occurred in late 1913 affects the commonly accepted view that his attempts at mature poetry were largely instigated by Robert Frost in the summer of 1914. Instead, it acknowledges the contributory influence on Thomas of other poet friends, such as de la Mare.
In a letter to W. H. Hudson, Thomas named November 1914 as a start date for his mature poetic compositions. He appeared to have forgotten or to discount his earlier failed experience of poetic composition, writing of his first successfully completed poems that they had
all been written since November [1914]. I had done no verses before and did not expect to and merely became nervous when I thought of beginning. But when it came to beginning I slipped into it naturally whatever the results.41
The unsuccessful attempt recorded in ‘Insomnia’ and the de la Mare letter has been relegated to an experience of feeling ‘nervous when I thought of beginning’. This dismissive reference, however, was written in 1915 after Thomas had successfully completed many poems. The 1913 letter to de la Mare, written before Thomas’s poetry had begun to flow, records in detail the earlier attempt at poetic composition, suggesting that at the time he saw it as highly significant.
A second indication of Thomas’s awareness of the significance of this attempt lies in his decision to communicate it to de la Mare. He held de la Mare in very high regard, particularly esteeming his poetry collection Peacock Pie, which he was reading in the summer of 1913, and later rated him ‘second [to Frost] among all living poets’.42 Thomas had long been in the habit of sharing his writing ideas with de la Mare. They worked closely on creative compositions, de la Mare sending Thomas his own poetry for comments and advice. Theresa Whistler records how they agreed to write stories on the same topic of time, Thomas publishing his story in 1911 and de la Mare writing his in 1917.43 They shared creative material, such as accounts of dreams, a frequent source of creativity for de la Mare, and also for Thomas, as his 1915 poem ‘A Dream’ bears witness. A 29 March 1911 letter to de la Mare, describing a dream, concludes with the words ‘this is my copyright’, showing a keen awareness in Thomas of the potential of dreams as creative material.44
Although in 1913 Thomas was in awe of de la Mare’s poetic gift, in the following approximation of the spacing in the handwriting of the September 1913 letter, Thomas described his friend, in a rephrasing of Pope’s words, as one of those
mob of gentlemen that rhyme
with ease. 45
The word ‘rhyme’ is Thomas’s choice, not Pope’s, and the idiosyncratically spaced handwriting emphasizes this word, as does its position at the end of the line. The spacing frames, and therefore isolates, the word ‘gentlemen’, which, presented thus, suggests an apparently select group of poets, a group from which Thomas excluded himself.46
Previously, this sense of exclusion as a writer was very strong in Thomas. In 1909 he wrote to Bottomley: ‘By comparison with others that I know – like de la Mare – I seem essentially like the other men in the train & I should like not to be.’47 However, by 1913, Thomas’s view of himself had changed subtly. He showed greater confidence in his writing abilities, as indicated by the fact that he replaced Pope’s ‘wrote’ with ‘rhyme’, suggesting awareness of his own possible gift as poet. Also, these lines denigrate not Thomas but the ‘mob of gentlemen’. Thomas’s exclusion has become a position of choice, not regret. The ‘ease’ with which the ‘mob of gentlemen’, poets such as de la Mare, ‘rhyme’ is perhaps too easy and not altogether admirable. This emphasis on subtlety in rhyming manifested just over a year later in reference to Thomas’s poetry, when he discussed the rhymes of ‘inlaid’ and ‘played’ in his poem ‘After Rain’ (p. 38) with Farjeon, allowing them to stay because ‘neither is a rhyme word only’.48
Thomas’s awareness of the significance of his early attempt at composing poetry is also indicated in the graphology and layout of the letter. He placed brackets around the words ‘for the first time’. The positioning of ‘trying’ at the end of the page delays the crucial word ‘rhyme’ – which, significantly, rhymes with ‘the first time’ – to the following sheet of the letter. The result is an emphasis on the difficulty of this attempt at poetic composition. The dramatic delay of this first mention of ‘rhyme’ is also strengthened by the fact that when it finally appears, it is underlined:
I found
myself (for the first time) trying
[new page]
hard to rhyme my mood &
failing very badly indeed, in
fact comically so,
As if to reiterate the importance of this attempt, both uses of the word ‘rhyme’ in the letter occur in emphatic positions, either at the end of a line or underlined near the start of a new page. This stress on the difficulty in rhyming ‘with ease’ also points the way to later daring experiments with the loosened, and therefore uneasy, rhyme schemes.
The account of the would-be poetic attempt in ‘Insomnia’ emphasizes links between the experience of composing and the conditions of composition. It begins with a description of the would-be poet’s experience of the external environment, particularly of the song of a robin:
I strove to escape out of that harmony of bird, wind, and man. But as fast as I made my mind a faintly heaving, shapeless, grey blank, some form or colour appeared; memory or anticipation was at work.
Gradually I found myself trying to understand this dawn harmony. I vowed to remember it and ponder it in the light of day. To make sure of remembering I tried putting it into rhyme.
The narrator’s attempts first to avoid and then to record the birdsong appear to trigger the composing process and also to provide a subject for it. The outcome is only three lines, consisting of
The seventh of September
and
The sere and the ember
Of the year and of me.
Although these lines include references to the season, the date and the speaker of the poem, they omit to mention the birdsong that was their initial impetus. They are as a result completely distanced from the experience of the environment that prompted their inception. Their failure as a poem suggests therefore a possible relation between success in composing and specific reference to the external environment in which the composition occurred. This is borne out by the many successfully completed poems by Thomas, such as ‘Good-night’, ‘It rains’, ‘Words’ and ‘Lights Out’, which contain circumstances of their composition. Long, dark train journeys or hilly cycle rides are indirectly reflected in sentence structure and shape.
IN THE PHYSICAL CONTEXT: THE VERNACULAR OF BIRDSONG
chack, chack –
what a note – what a note!
the sharp wet snap of a pebble on slate:
Geoffrey Winthrop Young49
Birdsong frequently appears in Thomas’s writing. In his growth as a poet, he showed awareness of its importance for poetry as a means of connecting with the environment in which both birdsong and poems are situated and composed or performed. Such awareness is already implicit in ‘Insomnia’, in which the attempt at composition is fired by the sound of birdsong.
However, the later poems indicate a gradual but significant
