voice:
It was the printing press that finally was to kill Anon. But it was the press also that preserved him. When in 1477 Caxton printed the twenty one books of the Morte DArthur he fixed the voice of Anon for ever. There we tap the reservoir of common belief that lay deep sunk in the minds of peasants and nobles. There in Malorys [sic] pages we hear the voice of Anon murmuring still.72
The act of printing a text is connected with a sense of loss, and the acts of writing and remembering are associated with death, dependent upon the passing of what they record. Printed writing actively kills, or murders, ‘Anon’.
In his prose piece ‘Reading out of doors’ (1903), Thomas also used Malory’s Morte d’Arthur as a representative printed text. Writing about twenty years earlier than Woolf, he was distinctly positive in his approach, emphasizing the process of renewal and re-invigoration. He used Morte d’Arthur to show how, rather than the writer attempting to subsume the environment in words, words are subsumed in the environment. Read outdoors, the sounds of nature complement and redress the flaws of Morte d’Arthur:
Immediately it is on the grass, the wood sorcery catches it. The birds fill with their softest notes the pauses of his halting stories. The flowers and the trees are glad to find the place in these stories, which Malory rarely gave to them.73
This exploration of print in a natural environment remains distinct from the very similar investigations of another contemporary writer, Hudson. In Green Mansions, Hudson described how, in the wildness of the forest, Rima shimmers in ‘iridescent glory’ but, when seen in human habitats, she appears ‘like some common dull-plumaged little bird sitting in a cage’.74 Seduced from her forest, she is eventually burnt to death. All that remains of her is an urn made by the narrator, who carves on it a textual inscription. Thomas noted how this acts as ‘an imperishable and sacred memory’, but also as a reminder of what has perished.75 The inscription reads ‘Sin vos y siu dios y mi’, translated in the novel as ‘I, no longer I, in a universe where she was not, and God was not’. The urn and the epitaph serve as remembrances of the girl but also stress the irrevocability of death. The ‘I’ who carves the inscription is ‘no longer I’.76
Woolf, Hudson and Thomas shared common ground. For all three, the act of writing words down, and, in Hudson’s case, the act of speaking as an individual human voice, coincided with, involved and even caused creative loss. While emphasizing the limitations of the fixing quality of print, they also celebrated the printed book or word. For Thomas, it allowed space for the environment to have a voice. For Woolf, it preserved space in which anonymous voices could speak. For Hudson, the visceral physical experience of carving words on an urn offered comfort and consolation.
A foreshadowing of Woolf’s explicit rendering of the tensions between anonymous and named printed text occurs in Thomas’s comparisons of adult human voices with voices of unnamed and unself-conscious children. These children are closely connected with their environment, inhabiting it in a way that is evocative of Hudson’s Rima. Their points of view are set against those of adults. Commonly, the adults remain distant, pronouncing on what they see, and attempting to contain or own a scene through their words. Commonly, too, they fail, and this failure alienates them further from the scenes that they observe. The children, on the other hand, remain part of the scenes. They inhabit them. Their voices come out of them, and are integral to them. In ‘Old Man’, the child is merely, effortlessly, ‘perhaps / Thinking, perhaps of nothing’ in the environment, while the more detached adult narrator is intent on trying ‘to think what it is I am remembering’ (p. 36). The children engage with their environment emotionally and imaginatively. The adult’s observation of a child responding to a gloomy day of falling snow in ‘Snow’ is heightened and brightened by the child’s direct speech, which provides the poem with its image of a bird, an image that the adult observer adopts in the last line:
A child was sighing
And bitterly saying: ‘Oh,
They have killed a white bird up there on her nest,
The down is fluttering from her breast.’
And still it fell through that dusky brightness
On the child crying for the bird of the snow. (p. 51)
The child in ‘The Child on the Cliffs’ imaginatively inhabits the world he physically perceives, instilling it with drama and adventure: ‘the grasshopper works at his sewing machine’ is ‘like a green knight in a dazzling market-place’, while the ‘foam there curls / And stretches a white arm out like a girl’s’ (p. 65). The child in ‘The Child in the Orchard’ similarly explores imaginative truth in nursery rhymes.
This combination of human language and the natural sounds and movements of the environment holds an echo of Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’, in which a woman takes the part of Thomas’s unself-conscious children. In ‘The Thorn’, Martha shudders and cries ‘when the little breezes make / The waters of the pond to shake.’77 It is as if she is a part of the land and her language synonymous with the sounds of nature. Wordsworth’s note to ‘The Thorn’ reiterated this point, attributing the poem’s use of repetition to the inadequacies inherent in human language, a point Thomas also drew on in his repetition of vernacular plant names in ‘Old Man’. Wordsworth wrote:
every man must know that an attempt is rarely made to communicate impassioned feelings without something of an accompanying consciousness of the inadequateness of our own powers, or the deficiencies of language. During such efforts there will be a craving in the mind, and as long as it is unsatisfied the speaker will cling to the same words, or words of the same character.78
Thomas spelt out the powerful effects of a deep unself-conscious engagement with the environment in ‘The Mill-Pond’ and ‘The Brook’. While the adult narrators observe and muse on the natural scene, the younger voices unexpectedly translate that scene into speech. These poems echo and reflect on Wordsworth’s illustration in ‘The Prelude’ of the nourishing effect of ‘spots of time’ in his description of a girl carrying a pitcher.79 However, Thomas’s poems demonstrate a sharper effect in which the voices of young girls shatter adult perceptions. In ‘The Mill-Pond’, when the girl speaks, interrupting the narrator’s three stanzas of physical description, she startles him. In ‘The Brook’, the adult voice muses on the brook, the child’s play in it and the ‘fir-tree-covered barrow on the heath’, but eventually acknowledges the superior success of the child as articulator of the natural scene and of the emotions of those inhabiting it:
And then the child’s voice raised the dead.
‘No one’s been here before’ was what she said
And what I felt, yet never should have found
A word for, while I gathered sight and sound. (p. 97)
Woolf, like Thomas, also dealt with sounds and voices integral to the environment rather than distanced from it. In her case the catalysts were the calls of animals and the sounds of the natural environment. Between the Acts describes an interruption of the performance of an outdoor play: ‘Then the wind rose, and in the rustle of the leaves even the great words became inaudible; and the audience sat staring at the villagers, whose mouths opened, but no sound came.’80 The interrupted human speech is then followed by the bellowing of cows, as if in continuation.
Thomas’s ‘The Mountain Chapel’ compares the human voice to the natural sound of the wind. The wind is unequivocally more powerful, more overwhelming and ultimately more lasting:
The eternal noise
