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Poetry and Oral Literature

[The Forest miners] singing their yearning hymns through the dark, wet woods on their way home.

Dennis Potter¹

In Thomas’s writings he alluded to a language of the physical environment, an anonymous language residing in features of the land or in the birdsong that emanates from it. He repeatedly examined the distance between this language and contemporary human forms of articulation like human song, speech or poetry. However, he also used oral tradition to link the language inscribed in or expressed by the physical environment to the written text of poetry. Such language of oral tradition is a near cousin to the language of the land, sharing its quality of anonymity, distanced from it only relatively recently, and holding within it records of the land, as Thomas made clear in his preface to the retold legends in Norse Tales (1912):

These stories are taken from poems in the Old Norse tongue. The stories, created in the ninth and tenth centuries, remain in touch with ancient pagan traditions. Their names have been lost, their poems confused and mutilated, in the course of a thousand years. Even the land where they wrote is unknown, and scholars have tried to discover it from the nature of the landscape and the conditions of life mentioned in the poems.²

This link with the land helps explain the power Thomas saw imbued in oral tradition, positing it as a key to the invigoration of imaginative writing in his time:

I cannot help wondering whether the great work done in the last century and a half towards the recovery of old ballads in their integrity will have any effect … Can it possibly give a vigorous impulse to a new school of poetry that shall treat the life of our time and what in past times has most meaning for us as freshly as those ballads did the life of their time? It is possible; … their style is commonly so beautiful, their pathos so natural, their observations of life so fresh, so fond of particular detail – its very lists of names being at times real poetry.³

Thomas’s early championing of the poet W. H. Davies was closely connected with his sense of the importance of oral tradition to poetry. His first review of Davies, in 1905, highly favourable, was given the title ‘A Poet At Last!’⁴ He supported Davies in other ways. Almost immediately after their first meeting, Thomas invited Davies to share his study cottage, which Davies did for over a year. After that period, Thomas continued working very closely with him, advising and encouraging him as a poet and frequently reviewing him. He presented Davies to the public as an exciting and unusual figure, emphasizing his unique success as a contemporary writer in remaining in connection with the neglected heritage of folksong, ballads and the oral tradition. He described Davies’s work as part of ‘an old literary mode charmingly and unconsciously revived, without any sense of artifice’, and praised Davies’s drinking songs in New Poems (1907) for ‘their vigour, their truth, their splendid spirit [which] is inestimable’. It is clear that, for Thomas, Davies formed a model of the invigorating power of old songs. Davies’s poems represented the ‘vigorous impulse’ referred to in The South Country in two ways. They were a source of stimulation for further ‘vigorous’ writing by Davies or other poets, and also embodied the results of such an impulse. Thomas attributed their vigour to Davies’s refreshing and unusual lack of education and literary knowledge, writing that his poetry came from a ‘strange, vivid, unlearned, experienced’ condition and quoting G. B. Shaw’s response to Davies’s collection, The Soul’s Destroyer, as a delight in its ‘freedom from literary vulgarity … like a draught of clear water in a desert’.⁵

Thomas made use of the ‘vigorous impulse’ of old songs and ballads in his own mature poetry, composed several years after the discovery of Davies’s work. A considerable number of Thomas’s poems lean significantly on traditional oral sources: his two ‘Old Songs’; his three ‘Songs’, as they were entitled in the 1978 edition of his poems; the reference to traditional music in ‘The Penny Whistle’; the reinvigoration of a ballad in ‘The Ash Grove’; and the reworking of proverbs and folk tales in ‘Lob’. ‘An Old Song II’ refers directly to the practice of drawing on folk lyric. The speaker imitates the song of a robin, also represented as a shade, shadow or echo. The word ‘repeat’ refers to the refrain from the folksong around which the whole poem is built. Thus, four lines of the poem comprise a neat acknowledgement of the debt it owes to birdsong and folksong:

A robin sang, a shade in shade:

And all I did was to repeat:

‘I’ll go no more a-roving

With you, fair maid.’⁶

These lines also evoke Thomas’s comment to Farjeon on 2 August 1914: ‘I may as well write poetry’, beginning ‘at 36 in the shade’, thus reinforcing the reading of these lines of ‘An Old Song II’ as an allusion to his debt as a poet to ballad, song and forgotten verse ‘in the shade’.⁷

BEGINNING AGAIN: RETURNING TO THE OLD LORE

To make new boots from the remains of old

Oxford English Dictionary ⁸

The final years of the nineteenth century corresponded with the beginning of Thomas’s writing career. Linda Dowling’s Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle observes the growing doubts at this time about the imaginative life of English literary language. She connects this with nineteenth-century developments in comparative philology, referring to the ‘fin de siècle linguistic self-consciousness as it floated between the artificial dialect of literature and the “barbaric yawp” of vernacular speech’. She writes:

Spoken dialects, that is to say, not only more perfectly reflected language reality than did written languages; they also persisted in their linguistic purity, whereas written languages, already falsified by orthography, compounded their falsity by incorporating the vogue words and constructions of civilized fashion. Thus did nineteenth-century linguistic science end by fully ratifying Wordsworth’s belief in rural speech as the real language of men, and by deeply undermining Coleridge’s idea of literature and the literary dialect as a lingua communis.⁹

Dowling’s reference to rural speech as ‘real language’ resonates with Thomas’s preference for the spoken vernacular and oral tradition. This was clearly stated by him in September 1913, the same month he attempted his own ‘ember’ / ‘September’ poem, when he extolled the poems of one contemporary, Ralph Hodgson, for their pre-Victorian, pre-Keatsian flexibility: ‘They recall what poetry was before Keats and Tennyson had so adorned it that it could run and sing too seldom, when words were, and more often than they now are, dissolved and hidden in the beauty which they created.’¹⁰

Thomas’s reviews often show him rejecting the more embellished poetic diction of recent Victorian verse and harking back to a Wordsworthian or pre-Wordsworthian approach to language. He praised Davies for writing ‘much as Wordsworth wrote, with the clearness, compactness, and felicity which makes a man think with shame how unworthily … he manages his native tongue’.¹¹ Frost was applauded for the way in North of Boston he cast off out-worn literary conventions and ‘refused the “glory of words” which is the modern poet’s embarrassing heritage’. North of Boston was also lauded for its ‘natural delicacy like Wordsworth’s, or at least Shelley’s, rather than that of Keats’.¹²

Thomas’s dissatisfaction with an ‘embarrassing heritage’ was shared by many writers of his time. In The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) introduction, W. B. Yeats, in a retrospective frame of mind, particularly attacked Victorianism:

The revolt against Victorianism meant to the young poet a revolt against irrelevant descriptions of nature, the scientific and moral discursiveness of In Memoriam – ‘When he should have been broken-hearted’, said Verlaine, ‘he had many reminiscences’ – the poetical eloquence of Swinburne, the psychological curiosity of Browning, and the poetic diction of everybody.

Yeats continued by describing how ‘in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts’ in a ‘reaction from rhetoric, from all that was prepense and artificial’ and from ‘what ailed Victorian literature’.¹³

For Thomas, getting off these stilts did not simply amount to retrogression to pre-Victorian poetic modes. In his North of Boston reviews, he took the time to distinguish Frost’s approach from Wordsworth’s. Frost ‘sympathizes where Wordsworth contemplates and the result is a unique type of eclogue, homely, racy’, moving from ‘a never vulgar colloquialism to brief moments of heightened and intense simplicity’.¹⁴ Thomas focused on the present in his celebration of Frost’s ‘colloquialism’ and leaner more contemporary diction.

Like Thomas, modernist writers in the 1913 ‘Futurism’ issue of Poetry and Drama expressed a sense of the urgent need for revolution in the use of language in poetry and literature. The opening article lays out the editors’ position: ‘[W]e claim ourselves, also, to be futurists’ and states some of ‘the first principles of our Futurism’ to be ‘[t]o lift the eyes from a sentimental contemplation of the past’ and to avoid ‘walking backwards with eyes of regret fixed on the past’.¹⁵ In the same issue, the Imagist poet F. S. Flint declared ‘Are we not really spellbound by the past, and is the Georgian Anthology really an expression of this age? I doubt it. I doubt whether English poets are really alive to what is around them.’¹⁶ Three of Thomas’s reviews, including the Hodgson review, appear in this issue of Poetry and Drama. They are grouped in a cluster that immediately follows Flint’s article. These pieces, published alongside other essays celebrating Futurism and its focus on the dynamic energy of new technology, include implicit dissatisfaction with much contemporary poetry. Hodgson’s verse is praised for its remarkable lack of ‘all weight of mere words, of undigested thought, of mechanical rhythm’.¹⁷ The saving grace of John Alford’s Poems lies in their ‘freshness [which] is that of a little before sunrise, cool and blithe and yet solemn’, suggesting a lack of such qualities in most modern poetry, and explicitly evoking a ‘kinship to Blake and some Elizabethans’.¹⁸ As in his reviews of Davies and Frost, the Poetry and Drama reviews recall a more distant era of ‘the ballads which were sold in the street and stuck about inn walls two hundred years ago’, when poetry was more closely connected to song, to music and to its environmental context, in this case on an inn wall.¹⁹

Other evidence of Thomas’s propensity for poetry closely related to oral tradition, and his belief in its absolute appropriateness to his time and poetic language, is located in his descriptions of Davies’s poems as ‘simple, instantaneous and new, recalling older poets chiefly by their perfection’; de la Mare’s song-like Peacock Pie, which gave him ‘perfect pleasure’;²⁰ and his heralding of Frost’s North of Boston as ‘one of the most revolutionary books of modern times’ because it went ‘back, through the paraphernalia of poetry into poetry again’.²¹

Yeats expressed similar sentiments in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, pointedly snubbing the Victorian tradition as he traced the ancestry of the successful modern lyric:

During the first years of the century the best known [poets] were celebrators of the country-side or of the life of ships; I think of Davies and of Masefield; some few wrote in the manner of the traditional country ballad … [and] De la Mare short lyrics that carry us back through Christabel or Kubla Khan.²²

Thomas internalized his own criticism of contemporary poetry. In May 1914, he wrote to Frost of wanting ‘to begin over again with them [his ideas about speech and literature] & wring the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’.²³ Like Yeats in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Thomas evoked Verlaine, alluding to his expression ‘Take eloquence and break its neck’.²⁴ In typical Thomas fashion, he inserted the image of a domiciled farmyard bird with a notoriously unmelodic call, a stark contrast to the wild song of the untamed bird. In order to ‘begin over again’, Thomas was turning to the unwritten vernacular of popular songs and proverbs, and the calls or song of wild birds in their natural environment: such songs as the dawn chorus recorded in ‘Insomnia’. For him, the sounds and rhythms of this environment and the vernacular formed the crucial preconditions of the composing process.

However, if Thomas saw creative writing as emerging from the natural physical environment, he also recognized the difficulties he and his contemporaries had in connecting with such pre-conditions of composition in the domiciled or urbanized settings of early twentieth-century towns. He often described himself as alienated from both wild birdsong and the vernacular: born in the suburbs of London, cut off from the rural countryside and from the vernacular of his indigenous Welsh roots. He borrowed the term ‘superfluous men’ from Turgenev to express this.²⁵ He praised Turgenev’s novels and stories for the high value placed on the vernacular: ‘He sends us continually out into the fields and the streets to men and women, reminding us that not long ago the ordinary man was discovered, and that he is great’, and a passage from Memoirs of a Sportsman, in which Turgenev explored man’s desire to merge with the environment in images of woods as sea inhabited by fish, became a source of two Thomas poems:

’Tis a wonderfully agreeable occupation, to lie on one’s back in the forest, and stare upward! It seems to you as though you were gazing into a bottomless sea, that it spreads broadly beneath you, that the trees do not rise out of the earth, but, like the roots of huge plants, descend, hang suspended, in those crystal-clear waves; the leaves on the trees now are of translucent emerald, again thicken into golden, almost black green. Somewhere, far away, terminating a slender branch, a separate leaf stands motionless against the blue patch of transparent sky, and by its side sways another, recalling by its movements the play of a fish’s gills²⁶

This image of a fish out of water in a wood reappears in Thomas’s ‘The Lofty Sky’ and ‘The Hollow Wood’, albeit with the introduction of a darker side. ‘The Lofty Sky’ includes a sense of imprisonment, as the speaker becomes a fish looking up through the sea of trees, desiring to escape and reach the surface ‘where the lilies are’ (p. 53). ‘The Hollow Wood’, written a few days earlier, accompanies the image of birds swimming in a dark wood like fish with a sense of mismatch and unhappiness. Their voices are discordant. They do not fit harmoniously with their environment. They ‘laugh and shriek’ in contrast to the bright singing of goldfinch in the light on the ‘thistle-tops’ (p. 48).

Thomas wrote that for Turgenev ‘no sentiment obtrudes … his observation is supreme. There is no greater praise to be given to an imaginative writer than that.’²⁷ This reference to ‘supreme’ observation suggests the way forward for Thomas. Keen attention to features of the environment offers up poetic material. With such an approach, the land becomes a way of connecting with vanishing oral tradition, providing inklings of what has been lost.

BEGINNING AGAIN: VOICING THE LORE

Alec Finlay²⁸

As his brother, Julian Thomas, has reported, Thomas cherished a Wordsworthian ambition to produce ‘prose, as he said to me shortly after he had finished his critical study of Walter Pater, “as near akin as possible to the talk of a Surrey peasant”’.²⁹ This concern stemmed from Thomas’s acute awareness of the fragility of vernacular knowledge, hovering on the edge of extinction. It was present in his writing as early as 1895 in the essay, ‘Dad’, where he described an old countryman:

He certainly had no intention of allowing the old lore concerning herbs to die out. Dried specimens of any sort were always kept by him and roots of many more. Such knowledge as he was full of is fast decaying.³⁰

The Norse Tales preface highlights the precarious existence of one form of vernacular knowledge, orally transmitted stories. The names of the storytellers ‘have been lost’; the surviving creative works are ‘confused and mutilated’. Their geographical sources too are ‘unknown’ and, by implication, also ‘lost’ or ‘mutilated’. Such stories remain in touch with an ancient tradition, with creators who were ‘for the most part Christians, living in the ninth and tenth centuries amidst a still keen aroma and tradition of Paganism’.³¹ This hint of antiquity coupled with their existence on the border of extinction contributed to their value for Thomas. In his ‘Note on sources’ in Celtic Stories, written a year earlier than Norse Tales, he declared: ‘it is one of the charms under the surface of these stories that we can feel, even if we can never trace, a pedigree of dimmest antiquity behind them’.³²

The Norse Tales preface describes how such stories are handed down: ‘gradually collected and paraphrased … [t]he different poets tell them in their own ways, one often inventing or presenting scenes and characters incompatible with those in another’s poem’.³³ These words, which could apply to Thomas’s activity compiling Celtic Stories and Norse Tales, suggest that he saw the task of compilers, editors and rewriters of old tales, preserving and reclaiming oral traditions, to be also part of oral tradition.

In his later series of reviews of reprints and anthologies, published in Poetry and Drama in 1914, he suggested that anthologies share that role. He defined ‘a genuine anthology, [as being] culled from obscure corners, from magazines, even from manuscripts’ and argued that ‘room should be found for songs, epitaphs, nursery rhymes, popular verse’.³⁴ He took great pains to include the unknown, neglected or hidden in his anthologies. He talked of the need to avoid ‘Golden Treasury obviousness’ in The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air and celebrated the discovery of hitherto unprinted unknown material:

3 jolly unpublished sailors’ songs for the Anthology: also 2 little known songs from The Compleat Angler … But in my endeavour to keep clear of what Lucas & other open air anthologists have used I daresay my poetry is not all good & not all popular enough³⁵

Similarly, the Pocket Book ‘Note by the compiler’ emphasizes the oral sources of the songs: ‘These Westmorland songs have, I think, never been published before.’³⁶

However, he also acknowledged the very different effects created when putting oral literature in print. The ‘Note on sources’ alludes to the process of change that is part of oral literature. Stories are repeatedly modified so as ‘to accord with changing taste and custom and belief’.³⁷ Reference is also made to the need to unravel ‘these changes in order to trace the origin of the stories, or at least as early as possible a form of them’, an activity best suited to print. This is made clear in Thomas’s declaration of his own approach: ‘Many of these tales have been re-written by poets and others in our own time. I have kept them as nearly as possible in their mediaeval form.’ This is tempered by the need for accessibility, as indicated in the introductory note to the volume: ‘The spelling of some of the chief names in these stories has been changed so that English children may at once be able to pronounce them.’³⁸

Thomas’s anthologizing work also sharpened his awareness of the looseness of the connections between music and lyrics. A letter to Bottomley shows Thomas continuing this tradition in his own recombinations of text and melody: ‘I will add Masefield’s version, but must retain that in the minor. Cecil Sharp (who knows) says no old sailor would sing the major tune that Masefield gives, & it was he who gave me the version I am using. It is not obvious but I have learned to like it well.’³⁹

Thomas’s efforts at reclamation of the vernacular are not only manifested in his activities as compiler, editor, rewriter and recorder of oral traditions, myth, legend and song. They are also evident in his scrupulous use of indigenous plant names in preference to Latin terms for flora and fauna and his record and celebration of the neglected and under-farmed countryside of the rapidly urbanizing Edwardian England in which he lived. This land, despite the neglect it had suffered, represented for him a long history of close human contact, correspondingly reflected in rural speech. The walls of the ruined cottage covered in periwinkle in ‘A Tale’, and his celebration of the ‘corner of the farmyard I like most’ with its ‘rusty harrow’ and ‘long worn out’ plough in ‘Tall Nettles’, are just two of many appearances of abandoned countryside in his poetry. Thomas’s writing on this, as Stan Smith notes, is particularly focused on the impending loss of that world. The only remaining records that ‘tell the tale’ of the ruined cottage are scattered ‘fragments of blue plates’, and the farmyard nettles have grown so tall that they cover all but the ‘elm butt’ (pp. 73, 119). It is a world poised on the brink of extinction, just like the vernacular spoken within it. As Smith puts it,

the rundown of the land, the demoralization of the farmers, and the poverty of the agricultural labourers, now the lowest paid of any large category of workers, created that landscape of picturesque abandon which is recognizably Thomas’s own.⁴⁰

Thomas’s position, as a poet in search of origins and the words that issue from them, results in a focus on the possibilities of rediscovering a human understanding of the natural environment. His poem ‘Home (“Often I had gone”)’ suggests that such an understanding is related to sustained contact with the land. The narrator, as the first words declare, is ‘often’ travelling, but momentarily achieves absorption in the natural world:

one nationality

We had, I and the birds that sang,

One memory. (p. 81)

The narrator cannot articulate this experience, remaining caught in it, unable, like the birds themselves, to distinguish the end of the song:

as he ended, on the elm

Another had but just begun

His last; they knew no more than I

The day was done. (p. 81)

The narrator’s experience is contrasted with the skilled and aware activity of a labourer. The last line of the poem refers to the sound of the labourer’s sawing, which translates and completes not only the narrator’s experience of the birdsong but the whole poem: ‘The sound of sawing rounded all.’ The labourer lives and works locally, inhabiting the land in the way the narrator, a passing traveller, does not. His sawing can be seen as an approximation of a local vernacular, having the power to ‘speak’ with and complete the birdsong that overwhelms the narrator. As Jonathan Bate declares in his analysis of this poem, the labourer presents a ‘relationship with earthly things that is turned into language by the poetry of dwelling’.⁴¹ Birdsong and its beginnings in the environment are linked to a completed poem by the everyday activities of a local, rural inhabitant in sustained contact with a particular area of land.

In early 1913, Thomas started work on a collection of retold proverbs, Four- and- Twenty Blackbirds. He rewrote vernacular proverbs to form a series of stories based on a literal reading of the images that they contain. Blackbirds has many connections with the voices of children. The writing of it coincided with a developing close friendship with Eleanor Farjeon, a writer for children, and a growing interest in the voices of children, recorded in a number of letters to Farjeon and his poet friend John Freeman who also had a young daughter. These letters repeatedly refer to Thomas’s youngest child Myfanwy’s experiments with incipient speech. Some of the Blackbirds stories began as oral literature told by Thomas and his wife to their children. Farjeon encouraged him in his work on these, and he later dedicated the published work to her. De la Mare also lent his support to Blackbirds, another writer friend whose work appealed to children, and whose work, Peacock Pie, Thomas was avidly reading at this time to his children and himself.⁴²

The significance of Blackbirds in Thomas’s development as a poet has been noted by a number of critics. In Studies in Children’s Literature, Deborah Thacker argues that, by interpreting the Blackbirds proverbs literally rather than metaphorically, he ‘undermines the authority of a moralising adult voice and, through entering into a playful relationship with the child-as-reader’, challenges language as ‘a socialising and controlling force’, and that such ‘childlike uses of language and the childlike studied misapprehension or “play”’ with language reflected in these children’s stories feed into and influence his poetry.⁴³ Similarly, R. G. Thomas suggested that Edward Thomas’s intense ‘desire to be “non-literary”’ that manifests itself in his focus on the vernacular and the voices of children helps to release his poetry.⁴⁴ Thomas himself traced a similar connection between Blackbirds and ‘Lob’, which is, as Longley describes it, ‘unequalled as a poem based upon English mythological material’.⁴⁵ He wrote: ‘I wish I had gone on where the Proverbs [Blackbirds] left off. Probably I never shall, unless “Lob” is the beginning.’⁴⁶

Just as the experience of listening to the robin’s song in ‘Insomnia’ leads to the composition of a rhyme, the rewriting of vernacular proverbs for children, which is what Blackbirds entails, led Thomas to poetry. A number of times in his poems children are shown as conduits for an understanding of what is lacking in the adult world. They inhabit, in a way an adult cannot, the nameless natural world with its ‘proverbs untranslatable’, a kind of Eden that adults have left behind (p. 115). ‘The Brook’ evokes a Blakean innocence in the description of a child living and directly participating in her environment. Her superior powers of articulation are emphasized. Unlike the adult in the poem, she can ‘translate’ her experience and put it into words. This celebration of the special penetrative abilities of children chimes with Thomas’s earlier delight in the childlike quality of Davies’s poems, as when he quoted, in a review in April 1908 of The Soul’s Destroyer, G. B. Shaw on how Davies’s poetry shows ‘no sign of his ever having read anything otherwise than as a child reads.’⁴⁷

‘Lob’ continues to stress connections between birds, the vernacular, proverbs and rhymes for children, and poetry. The vernacular is translated into poetry, and the act of translating birdsong into human language is recorded:

Our blackbirds sang no English till his [Lob’s] ear

Told him they called his Jan Toy ‘Pretty dear’. (p. 77)

Longley observes how these lines connect ‘blackbirds, an old proverb, Lob’s sweetheart and a dialect poem by Thomas Hardy’.⁴⁸ As with the sailors’ song, which is ‘far outweighed’ by the seagull’s ‘mewing’, in ‘An Old Song II’ (p. 47), so, in ‘Lob’, the belatedness of Lob’s act of naming the birdsong is highlighted by the reference to that song’s pre-linguistic history.

In its connection of song, poetry, the vernacular and the environment Lob crosses both temporal and spatial boundaries. Lob is presented as a timeless figure appearing across generations, turning up in various locations in the rural countryside, often as a traveller. Steeped in the vernacular, and quotations and adaptations from earlier literature, the figure of Lob represents oral literature. He possesses the ability to name, but his words are subject to the transforming effect of oral tradition, as is evident in the reference to Lob’s weather rhymes, which also, in the allusion to sleeplessness, evoke the failed poetic attempt recorded in ‘Insomnia’:

On sleepless nights he made up weather rhymes

Which others spoilt. (p. 78)

Lob’s success in naming birdsong contrasts with Thomas’s early failure to appreciate songs of birds, ‘I never could enjoy them much … I am so miserably conscious of myself’ and the attempt of the narrator in ‘Insomnia’, who, also suffering from excessive consciousness, fails to put the robin’s song into rhyme.⁴⁹ The key to the power of ‘Lob’ lies in the conjunction of the environment, birdsong and plants, named and renamed by the fluid voice of anonymous indigenous tradition. Even the moniker for Lob constantly changes, from ‘tall Tom’ to ‘Herne the Hunter’ to ‘Hob’, reaching an apotheosis at the end of the poem in a litany of names that encompass time and space. Such a process also incorporates the reinvention of oral tradition in the context of printed texts by weaving in reworked proverbial sayings and text from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Hardy and de la Mare. This celebration of folk heroes, characters in proverbs and printed texts, indigenous plants, waste or common land includes what Longley calls a ‘roll-call of battles’ in which the common soldier has died.⁵⁰ The oral tradition and the vernacular are thus linked to a sense of place:

The man you saw, – Lob-lie-by-the-fire, Jack Cade,

Jack Smith, Jack Moon, poor Jack of every trade,

Young Jack, or old Jack, or Jack What-d’ye-call,

Jack-in-the-hedge, or Robin-run-by-the-wall,

Robin Hood, Ragged Robin, lazy Bob,

One of the lords of No Man’s Land, good Lob, –

Although he was seen dying at Waterloo,

Hastings, Agincourt, and Sedgemoor, too, –

Lives yet. (p. 79)

These lines draw together the richness and fluidity of oral tradition, represented by the many different names and guises under which Lob appears, and through the concluding recitation of names and places, root that oral tradition in specific geographical locations related to the experiences of common man. By recreating the process that is so essential to this tradition in a poem, Thomas has not only recorded that tradition as in earlier editorial work, but also participated in it, reliving it in process, linking past memories and legends to the present time and place.

BEGINNING AGAIN: WITH RE-INVENTING THE ANONYMOUS

In my new robe

This morning –

Someone else.

Matsuo Bashō⁵¹

Celtic Stories, Norse Tales and Blackbirds mirror the processes by which oral tradition is perpetuated in their reuse of proverbs and sayings. This also occurs in Thomas’s intricate use of the vernacular in his poems, where sayings are woven in unannounced, as if, as Longley puts it, ‘he had invented them’.⁵² Many of what initially appear to be original turns of phrase hark back to previous texts or sayings. Myfanwy Thomas wrote:

Not many people realize the implication of the line ‘But if she finds a blossom on furze’ [in ‘If I should ever by chance’] and also the line in the poem ‘October’, ‘And gorse that has no time not to be gay’. They have their origins in the country saying, ‘When gorse is out of flower then kissing’s out of fashion’.⁵³

In such instances, Thomas ran counter to the trend of anonymity in oral literature, bestowing his own name or pseudonym on previously anonymous material. However, at other times, in line, incidentally, with the tradition of mythologizing Welsh history and literature recorded by Prys Morgan in The Invention of Tradition, Thomas reinvented himself and his writing as anonymous.⁵⁴ In Beautiful Wales, he presented his own lyric as an anonymous translation of a Welsh song:

Here is one of his [Llewelyn the Bard’s] imitative songs, reduced to its lowest terms by a translator:

She is dead, Eluned,

Whom the young men and the old men

And the old women and even the young women

Came to the gates in the village

To see, because she walked as beautifully as a heifer.⁵⁵

The uncovering of this deception left Thomas unabashed. He reported to Bottomley that ‘[t]o the Cymric enthusiast I only said that there was no Welsh original for “Eluned” & that therefore he wd be disappointed because anyone can make a pseudo translation that suggests a noble original.’⁵⁶

He indicated this preference for anonymity and communality of literature over one individual’s claim on a text in exchanges with Bottomley in 1904–5. They were discussing rearrangements in verse of prose versions of Welsh songs for Beautiful Wales. Initially, he informed Bottomley that ‘your name would be mentioned if you were pleased with the verses’. Later, he changed his mind:

I have already planned to use ‘The Maid of Llandebie’, I mean your translation. Of course it is not you, & it is not the Welsh lyric, but it can be sung & it has already reminded me of the original. Therefore, without your name, but with your apologies, I have inserted it in my 3^rd. chapter.

Finally, a compromise was reached, with Bottomley being represented as an anonymous poet, credited but not named: ‘Here follows the air and a translation by an English poet.’ A subsequent apology to Bottomley employed the telling excuse that the lines ‘were quoted in such intimate relations with the context that it would be difficult for me to mention your name’. In other words, the act of naming Bottomley would have run the risk of alienating the lines from their context.⁵⁷

Thomas’s preference for anonymity in the context of Welsh oral traditions is not surprising, given his special esteem for Welsh culture, seeing himself as ‘mainly Welsh’.⁵⁸ However, he behaved in a similar fashion in other contexts, omitting to credit borrowed passages of contemporary texts. His Swinburne quotes unattributed passages from Edmund Gosse, causing Gosse to observe, a little bitterly, that Thomas ‘is one of those people who grudge acknowledgement and he quotes metres of passages from me without mentioning my name. (He does mention it elsewhere.)’⁵⁹

The difficult conditions in which Thomas produced his books, working to tight deadlines with limited funds for copyright, may have encouraged such behaviour, but a similar practice occurred in other circumstances. He reworked unacknowledged material from his own earlier texts in new uncommissioned pieces that were therefore unrestricted by publishers’ demands. In ‘Birds in March’, possibly his earliest published piece, a description of ‘a woodland mere’ includes a chilling image: ‘a moor-hen’s nest approaching completion. It is made of the long bayonet-like reeds and other water plants.’⁶⁰ This image resurfaced over twenty years later in 1916 in ‘Bright Clouds’, also in reference to a moorhen:

Tall reeds

Like criss-cross bayonets

Where a bird once called, (p. 125)

Thomas not only employed anonymity within his texts. He extended it to completed works. His writing was often published anonymously or under a pseudonym. Such anonymity was sometimes imposed on him as a reviewer, but he actively pursued it in connection with the writing he most valued, his poetry. He posed as ‘Edward Eastaway’ in journals, anthologies and a booklet of six poems, and planned to use this pseudonym for his 1917 collection. He wanted to see how the poems would fare uninfluenced by his previous reputation as prose writer and critic: ‘I prefer to remain Eastaway for the time being. People are too likely to be prejudiced for or against E.T.’⁶¹ He was keenly aware of the detrimental effect of the declaration of individual ownership of a creative piece. Adding a name to a text risks distracting the reader from the creative piece, blurring responses to that piece with preconceived judgements about the author’s capabilities. In this context, his vigorous activities in the realm of anonymity, editorializing, anthologizing and rewriting vernacular records of the environment and making unattributed use of other writers’ material can be seen as exercises in restraint, of his own and other named voices, in order to foster complete focus on the current creative piece.

The introduction to Taylor’s Words and Places in Illustration of History, Ethnology and Geography (1911) discusses the anonymous creation of place names, doubly significant as anonymous acts of creative composition and of naming the environment. They often precede written attempts to describe an environment and so remain closer to it. In addition, the environment, oral tradition and written and spoken language all coincide in place names. Thomas praised those who give inaccurate etymological histories for traditional place names for making ‘England great, fearing neither man nor God nor philology’. Attempts to give such names finite histories and definitions are likely to have a reductive effect, so it is ‘[b] etter [to use] pure imagination than rash science in handling place names’.⁶² Elsewhere, the inaccuracy of ‘a thousand errors so long as they are human’ is favoured.⁶³ Such apparent inaccuracy is more accurate since it closely reflects the fluid history of the names themselves.

He explored this topic further in relation to the names of plants in ‘Old Man’:

Old Man, or Lad’s-love, – in the name there’s nothing

To one that knows not Lad’s-love, or Old Man,

The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree,

Various plant names ‘half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is’ (p. 36). Their proliferation emphasizes the ambiguities inherent in the naming process, and the importance of remaining aware of that ambiguity, challenging the ambition of taxonomy to classify definitively, a challenge that is reflected in the omission in this list of names of the plant’s definitive Latin classification, Artemesia abrotanum.

BEGINNING AGAIN: WITH THE DANGERS OF APPROPRIATION

I love a ballad in print, a-life, for then we are sure they are true.

The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare⁶⁴

Many writers in Thomas’s time considered deeply the connections between the environment, oral literature and imaginative writing. As F. R. Leavis observed of Thomas’s near contemporary Virginia Woolf: ‘Edward Thomas’s concern with the outer scene is akin to Mrs Woolf’s.’⁶⁵ Her explorations in this area throw light on Thomas’s views.

Woolf’s regard for Thomas’s writing on the land was apparent in her review of A Literary Pilgrim in England:

We have seldom read a book indeed which gives a better feeling of England than this one. Never perfunctory or conventional, but always saying what strikes him as the true or interesting or characteristic thing, Mr. Thomas brings the very look of the fields and roads before us; he brings the poets too; and no one will finish the book without a sense that he [sic] knows and respects the author.⁶⁶

In the initial draft of her last novel, Between the Acts, Woolf directly mentioned ‘Old Man’ and its exploration of words, naming and the environment. An allusion remains in the completed novel when Isa ‘stripped the bitter leaf that grew, as it happened, outside the nursery window, Old Man’s Beard. Shrivelling the shreds in lieu of words, for no words grow there, nor roses either.’⁶⁷ The importance of this poem to Woolf is indicated in her reference to its last lines when musing on the difficulty of memoir writing in her unpublished ‘A Sketch of the Past’, composed at the same time as Between the Acts: ‘I see it – the past – as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery.’⁶⁸

As her use of ‘Old Man’ suggests, Woolf shared Thomas’s interest in the relationship between names and things, and the origins of naming. These relationships are examined in detail in ‘Anon’, on which she was working concurrently with Between the Acts in 1940–1. ‘Anon’ presents birdsong as the precursor to the human voice, echoing Thomas’s placing of the robin’s song before the poet’s attempt at composition in ‘Insomnia’. Longley has observed how birds ‘often stand in for the poet’ or ‘provide aesthetic models’ for him: ‘[He] assumes (rightly) that birdsong, the most complex utterance by any other species, and the lyric poem have a common evolutionary origin. Here [in ‘Sedge-Warblers’] the sedge-warblers’ song re-attaches the speaker-as-poet to the earth’ (p. 241).

‘Insomnia’ shows a single instance of birdsong acting as stimulant for a poem. ‘Sedge-Warblers’ links the poet with one species of bird. Woolf, however, looked at the wider historical context, tracing the movement from birdsong to the anonymous vernacular of folk song:

Innumerable birds sang; but their song was only heard by a few skin clad hunters in the clearings. Did the desire to sing come to one of those huntsmen because he heard the birds sing, and so rested his axe against the tree for a moment?⁶⁹

In ‘Anon’ and other writings, Woolf was adamant about the importance of the anonymous voice. A Room of One’s Own refers to Chaucer’s dependence on ‘forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue’.⁷⁰ Thomas’s emphasis on the importance of anonymity was often accompanied by implicit references to the dangers inherent in naming. ‘March the Third’ celebrates anonymity of the ‘day unpromised’ which is ‘more dear / Than all the named days of the year’, and links that unnamed day to birdsong:

’Tis Sunday, and the church-bells end

When the birds do. I think they blend

Now better than they will when passed

Is this unnamed, unmarked godsend.⁷¹

‘October’ includes a telling reference to the effect of naming:

Some day I shall think this a happy day,

And this mood by the name of melancholy

Shall no more blackened and obscured be. (p. 101)

Woolf was even more explicit, particularly in her later work, written in the context of a period of increased upheaval in the late 1930s and early 1940s at the onset of a second world war. ‘Anon’ refers to Morte d’Arthur, the first printed text, as a symbol of printed literature, the fixing effect of print and its fatal effect on the anonymous voice:

It was the printing press that finally was to kill Anon. But it was the press also that preserved him. When in 1477 Caxton printed the twenty one books of the Morte DArthur he fixed the voice of Anon for ever. There we tap the reservoir of common belief that lay deep sunk in the minds of peasants and nobles. There in Malorys [sic] pages we hear the voice of Anon murmuring still.⁷²

The act of printing a text is connected with a sense of loss, and the acts of writing and remembering are associated with death, dependent upon the passing of what they record. Printed writing actively kills, or murders, ‘Anon’.

In his prose piece ‘Reading out of doors’ (1903), Thomas also used Malory’s Morte d’Arthur as a representative printed text. Writing about twenty years earlier than Woolf, he was distinctly positive in his approach, emphasizing the process of renewal and re-invigoration. He used Morte d’Arthur to show how, rather than the writer attempting to subsume the environment in words, words are subsumed in the environment. Read outdoors, the sounds of nature complement and redress the flaws of Morte d’Arthur:

Immediately it is on the grass, the wood sorcery catches it. The birds fill with their softest notes the pauses of his halting stories. The flowers and the trees are glad to find the place in these stories, which Malory rarely gave to them.⁷³

This exploration of print in a natural environment remains distinct from the very similar investigations of another contemporary writer, Hudson. In Green Mansions, Hudson described how, in the wildness of the forest, Rima shimmers in ‘iridescent glory’ but, when seen in human habitats, she appears ‘like some common dull-plumaged little bird sitting in a cage’.⁷⁴ Seduced from her forest, she is eventually burnt to death. All that remains of her is an urn made by the narrator, who carves on it a textual inscription. Thomas noted how this acts as ‘an imperishable and sacred memory’, but also as a reminder of what has perished.⁷⁵ The inscription reads ‘Sin vos y siu dios y mi’, translated in the novel as ‘I, no longer I, in a universe where she was not, and God was not’. The urn and the epitaph serve as remembrances of the girl but also stress the irrevocability of death. The ‘I’ who carves the inscription is ‘no longer I’.⁷⁶

Woolf, Hudson and Thomas shared common ground. For all three, the act of writing words down, and, in Hudson’s case, the act of speaking as an individual human voice, coincided with, involved and even caused creative loss. While emphasizing the limitations of the fixing quality of print, they also celebrated the printed book or word. For Thomas, it allowed space for the environment to have a voice. For Woolf, it preserved space in which anonymous voices could speak. For Hudson, the visceral physical experience of carving words on an urn offered comfort and consolation.

A foreshadowing of Woolf’s explicit rendering of the tensions between anonymous and named printed text occurs in Thomas’s comparisons of adult human voices with voices of unnamed and unself-conscious children. These children are closely connected with their environment, inhabiting it in a way that is evocative of Hudson’s Rima. Their points of view are set against those of adults. Commonly, the adults remain distant, pronouncing on what they see, and attempting to contain or own a scene through their words. Commonly, too, they fail, and this failure alienates them further from the scenes that they observe. The children, on the other hand, remain part of the scenes. They inhabit them. Their voices come out of them, and are integral to them. In ‘Old Man’, the child is merely, effortlessly, ‘perhaps / Thinking, perhaps of nothing’ in the environment, while the more detached adult narrator is intent on trying ‘to think what it is I am remembering’ (p. 36). The children engage with their environment emotionally and imaginatively. The adult’s observation of a child responding to a gloomy day of falling snow in ‘Snow’ is heightened and brightened by the child’s direct speech, which provides the poem with its image of a bird, an image that the adult observer adopts in the last line:

A child was sighing

And bitterly saying: ‘Oh,

They have killed a white bird up there on her nest,

The down is fluttering from her breast.’

And still it fell through that dusky brightness

On the child crying for the bird of the snow. (p. 51)

The child in ‘The Child on the Cliffs’ imaginatively inhabits the world he physically perceives, instilling it with drama and adventure: ‘the grasshopper works at his sewing machine’ is ‘like a green knight in a dazzling market-place’, while the ‘foam there curls / And stretches a white arm out like a girl’s’ (p. 65). The child in ‘The Child in the Orchard’ similarly explores imaginative truth in nursery rhymes.

This combination of human language and the natural sounds and movements of the environment holds an echo of Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’, in which a woman takes the part of Thomas’s unself-conscious children. In ‘The Thorn’, Martha shudders and cries ‘when the little breezes make / The waters of the pond to shake.’⁷⁷ It is as if she is a part of the land and her language synonymous with the sounds of nature. Wordsworth’s note to ‘The Thorn’ reiterated this point, attributing the poem’s use of repetition to the inadequacies inherent in human language, a point Thomas also drew on in his repetition of vernacular plant names in ‘Old Man’. Wordsworth wrote:

every man must know that an attempt is rarely made to communicate impassioned feelings without something of an accompanying consciousness of the inadequateness of our own powers, or the deficiencies of language. During such efforts there will be a craving in the mind, and as long as it is unsatisfied the speaker will cling to the same words, or words of the same character.⁷⁸

Thomas spelt out the powerful effects of a deep unself-conscious engagement with the environment in ‘The Mill-Pond’ and ‘The Brook’. While the adult narrators observe and muse on the natural scene, the younger voices unexpectedly translate that scene into speech. These poems echo and reflect on Wordsworth’s illustration in ‘The Prelude’ of the nourishing effect of ‘spots of time’ in his description of a girl carrying a pitcher.⁷⁹ However, Thomas’s poems demonstrate a sharper effect in which the voices of young girls shatter adult perceptions. In ‘The Mill-Pond’, when the girl speaks, interrupting the narrator’s three stanzas of physical description, she startles him. In ‘The Brook’, the adult voice muses on the brook, the child’s play in it and the ‘fir-tree-covered barrow on the heath’, but eventually acknowledges the superior success of the child as articulator of the natural scene and of the emotions of those inhabiting it:

And then the child’s voice raised the dead.

‘No one’s been here before’ was what she said

And what I felt, yet never should have found

A word for, while I gathered sight and sound. (p. 97)

Woolf, like Thomas, also dealt with sounds and voices integral to the environment rather than distanced from it. In her case the catalysts were the calls of animals and the sounds of the natural environment. Between the Acts describes an interruption of the performance of an outdoor play: ‘Then the wind rose, and in the rustle of the leaves even the great words became inaudible; and the audience sat staring at the villagers, whose mouths opened, but no sound came.’⁸⁰ The interrupted human speech is then followed by the bellowing of cows, as if in continuation.

Thomas’s ‘The Mountain Chapel’ compares the human voice to the natural sound of the wind. The wind is unequivocally more powerful, more overwhelming and ultimately more lasting:

The eternal noise

Of wind whistling in grass more shrill

Than aught as human as a sword,

And saying still:

‘’Tis but a moment since man’s birth

And in another moment more

Man lies in earth

For ever; but I am the same

Now, and shall be, even as I was

Before he came;

Till there is nothing I shall be.’ (pp. 43–4)

In ‘The Word’, a poem meditating on the elusiveness of words and names, ‘There are so many things I have forgot’, the speaker’s thoughts are interrupted by ‘a pure thrush word’. This interruption is unexpected and sudden, ‘cried out to me’ from the bushes. Intellectual and articulated thought is contrasted with physical and sensuous experience. The bird call, too, is sudden but also confirming, occurring, significantly, when the speaker is focusing not on intellectual thought but on how the physical experience of scents evokes ‘food’ and ‘memory’. In contrast to the speaker’s convoluted lists of lost or forgotten names, the bird call or ‘word’ is ‘empty’, ‘thingless’ and ‘pure’. Not only is this particular name remembered even as the speaker cannot articulate it, but it completes and rounds off the poem:

the name, only the name I hear.

While perhaps I am thinking of the elder scent

That is like food, or while I am content

With the wild rose scent that is like memory,

This name suddenly is cried out to me

From somewhere in the bushes by a bird

Over and over again, a pure thrush word. (p. 93)

These voices from the natural world or from children raise rather than destroy the dead. They are ‘empty’ as Thomas described it in ‘The Word’. They speak without risking the dangers of appropriation that Woolf identified in ‘Anon’ in her reference to Caxton fixing ‘the voice of Anon for ever’.⁸¹

Between the Acts presents a gentler relationship between the sound of the wind and the cows and human efforts at articulation in an outdoor pageant. Although the play is interrupted by these sounds from nature, it picks up again after their cessation. Once the cows have bellowed, they ‘lowered their heads, and began browsing’ and the play moves on.⁸² The temporary interruption of the performance by sounds from nature augments that performance, as the play interacts with and becomes more integrally connected with its physical setting. Cows, actors, director and audience all form part of the play experience, although the cows remain unaware of their contribution while the actors and director expend deliberate human effort, and the audience strains to interpret what is seen and heard.

Similar contrast is evident in ‘The Mill-Pond’ and ‘The Brook’ (pp. 56, 97). Both poems open with the narrator very deliberately watching and describing the scene, collecting rather than participating in what ‘The Brook’ terms the ‘sight and sound’ surrounding him. In contrast, the child and girl, like Woolf’s wind and cows, are much more part of the land. In ‘The Brook’, the child paddles in the water. In ‘The Mill-Pond’, the narrator puts his feet near the water, but does not enter: ‘my feet dangling teased the foam / That slid below’. At this point of not entering the water, isolating himself from his physical environment, a girl, dressed in white, perhaps implying a relation between her communion with the land and innocence, is introduced with the words ‘came out’. It is as if she issues directly out of the landscape, like the ‘thrush word’ in ‘The Word’ out of ‘somewhere in the bushes’ (p. 93), or Wordsworth’s woman in ‘The Thorn’, initially seen as a ‘jutting crag’ and only then as ‘[a] Woman seated on the ground’.⁸³

However, unlike Wordsworth’s characters, Thomas’s children and Woolf’s sounds of nature more evidently invade or interrupt the worlds of their detached narrators, actively engaging with or confronting them, often violently and unexpectedly. The rising wind and bellowing cows in Woolf’s novel drown out the actors’ words. In ‘The Brook’, the child’s sudden speech ‘raised the dead’ (p. 97). The speaker’s surprise in ‘The Mill-Pond’ at the girl’s voice soon turns to anger and, as if in response to this building tension, a storm bursts forth in the natural world (p. 56).

The girl’s ambiguous warning ‘Take care!’ in ‘The Mill-Pond’ demonstrates the power of this voice of the land. Her words herald the storm while advising the narrator of the need for caution and shelter. They also highlight the narrator’s situation, poised on the brink, risking either alienation as a detached spectator, or loss of individuality if he should absorb himself in the landscape by dipping his feet in the dangerous mill-water. For the narrator, the land remains both a landscape viewed from a distance and a world that can harm and hurt. For the girl, the landscape is land, a place she inhabits and of which she is part, the power of her words residing in her unself-conscious position within this world.

BEGINNING AGAIN: WITH THE LANGUAGE OF THE LAND

Nature, that universal and publick Manuscript that lies expanded unto the Eyes of all.

Thomas Browne⁸⁴

In ‘The Brook’ and ‘The Mill-Pond’, the narrator’s self-conscious attempts at articulation divide him from the pre-linguistic experience he wishes to articulate. Thomas’s writings suggest that poetry and the vernacular emerge without design from that pre-linguistic experience, emphasizing the importance of habitation or deep occupation of the land. He teased these ideas out in more depth in a review of an Australian poetry collection, arguing that the environment, in as much as it represents the past, is a crucial source of poetry:

A race hardly develops a genuine poetry more rapidly than an oak achieves full maturity. Poetry is a natural growth, having more than a superficial relation to roses and trees and hills. However airy and graceful it may be in foliage and flower, it has roots deep in a substantial past. It springs apparently from an occupation of the land, from long, busy, and quiet tracts of time, wherein a man or a nation may find its own soul. To have a future, it must have had a past.⁸⁵

The Australian poet, Thomas continued, ‘is akin to the old ballad singers. He cannot tear the heart out of the mystery of the new lands, but he leads us up to the mystery, and we experience it.’ The poet is an interpreter of the land, described as ‘new’ in this review, in a reflection of the colonial attitude to early twentieth-century Australia.

A few years later, in The South Country, Thomas talked more literally of the land as possessing language: ‘If we but knew or cared, every swelling of the grass, every wavering line of hedge or path or road were an inscription, brief as an epitaph’.⁸⁶ Hans Ulrich Seeber observes how in ‘Haymaking’, ‘February Afternoon’, ‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)’ and ‘Swedes’, Thomas ‘sees and reads the surface of English landscape and country life as a storehouse of memories; he transforms it into a text’.⁸⁷ Although features of landscape do not form words, they speak a language to those who can read it. The first lines of ‘November’ represent such an attempt, evoking the land’s condition at a particular time of year by reading the marks left on it by living beings:

the paths

With morning and evening hobnails dinted,

With foot and wing-tip overprinted

Or separately charactered,