poem. In each case he observed that the poem was composed in transit and, apart from once, when the note does not specify the destination, he recorded that he was ‘going home’ or ‘coming home’, mainly from military camp.
Early versions of ‘Liberty’ and ‘Rain’ are among the drafts including indications of composing conditions. Both poems focus on solitude, loneliness and homelessness, at night, the time when Thomas often travelled. Other poems refer to a longing for home. ‘No one so much as you’ suggests separation from home in its emphasis on the distance in an apparently close relationship. ‘I never saw that land before’ describes a search for, and loss of, an ideal home: ‘some goal / I touched then’, and ‘Some eyes condemn’, written eight or nine days later, echoes this in ‘I had not found my goal’ (pp. 120, 121). ‘What will they do?’ revolves around the sense of a lost home, while ‘The Sheiling’ celebrates the discovery of a spiritual home. In the case of ‘The Sheiling’, the composition process begins while ‘travelling back from Gordon Bottomley’s (Silverdale)’, a spiritual home or place of sanctuary for Thomas, as the poem’s content declares.
‘Some eyes condemn’ and ‘What will they do?’ reflect physical conditions particular to train journeys. The traveller, stationary in a moving vehicle, watches through the window people apparently moving away from him. In ‘Some eyes condemn’, composed in Hare Hall military camp, ‘Hare Hall & train’, the speaker appears passive, while the ‘eyes’ he observes move restlessly, the movement emphasized by a twisting enjambement:
Others, too, I have seen rest, question, roll,
Dance, shoot. And many I have loved watching. Some
I could not take my eyes from till they turned
And loving died. I had not found my goal. (p. 121)
A draft of ‘What will they do?’ includes the note ‘going home to Steep’. The speaker’s observations in this poem also suggest a position behind a glass window, echoing the conditions of composition on a long, slow train journey:
I have but seen them in the loud street pass;
And I was naught to them. I turned about
To see them disappearing carelessly. (p. 133)
Physical conditions of composition have a strong effect on ‘The Lofty Sky’, composed while Thomas was confined inside at home with an injured ankle. On the same day that ‘The Lofty Sky’ was composed, Thomas wrote, ‘I am downstairs but worse off because I know how helpless I still am. I can only hop.’20 Confinement and the desire to escape it form the subject of ‘The Lofty Sky’, which focuses on the outdoor environment to which the poet and speaker are denied access.
Coleridge’s ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’ was composed under similar restraints. In his chapter on Coleridge in A Literary Pilgrim in England, written the summer before the composition of ‘The Lofty Sky’, Thomas clearly linked Coleridge’s completed poem to its conditions of composition, observing how Coleridge,
disabled from walking, sat in ‘this lime-tree bower my prison,’ and followed in imagination the walk which his friends were taking, and wrote a poem on it, half ‘gloomy-pampered’ at his deprivation, half happy both with what he imagined and with the trees of his prison.21
The echo of ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’ in ‘The Lofty Sky’ indicates another condition of composition: the strong influence of the Romantic legacy on Thomas as poet and critic. His admiration for Coleridge in particular was unequivocal. For Thomas, the Biographia Literaria contained ‘the most profound literary criticism which has so far been written in English. His [Coleridge’s] scattered pages on poetic diction, due to his disagreement with Wordsworth’s theory, are all that can at present form the basis of any true criticism of Poetry.’22
‘Words’ is another poem directly affected by its physical conditions of composition. Thomas’s letters reveal that it was composed on a bicycle, scribbled on various ‘scraps’ at intervals on a cycling trip up and down the steep hills of Gloucestershire.23 This external environment is reflected in the content, form and rhythm of the poem. In ‘“The shape of the sentences”: Edward Thomas’s tracks in contemporary poetry’, Lucy Newlyn points out that the shape of ‘Words’, formed from a series of very short lines, is recognizably that of a long, thin path, a visual form also used in Henry Thoreau’s ‘The Old Marlborough Road’, a poem Thomas knew.24 The typical short up-down rhythm created by cycling also has a partner in the accumulation of brief phrases that make up the short lines of ‘Words’. More pragmatically, short lines are easier to hold in the head, which is helpful when composing while cycling.
Earlier in the same essay, Newlyn observes how the rhythm of Thomas’s writing on walking reflects his tendency to navigate away from prescribed pathways. His sentences ‘follow an easy, meandering pattern, accommodating obstacles and pauses, as well as distractions en route’. She refers to ‘Thomas’s development of a “pedestrian” prose style – one that explored the three-way connection between walking, talking, and sentence structure’, and discusses in detail the way Thomas’s skilful use of complicated sentence structure in ‘Women he liked’ forces readers to re-trace their steps in an effort to disentangle the sentence, the process enacted being ‘remarkably like a walk that ends in a clearing – one of Thomas’s favourite experiences’.25
Thomas showed acute awareness of how physical conditions impinge on composition in his introduction to George Borrow’s Zincali. Zincali was ‘written, as he [Borrow] tells us, chiefly at Spanish inns during his journeys’, and Borrow’s subsequently published letters from Spain,
which formed the basis for a great part of The Bible in Spain, show us that he wrote his portly but vigorous prose fresh from the saddle and from the scenes depicted; and upon some of these letters or the journals, their sources, he drew for the earlier book.26
In his critical biography of Borrow, Thomas measured the success of The Bible in Spain by its ability to conjure up the environment and conditions in which it was written. He praised the book for being ‘just as fresh as the letters’.27
Thomas did not always take notes with particular pieces of writing in mind. He often discovered composition subjects when re-reading his notes, writing in 1903 that ‘I sit down with my abundant notebooks and find a subject or an apparently suggestive sentence.’28 At the point of making those notes, he was unaware of the eventual creative form or forms that they would take. Similarly, some initial prose versions of his mature poems exist in texts written long before he conceived of himself as a poet and before he worked them into a poetic form.29
Other details of the conditions of composing indicate the unplanned onset of that process. Thomas wrote ‘Words’ on whatever scraps of paper he could find. This resulted in ‘2 lines that got left out owing to the scraps I wrote on as I travelled’.30 His lack of appropriate writing material suggests the unexpected advent of the composing process. He did not choose the moment of composition but was instead compelled to write, despite unfavourable conditions. The poem hijacked the poet.
The content of ‘Words’ reflects the unplanned onset of its composing process. Words choose the poet, or to be more precise, the poet pleads with words to choose him, placing himself at their mercy:
Choose me,
You English words? (p. 92)
Similarly, the very short lines in ‘Words’ suggest uncertainty and a lack of preparedness, echoed in the way the lines break across
