And saying still:‘’Tis but a moment since man’s birth
And in another moment more
Man lies in earth
For ever; but I am the same
Now, and shall be, even as I was
Before he came;
Till there is nothing I shall be.’ (pp. 43–4)
In ‘The Word’, a poem meditating on the elusiveness of words and names, ‘There are so many things I have forgot’, the speaker’s thoughts are interrupted by ‘a pure thrush word’. This interruption is unexpected and sudden, ‘cried out to me’ from the bushes. Intellectual and articulated thought is contrasted with physical and sensuous experience. The bird call, too, is sudden but also confirming, occurring, significantly, when the speaker is focusing not on intellectual thought but on how the physical experience of scents evokes ‘food’ and ‘memory’. In contrast to the speaker’s convoluted lists of lost or forgotten names, the bird call or ‘word’ is ‘empty’, ‘thingless’ and ‘pure’. Not only is this particular name remembered even as the speaker cannot articulate it, but it completes and rounds off the poem:
the name, only the name I hear.
While perhaps I am thinking of the elder scent
That is like food, or while I am content
With the wild rose scent that is like memory,
This name suddenly is cried out to me
From somewhere in the bushes by a bird
Over and over again, a pure thrush word. (p. 93)
These voices from the natural world or from children raise rather than destroy the dead. They are ‘empty’ as Thomas described it in ‘The Word’. They speak without risking the dangers of appropriation that Woolf identified in ‘Anon’ in her reference to Caxton fixing ‘the voice of Anon for ever’.81
Between the Acts presents a gentler relationship between the sound of the wind and the cows and human efforts at articulation in an outdoor pageant. Although the play is interrupted by these sounds from nature, it picks up again after their cessation. Once the cows have bellowed, they ‘lowered their heads, and began browsing’ and the play moves on.82 The temporary interruption of the performance by sounds from nature augments that performance, as the play interacts with and becomes more integrally connected with its physical setting. Cows, actors, director and audience all form part of the play experience, although the cows remain unaware of their contribution while the actors and director expend deliberate human effort, and the audience strains to interpret what is seen and heard.
Similar contrast is evident in ‘The Mill-Pond’ and ‘The Brook’ (pp. 56, 97). Both poems open with the narrator very deliberately watching and describing the scene, collecting rather than participating in what ‘The Brook’ terms the ‘sight and sound’ surrounding him. In contrast, the child and girl, like Woolf’s wind and cows, are much more part of the land. In ‘The Brook’, the child paddles in the water. In ‘The Mill-Pond’, the narrator puts his feet near the water, but does not enter: ‘my feet dangling teased the foam / That slid below’. At this point of not entering the water, isolating himself from his physical environment, a girl, dressed in white, perhaps implying a relation between her communion with the land and innocence, is introduced with the words ‘came out’. It is as if she issues directly out of the landscape, like the ‘thrush word’ in ‘The Word’ out of ‘somewhere in the bushes’ (p. 93), or Wordsworth’s woman in ‘The Thorn’, initially seen as a ‘jutting crag’ and only then as ‘[a] Woman seated on the ground’.83
However, unlike Wordsworth’s characters, Thomas’s children and Woolf’s sounds of nature more evidently invade or interrupt the worlds of their detached narrators, actively engaging with or confronting them, often violently and unexpectedly. The rising wind and bellowing cows in Woolf’s novel drown out the actors’ words. In ‘The Brook’, the child’s sudden speech ‘raised the dead’ (p. 97). The speaker’s surprise in ‘The Mill-Pond’ at the girl’s voice soon turns to anger and, as if in response to this building tension, a storm bursts forth in the natural world (p. 56).
The girl’s ambiguous warning ‘Take care!’ in ‘The Mill-Pond’ demonstrates the power of this voice of the land. Her words herald the storm while advising the narrator of the need for caution and shelter. They also highlight the narrator’s situation, poised on the brink, risking either alienation as a detached spectator, or loss of individuality if he should absorb himself in the landscape by dipping his feet in the dangerous mill-water. For the narrator, the land remains both a landscape viewed from a distance and a world that can harm and hurt. For the girl, the landscape is land, a place she inhabits and of which she is part, the power of her words residing in her unself-conscious position within this world.
BEGINNING AGAIN: WITH THE LANGUAGE OF THE LAND
Nature, that universal and publick Manuscript that lies expanded unto the Eyes of all.
Thomas Browne84
In ‘The Brook’ and ‘The Mill-Pond’, the narrator’s self-conscious attempts at articulation divide him from the pre-linguistic experience he wishes to articulate. Thomas’s writings suggest that poetry and the vernacular emerge without design from that pre-linguistic experience, emphasizing the importance of habitation or deep occupation of the land. He teased these ideas out in more depth in a review of an Australian poetry collection, arguing that the environment, in as much as it represents the past, is a crucial source of poetry:
A race hardly develops a genuine poetry more rapidly than an oak achieves full maturity. Poetry is a natural growth, having more than a superficial relation to roses and trees and hills. However airy and graceful it may be in foliage and flower, it has roots deep in a substantial past. It springs apparently from an occupation of the land, from long, busy, and quiet tracts of time, wherein a man or a nation may find its own soul. To have a future, it must have had a past.85
The Australian poet, Thomas continued, ‘is akin to the old ballad singers. He cannot tear the heart out of the mystery of the new lands, but he leads us up to the mystery, and we experience it.’ The poet is an interpreter of the land, described as ‘new’ in this review, in a reflection of the colonial attitude to early twentieth-century Australia.
A few years later, in The South Country, Thomas talked more literally of the land as possessing language: ‘If we but knew or cared, every swelling of the grass, every wavering line of hedge or path or road were an inscription, brief as an epitaph’.86 Hans Ulrich Seeber observes how in ‘Haymaking’, ‘February Afternoon’, ‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)’ and ‘Swedes’, Thomas ‘sees and reads the surface of English landscape and country life as a storehouse of memories; he transforms it into a text’.87 Although features of landscape do not form words, they speak a language to those who can read it. The first lines of ‘November’ represent such an attempt, evoking the land’s condition at a particular time of year by reading the marks left on it by living beings:
the paths
With morning and evening hobnails dinted,
With foot and wing-tip overprinted
Or separately charactered,
