Edward Thomas. Judy Kendall
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 3rd.