Edward Thomas. Judy Kendall
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