Edward Thomas. Judy Kendall
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3 jolly unpublished sailors’ songs for the Anthology: also 2 little known songs from The Compleat Angler … But in my endeavour to keep clear of what Lucas & other open air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’,