Edward Thomas. Judy Kendall
twit’, while the birds in the dark forest are ‘Fish that laugh and shriek’. The word ‘drop’ in ‘the bright twit of the goldfinch drops’ into the wood suggests both downward movement and a drop in mood as the bird enters the darkness.
Thomas’s first mature poem, ‘Up in the Wind’, written on 3 December 1914, investigates connections between the song of the stone curlew and the land. The song speaks with, if not for, the land. The lines relate the song to wildness and a lack of man-made boundaries, and show the bird nesting in half-cultivated fields that hark back to the communality of land:
the land is wild, and there’s a spirit of wildness
Much older, crying when the stone-curlew yodels
His sea and mountain cry, high up in Spring.
He nests in fields where still the gorse is free as
When all was open and common. (p. 31)
This stress on the link between birdsong and the land is countered by an awareness of the distance between human song or poetry and land and birdsong. Such an awareness of, in particular, the inaccessibility of birdsong is already evident in Thomas’s early writings. A letter to his future wife Helen in 1897 runs:
I enjoy the songs of birds at times, but not often: I never could enjoy them much, though doubtless they have combined with other things to cause my delights; perhaps my surroundings are too imperfect for it; but more likely I am incapable of it.52
His later poetry, too, although it often refers to birdsong as a language, emphasizes its distance from human language. ‘If I were to own’, written in April 1916, employs the phrase ‘proverbs untranslatable’ (p. 115) to describe a thrush’s song, encouraging a view of birdsong as a vernacular language, but also stressing its inaccessibility – it cannot be translated. This image recalls Thomas’s implicit criticism of Keats in his critical biography of the poet, also published in 1916, which observes how ‘[t]he great odes, the poems to Autumn, and “The Eve of St Agnes”, could never have been translated out of a thrush’s song’.53 An earlier poem of Thomas’s, composed on 26 December 1914, ‘An Old Song II’, is less explicit about levels of comprehension and accessibility but combines the sounds of human singing and a gull’s ‘mewing’ in the fading light of dusk that threatens oblivion:
The sailors’ song of merry loving
With dusk and sea-gull’s mewing
Mixed sweet, the lewdness far outweighed
By the wild charm the chorus played: (p. 47)
Longley has interpreted these lines as art that has become ‘inseparable from Nature’, art being represented by the sailors’ song.54 However, ‘An Old Song II’ draws its rhythms from traditional song, and the example of human song is a generic sailors’ song of a ‘lewdness’ that is ‘far outweighed’ by the ‘wild charm’ of the birds’ chorus. Such detail undermines Longley’s reading, reversing it to suggest, as Harry Coombes has phrased it in a comment on the robin’s song in ‘Insomnia’, a ‘sense of the alien’ in nature.55 Whichever reading is adopted, however, the emphasis remains on the extent to which human composition, particularly vernacular song, is connected with or divided from the environment, as articulated in birdsong.
In the 17 January 1915 poem, ‘The Unknown Bird’, the bird, as in ‘Up in the Wind’, acts as a buffer between man and what remains inarticulate. Birdsong is presented as superior to human attempts at articulation of what is ‘bodiless’ (p. 55). This pre-empts the later celebration in ‘The Word’, composed on 5 July 1915, of the ‘pure thrush word’ (p. 93). In ‘The Unknown Bird’, the speaker admires the bird’s song, but is unable to replicate it satisfactorily: ‘that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet’. The poet’s efforts to reproduce the song are limited and second-hand: ‘Nor could I ever make another hear’ and ‘All the proof is – I told men / What I had heard.’ The song and the bird remain ‘wandering beyond my shore’. In contrast, the bird’s song is successful in articulating, or being, ‘bodiless’. The poem therefore celebrates birdsong’s unreproduceability, evoking the peripheral quality of the experience of listening to such song, just beyond the ‘shore’. It explores and articulates not the song, but the distance between that song and human language, and the possibility of connection between the two. Such writing as this shows the importance for Thomas of an indirect approach. Instead of attempting to reiterate mechanically and monotonously the bird’s notes, which in ‘Insomnia’ seem to describe not only the robin’s song but the would-be poet’s failed attempts to reproduce it, this passage in ‘Insomnia’ does not strain to complete the process but focuses on that process, the attempt itself. Interestingly, although the approach to composition recorded in ‘Insomnia’ is direct, the importance of an indirect approach to song and poetry is implicit in the tangential appearance of the account of poetic composition. The body of the essay is devoted to the narrator’s struggles to sleep. The truncated process of attempting to compose lines and rhymes of a poem, linked with the experience of birdsong and other sounds from the external environment, is recorded only in the last few paragraphs, which finally revert once again to the topic of insomnia.
An emphasis on process also informs ‘I never saw that land before’, composed on 5 May 1916:
if I could sing
What would not even whisper my soul
As I went on my journeying.
I should use, as the trees and birds did,
A language not to be betrayed;
And what was hid should still be hid (p. 120)
The conditional ‘if I could’ not only reinforces the difficulty of attempts to reproduce the environment in language but the difficulty of reproducing the language that is written into the environment. The poem focuses on the attempt rather than its successful conclusion. The use of the conditional signals incompleteness, and the impossibility of completion. The emphasis necessarily remains on the process of articulating or describing the environment. This process is one that cannot be totally successful.
Thomas’s explorations of birdsong and its connection with human language and poetry were strongly influenced by W. H. Hudson’s work, and in particular Hudson’s bird-girl in the novel Green Mansions.56 Thomas admired Hudson highly: ‘Except William Morris, there is no other man I would sometimes like to have been, no other writing man’ and he described Green Mansions as ‘one of the noblest pieces of self-expression’.57
Hudson’s bird-girl can communicate with birds as well as people. Hudson named her Rima. The evocation in this name of ‘rhyme’ suggests the high value Hudson placed on the power of poetry as a means of connecting with the environment. In his Green Mansions review, Thomas emphasized the power of communication that Rima possesses: ‘her singing was a mode of expression which Nature had taught her. It was attuned to the voices of animals and birds and waters and winds among the leaves; it was more a universal language than Latin or English.’ In the novel, however, the close connection she enjoys with birdsong is contrasted with her uneasy relationship with humans and the human voice. Unlike the facility with which she communicates with her natural environment, Rima finds communication with human beings limited and unsatisfactory. Returning from a venture out of her forest habitat into the world of men, she is fatally silenced, implying a doubt, on Hudson’s part, as to how far the environment, represented by birdsong, could be connected, or translated, into human speech or poetry.
Thomas explored the issues raised by Green Mansions in a description of a woman in his prose piece, ‘A Group of Statuary’, first published in Light and Twilight in 1910. As if echoing Hudson, Thomas referred to birdsong in this piece as a way of articulating the uneasy relationship between the human voice and, by implication, the woman who possesses that voice, and her environment. She is ‘a lovely woman living among mountain lakes’, whose eyes ‘were like wild-voiced nightingales in their silence’, a silence imposed upon them by their present ‘imprisonment’ in the urban ‘cage’ of London.58 Like Rima, Thomas’s woman also appears to have been silenced. Her