Wind’, acts as a buffer between man and what remains inarticulate. Birdsong is presented as superior to human attempts at articulation of what is ‘bodiless’ (p. 55). This pre-empts the later celebration in ‘The Word’, composed on 5 July 1915, of the ‘pure thrush word’ (p. 93). In ‘The Unknown Bird’, the speaker admires the bird’s song, but is unable to replicate it satisfactorily: ‘that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet’. The poet’s efforts to reproduce the song are limited and second-hand: ‘Nor could I ever make another hear’ and ‘All the proof is – I told men / What I had heard.’ The song and the bird remain ‘wandering beyond my shore’. In contrast, the bird’s song is successful in articulating, or being, ‘bodiless’. The poem therefore celebrates birdsong’s unreproduceability, evoking the peripheral quality of the experience of listening to such song, just beyond the ‘shore’. It explores and articulates not the song, but the distance between that song and human language, and the possibility of connection between the two. Such writing as this shows the importance for Thomas of an indirect approach. Instead of attempting to reiterate mechanically and monotonously the bird’s notes, which in ‘Insomnia’ seem to describe not only the robin’s song but the would-be poet’s failed attempts to reproduce it, this passage in ‘Insomnia’ does not strain to complete the process but focuses on that process, the attempt itself. Interestingly, although the approach to composition recorded in ‘Insomnia’ is direct, the importance of an indirect approach to song and poetry is implicit in the tangential appearance of the account of poetic composition. The body of the essay is devoted to the narrator’s struggles to sleep. The truncated process of attempting to compose lines and rhymes of a poem, linked with the experience of birdsong and other sounds from the external environment, is recorded only in the last few paragraphs, which finally revert once again to the topic of insomnia.
An emphasis on process also informs ‘I never saw that land before’, composed on 5 May 1916:
if I could sing
What would not even whisper my soul
As I went on my journeying.
I should use, as the trees and birds did,
A language not to be betrayed;
And what was hid should still be hid (p. 120)
The conditional ‘if I could’ not only reinforces the difficulty of attempts to reproduce the environment in language but the difficulty of reproducing the language that is written into the environment. The poem focuses on the attempt rather than its successful conclusion. The use of the conditional signals incompleteness, and the impossibility of completion. The emphasis necessarily remains on the process of articulating or describing the environment. This process is one that cannot be totally successful.
Thomas’s explorations of birdsong and its connection with human language and poetry were strongly influenced by W. H. Hudson’s work, and in particular Hudson’s bird-girl in the novel Green Mansions.56 Thomas admired Hudson highly: ‘Except William Morris, there is no other man I would sometimes like to have been, no other writing man’ and he described Green Mansions as ‘one of the noblest pieces of self-expression’.57
Hudson’s bird-girl can communicate with birds as well as people. Hudson named her Rima. The evocation in this name of ‘rhyme’ suggests the high value Hudson placed on the power of poetry as a means of connecting with the environment. In his Green Mansions review, Thomas emphasized the power of communication that Rima possesses: ‘her singing was a mode of expression which Nature had taught her. It was attuned to the voices of animals and birds and waters and winds among the leaves; it was more a universal language than Latin or English.’ In the novel, however, the close connection she enjoys with birdsong is contrasted with her uneasy relationship with humans and the human voice. Unlike the facility with which she communicates with her natural environment, Rima finds communication with human beings limited and unsatisfactory. Returning from a venture out of her forest habitat into the world of men, she is fatally silenced, implying a doubt, on Hudson’s part, as to how far the environment, represented by birdsong, could be connected, or translated, into human speech or poetry.
Thomas explored the issues raised by Green Mansions in a description of a woman in his prose piece, ‘A Group of Statuary’, first published in Light and Twilight in 1910. As if echoing Hudson, Thomas referred to birdsong in this piece as a way of articulating the uneasy relationship between the human voice and, by implication, the woman who possesses that voice, and her environment. She is ‘a lovely woman living among mountain lakes’, whose eyes ‘were like wild-voiced nightingales in their silence’, a silence imposed upon them by their present ‘imprisonment’ in the urban ‘cage’ of London.58 Like Rima, Thomas’s woman also appears to have been silenced. Her impoverished existence in an urban setting is emphasized. Her overlooked status is highlighted with the image of a statue: ‘no one notices the statuary of London’. Her fate as a forgotten or overlooked figure is re-enacted when an image of her eyes speaking like nightingales is continued with the words ‘but in this cage …’.59 The ellipses imply silence, although it remains uncertain whether the woman’s divorce from her environment results in a loss of the power to articulate or to be heard. This suggests another important feature in Thomas’s explorations of the composing process – the relation of the progressing poem not only to its human maker but to its potential listener or reader.
[The Forest miners] singing their yearning hymns through the dark, wet woods on their way home.
Dennis Potter1
In Thomas’s writings he alluded to a language of the physical environment, an anonymous language residing in features of the land or in the birdsong that emanates from it. He repeatedly examined the distance between this language and contemporary human forms of articulation like human song, speech or poetry. However, he also used oral tradition to link the language inscribed in or expressed by the physical environment to the written text of poetry. Such language of oral tradition is a near cousin to the language of the land, sharing its quality of anonymity, distanced from it only relatively recently, and holding within it records of the land, as Thomas made clear in his preface to the retold legends in Norse Tales (1912):
These stories are taken from poems in the Old Norse tongue. The stories, created in the ninth and tenth centuries, remain in touch with ancient pagan traditions. Their names have been lost, their poems confused and mutilated, in the course of a thousand years. Even the land where they wrote is unknown, and scholars have tried to discover it from the nature of the landscape and the conditions of life mentioned in the poems.2
This link with the land helps explain the power Thomas saw imbued in oral tradition, positing it as a key to the invigoration of imaginative writing in his time:
I cannot help wondering whether the great work done in the last century and a half towards the recovery of old ballads in their integrity will have any effect … Can it possibly give a vigorous impulse to a new school of poetry that shall treat the life of our time and what in past times has most meaning for us as freshly as those ballads did the life of their time? It is possible; … their style is commonly so beautiful, their pathos so natural, their observations of life so fresh, so fond of particular detail – its very lists of names being at times real poetry.3
Thomas’s early championing of the poet W. H. Davies was closely connected with his sense of the importance of oral tradition to poetry. His first review of Davies, in 1905, highly favourable, was given the
