mere’ includes a chilling image: ‘a moor-hen’s nest approaching completion. It is made of the long bayonet-like reeds and other water plants.’60 This image resurfaced over twenty years later in 1916 in ‘Bright Clouds’, also in reference to a moorhen:
Tall reeds
Like criss-cross bayonets
Where a bird once called, (p. 125)
Thomas not only employed anonymity within his texts. He extended it to completed works. His writing was often published anonymously or under a pseudonym. Such anonymity was sometimes imposed on him as a reviewer, but he actively pursued it in connection with the writing he most valued, his poetry. He posed as ‘Edward Eastaway’ in journals, anthologies and a booklet of six poems, and planned to use this pseudonym for his 1917 collection. He wanted to see how the poems would fare uninfluenced by his previous reputation as prose writer and critic: ‘I prefer to remain Eastaway for the time being. People are too likely to be prejudiced for or against E.T.’61 He was keenly aware of the detrimental effect of the declaration of individual ownership of a creative piece. Adding a name to a text risks distracting the reader from the creative piece, blurring responses to that piece with preconceived judgements about the author’s capabilities. In this context, his vigorous activities in the realm of anonymity, editorializing, anthologizing and rewriting vernacular records of the environment and making unattributed use of other writers’ material can be seen as exercises in restraint, of his own and other named voices, in order to foster complete focus on the current creative piece.
The introduction to Taylor’s Words and Places in Illustration of History, Ethnology and Geography (1911) discusses the anonymous creation of place names, doubly significant as anonymous acts of creative composition and of naming the environment. They often precede written attempts to describe an environment and so remain closer to it. In addition, the environment, oral tradition and written and spoken language all coincide in place names. Thomas praised those who give inaccurate etymological histories for traditional place names for making ‘England great, fearing neither man nor God nor philology’. Attempts to give such names finite histories and definitions are likely to have a reductive effect, so it is ‘[b] etter [to use] pure imagination than rash science in handling place names’.62 Elsewhere, the inaccuracy of ‘a thousand errors so long as they are human’ is favoured.63 Such apparent inaccuracy is more accurate since it closely reflects the fluid history of the names themselves.
He explored this topic further in relation to the names of plants in ‘Old Man’:
Old Man, or Lad’s-love, – in the name there’s nothing
To one that knows not Lad’s-love, or Old Man,
The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree,
Various plant names ‘half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is’ (p. 36). Their proliferation emphasizes the ambiguities inherent in the naming process, and the importance of remaining aware of that ambiguity, challenging the ambition of taxonomy to classify definitively, a challenge that is reflected in the omission in this list of names of the plant’s definitive Latin classification, Artemesia abrotanum.
BEGINNING AGAIN: WITH THE DANGERS OF APPROPRIATION
I love a ballad in print, a-life, for then we are sure they are true.
The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare64
Many writers in Thomas’s time considered deeply the connections between the environment, oral literature and imaginative writing. As F. R. Leavis observed of Thomas’s near contemporary Virginia Woolf: ‘Edward Thomas’s concern with the outer scene is akin to Mrs Woolf’s.’65 Her explorations in this area throw light on Thomas’s views.
Woolf’s regard for Thomas’s writing on the land was apparent in her review of A Literary Pilgrim in England:
We have seldom read a book indeed which gives a better feeling of England than this one. Never perfunctory or conventional, but always saying what strikes him as the true or interesting or characteristic thing, Mr. Thomas brings the very look of the fields and roads before us; he brings the poets too; and no one will finish the book without a sense that he [sic] knows and respects the author.66
In the initial draft of her last novel, Between the Acts, Woolf directly mentioned ‘Old Man’ and its exploration of words, naming and the environment. An allusion remains in the completed novel when Isa ‘stripped the bitter leaf that grew, as it happened, outside the nursery window, Old Man’s Beard. Shrivelling the shreds in lieu of words, for no words grow there, nor roses either.’67 The importance of this poem to Woolf is indicated in her reference to its last lines when musing on the difficulty of memoir writing in her unpublished ‘A Sketch of the Past’, composed at the same time as Between the Acts: ‘I see it – the past – as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery.’68
As her use of ‘Old Man’ suggests, Woolf shared Thomas’s interest in the relationship between names and things, and the origins of naming. These relationships are examined in detail in ‘Anon’, on which she was working concurrently with Between the Acts in 1940–1. ‘Anon’ presents birdsong as the precursor to the human voice, echoing Thomas’s placing of the robin’s song before the poet’s attempt at composition in ‘Insomnia’. Longley has observed how birds ‘often stand in for the poet’ or ‘provide aesthetic models’ for him: ‘[He] assumes (rightly) that birdsong, the most complex utterance by any other species, and the lyric poem have a common evolutionary origin. Here [in ‘Sedge-Warblers’] the sedge-warblers’ song re-attaches the speaker-as-poet to the earth’ (p. 241).
‘Insomnia’ shows a single instance of birdsong acting as stimulant for a poem. ‘Sedge-Warblers’ links the poet with one species of bird. Woolf, however, looked at the wider historical context, tracing the movement from birdsong to the anonymous vernacular of folk song:
Innumerable birds sang; but their song was only heard by a few skin clad hunters in the clearings. Did the desire to sing come to one of those huntsmen because he heard the birds sing, and so rested his axe against the tree for a moment?69
In ‘Anon’ and other writings, Woolf was adamant about the importance of the anonymous voice. A Room of One’s Own refers to Chaucer’s dependence on ‘forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue’.70 Thomas’s emphasis on the importance of anonymity was often accompanied by implicit references to the dangers inherent in naming. ‘March the Third’ celebrates anonymity of the ‘day unpromised’ which is ‘more dear / Than all the named days of the year’, and links that unnamed day to birdsong:
’Tis Sunday, and the church-bells end
When the birds do. I think they blend
Now better than they will when passed
Is this unnamed, unmarked godsend.71
‘October’ includes a telling reference to the effect of naming:
Some day I shall think this a happy day,
And this mood by the name of melancholy
Shall no more blackened and obscured be. (p. 101)
Woolf was even more explicit, particularly in her later work, written in the context of a period of increased upheaval in the late 1930s and early 1940s at the onset
