Edward Thomas. Judy Kendall
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,