early writings. A letter to his future wife Helen in 1897 runs:

I enjoy the songs of birds at times, but not often: I never could enjoy them much, though doubtless they have combined with other things to cause my delights; perhaps my surroundings are too imperfect for it; but more likely I am incapable of it.⁵²

His later poetry, too, although it often refers to birdsong as a language, emphasizes its distance from human language. ‘If I were to own’, written in April 1916, employs the phrase ‘proverbs untranslatable’ (p. 115) to describe a thrush’s song, encouraging a view of birdsong as a vernacular language, but also stressing its inaccessibility – it cannot be translated. This image recalls Thomas’s implicit criticism of Keats in his critical biography of the poet, also published in 1916, which observes how ‘[t]he great odes, the poems to Autumn, and “The Eve of St Agnes”, could never have been translated out of a thrush’s song’.⁵³ An earlier poem of Thomas’s, composed on 26 December 1914, ‘An Old Song II’, is less explicit about levels of comprehension and accessibility but combines the sounds of human singing and a gull’s ‘mewing’ in the fading light of dusk that threatens oblivion:

The sailors’ song of merry loving

With dusk and sea-gull’s mewing

Mixed sweet, the lewdness far outweighed

By the wild charm the chorus played: (p. 47)

Longley has interpreted these lines as art that has become ‘inseparable from Nature’, art being represented by the sailors’ song.⁵⁴ However, ‘An Old Song II’ draws its rhythms from traditional song, and the example of human song is a generic sailors’ song of a ‘lewdness’ that is ‘far outweighed’ by the ‘wild charm’ of the birds’ chorus. Such detail undermines Longley’s reading, reversing it to suggest, as Harry Coombes has phrased it in a comment on the robin’s song in ‘Insomnia’, a ‘sense of the alien’ in nature.⁵⁵ Whichever reading is adopted, however, the emphasis remains on the extent to which human composition, particularly vernacular song, is connected with or divided from the environment, as articulated in birdsong.

In the 17 January 1915 poem, ‘The Unknown Bird’, the bird, as in ‘Up in the Wind’, acts as a buffer between man and what remains inarticulate. Birdsong is presented as superior to human attempts at articulation of what is ‘bodiless’ (p. 55). This pre-empts the later celebration in ‘The Word’, composed on 5 July 1915, of the ‘pure thrush word’ (p. 93). In ‘The Unknown Bird’, the speaker admires the bird’s song, but is unable to replicate it satisfactorily: ‘that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet’. The poet’s efforts to reproduce the song are limited and second-hand: ‘Nor could I ever make another hear’ and ‘All the proof is – I told men / What I had heard.’ The song and the bird remain ‘wandering beyond my shore’. In contrast, the bird’s song is successful in articulating, or being, ‘bodiless’. The poem therefore celebrates birdsong’s unreproduceability, evoking the peripheral quality of the experience of listening to such song, just beyond the ‘shore’. It explores and articulates not the song, but the distance between that song and human language, and the possibility of connection between the two. Such writing as this shows the importance for Thomas of an indirect approach. Instead of attempting to reiterate mechanically and monotonously the bird’s notes, which in ‘Insomnia’ seem to describe not only the robin’s song but the would-be poet’s failed attempts to reproduce it, this passage in ‘Insomnia’ does not strain to complete the process but focuses on that process, the attempt itself. Interestingly, although the approach to composition recorded in ‘Insomnia’ is direct, the importance of an indirect approach to song and poetry is implicit in the tangential appearance of the account of poetic composition. The body of the essay is devoted to the narrator’s struggles to sleep. The truncated process of attempting to compose lines and rhymes of a poem, linked with the experience of birdsong and other sounds from the external environment, is recorded only in the last few paragraphs, which finally revert once again to the topic of insomnia.

An emphasis on process also informs ‘I never saw that land before’, composed on 5 May 1916:

if I could sing

What would not even whisper my soul

As I went on my journeying.

I should use, as the trees and birds did,

A language not to be betrayed;

And what was hid should still be hid (p. 120)

The conditional ‘if I could’ not only reinforces the difficulty of attempts to reproduce the environment in language but the difficulty of reproducing the language that is written into the environment. The poem focuses on the attempt rather than its successful conclusion. The use of the conditional signals incompleteness, and the impossibility of completion. The emphasis necessarily remains on the process of articulating or describing the environment. This process is one that cannot be totally successful.

Thomas’s explorations of birdsong and its connection with human language and poetry were strongly influenced by W. H. Hudson’s work, and in particular Hudson’s bird-girl in the novel Green Mansions.⁵⁶ Thomas admired Hudson highly: ‘Except William Morris, there is no other man I would sometimes like to have been, no other writing man’ and he described Green Mansions as ‘one of the noblest pieces of self-expression’.⁵⁷

Hudson’s bird-girl can communicate with birds as well as people. Hudson named her Rima. The evocation in this name of ‘rhyme’ suggests the high value Hudson placed on the power of poetry as a means of connecting with the environment. In his Green Mansions review, Thomas emphasized the power of communication that Rima possesses: ‘her singing was a mode of expression which Nature had taught her. It was attuned to the voices of animals and birds and waters and winds among the leaves; it was more a universal language than Latin or English.’ In the novel, however, the close connection she enjoys with birdsong is contrasted with her uneasy relationship with humans and the human voice. Unlike the facility with which she communicates with her natural environment, Rima finds communication with human beings limited and unsatisfactory. Returning from a venture out of her forest habitat into the world of men, she is fatally silenced, implying a doubt, on Hudson’s part, as to how far the environment, represented by birdsong, could be connected, or translated, into human speech or poetry.

Thomas explored the issues raised by Green Mansions in a description of a woman in his prose piece, ‘A Group of Statuary’, first published in Light and Twilight in 1910. As if echoing Hudson, Thomas referred to birdsong in this piece as a way of articulating the uneasy relationship between the human voice and, by implication, the woman who possesses that voice, and her environment. She is ‘a lovely woman living among mountain lakes’, whose eyes ‘were like wild-voiced nightingales in their silence’, a silence imposed upon them by their present ‘imprisonment’ in the urban ‘cage’ of London.⁵⁸ Like Rima, Thomas’s woman also appears to have been silenced. Her impoverished existence in an urban setting is emphasized. Her overlooked status is highlighted with the image of a statue: ‘no one notices the statuary of London’. Her fate as a forgotten or overlooked figure is re-enacted when an image of her eyes speaking like nightingales is continued with the words ‘but in this cage …’.⁵⁹ The ellipses imply silence, although it remains uncertain whether the woman’s divorce from her environment results in a loss of the power to articulate or to be heard. This suggests another important feature in Thomas’s explorations of the composing process – the relation of the progressing poem not only to its human maker but to its potential listener or reader.