as dearAs the earth which you prove
That we love.
Emphasis on uncertainty of cause and outcome is also present in Thomas’s unorthodox use of rhyme and metre. As Ian Sansom suggests in a review of Collected Poems (2004), Thomas’s completed poems tend to reflect the uncertainty accompanying their beginnings:
[M]any of the poems read like echoes of themselves, like broken-up, vaguely blank-verseish prose (and indeed, in many instances, that’s exactly what they are).
If anything explains the continuing appeal of his poems, it’s probably that Thomas seems to have no clear idea of what he’s doing or where’s [sic] he’s going; the effort is all.31
Sansom implies that this uncertainty is unintentional and is linked to an essential lack of clarity in Thomas. However, Thomas’s continued emphasis in poems on beginnings or endings, and on moments that precede or mark the close of a period of articulation, suggest deliberate decision. This is evident in ‘Adlestrop’, where the celebration and analysis of a moment of epiphany is heralded both by a pause in a train’s unscheduled stop and by the regular accompanying litany of sounds. The effect is that of a considered and strong evocation of the moments just before or after an event, such as preparation for speech, cessation of mechanical action and arrival or departure of people:
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. (p. 51)
Thomas’s dealings with contemporaries’ criticism of his poetry similarly show deliberate, intended and knowing striving after uncertainty of effect. The response of Blackwood, one of the first publishers to whom he sent his poetry, was typical of Thomas’s early readers:
The poems are to me somewhat of a puzzle, and I do not think I could venture upon them. They are, however, exceedingly interesting, and I shall be very pleased indeed to consider anything else which Mr Eastaway may write at any time.32
Thomas’s reaction, recorded in a letter to Farjeon, was perceptive and defiant: ‘I suppose Blackwood just thought it looked very much like prose and was puzzled by the fact that it was got up like verse. I only hope the mistake was his and prefer to think it likely.’33 A few weeks later, Thomas wrote,
Did I tell you that I sent Monro a lot of verses in hopes he would make a book of them? Well, he won’t. He doesn’t like them at all. Nor does Ellis – he says their rhythm isn’t obvious enough. I am busy consoling myself. I am not in the least influenced by such things: but one requires readjustment.34
These reactions to negative criticism of his poetry show Thomas resisting, despite his acute sensitivity to the reception of his poems, the pressure to make them and their rhythms more ‘obvious’ or certain. He rarely bowed to a plea for more clarity. The compromise he reached in ‘Digging (“What matter makes my spade”)’ is unusual: ‘I have a laugh at you for not detecting the rhyme of soldier and bear. However to please you I bring the rhyme nearer.’35 Most often he seemed bent on widening the gap between his work and conventional expectations of rhythm and rhyme, as if celebrating the ambiguous inception of this work, which remained beyond his control, dependent on the physical environment in which he happened to be placed.
IN THE PHYSICAL CONTEXT: THOMAS ON HOW HIS POEMS EMERGE
I need to be in a position to write when writing comes.
Carol Ann Duffy36
Thomas’s poems and their composing processes have an unplanned air, an air he courted and fostered, as suggested in his references to his habit of note-taking. He stressed the primacy of the environment and its role in dictating the form and style of notes made within it. The notes were written as responses, and he re-read them because of their ability to evoke the environment. This allowed him to write further and produce a completed creative piece. Their main purpose is revealed in his lament: ‘One little note used to recall to me much of the glory or joy of former days out of doors. Now it is barren.’37
Thomas’s words suggest that he saw the beginnings of the composing process as lying in the experience of the environment, not in notes on it. He was moving towards the extreme claim that human language has developed from man’s relation with his environment and depends upon that relationship. In terms of poetic composition, this implies that the composing process commences with the poet’s interaction with the environment. In ‘Reading out of doors’, he developed this idea, tentatively positing not man but the environment as the initiator of the creative process:
I have ever found that my own thoughts, or those which the landscape and the air thought for me, were far beyond the range of such as they [Spenser, Wordsworth, Thoreau]. There is more wisdom in the amber maple leaf or the poise of a butterfly or the silence of a league of oaks than in all the poems of Wordsworth.38
This passage implies that the ‘landscape and the air’ are not merely conditions existing before language and from which language springs. They offer the first moments of the creation of that language. To some degree they write the creative work that follows, thinking the writer’s thoughts for him with a ‘wisdom’ to be favoured over that in a Wordsworth poem, the writer’s role in this process being that of amanuensis.
If, as Thomas suggested, the composition processes begin in the environment, then further examination of such processes necessarily entails focus upon experience of the environment. This is exactly what happens in his account of poetic composition in the essay ‘Insomnia’.
Comparison with a letter Thomas wrote to Walter de la Mare in 1913 makes clear that the account of composing in ‘Insomnia’ is to a great degree autobiographical. It matches detail for detail the description of attempted poetry composition in the de la Mare letter.39 In both, the speaker is a ‘non-poet’ who, suffering insomnia, finds himself trying to write a poem that reflects his mood. Failing to complete the first verse, he remains plagued by the rhyme of ‘ember’ and ‘September’.40
The significance of ‘Insomnia’ to Thomas’s composition processes and to a more accurate understanding of the chronology of those processes is so crucial that it will be examined from several angles in the course of this book. It is worth therefore spending some time detailing the conditions and date of composition of this essay.
Most critics and biographers of Thomas date the inception of his mature poetry to late 1914. However, an examination of the accounts of composing in ‘Insomnia’ and the related letter to de la Mare point to an earlier start date for his first mature attempt at poetry. This is an incomplete attempt since the poet gives up after three lines. Nevertheless, it comprises a highly significant record of his first moments of poetic composition.
The exact date of ‘Insomnia’ remains unknown. However, it can be assumed that it was written after the de la Mare letter, since the letter contains the germ of the essay. The letter, although undated, was almost certainly written in the later months of 1913. Penned on notepaper headed ‘Selsfield House’, it has been filed in the Bodleian manuscripts between letters dated end of October 1913 and 2 January 1914, a period when Thomas was staying at Selsfield House. However, a much more likely date lies between 5 and 13 September 1913, since both letter and essay refer to the month of September, and letters to Farjeon confirm that Thomas was also staying at Selsfield House at this time. Discussion in the de la Mare letter of Thomas’s arrangements to meet de la Mare suggest it was written on Sunday, 7 September, the date mentioned at the end of ‘Insomnia’: ‘And so I fell asleep
