context, in this case on an inn wall.19
Other evidence of Thomas’s propensity for poetry closely related to oral tradition, and his belief in its absolute appropriateness to his time and poetic language, is located in his descriptions of Davies’s poems as ‘simple, instantaneous and new, recalling older poets chiefly by their perfection’; de la Mare’s song-like Peacock Pie, which gave him ‘perfect pleasure’;20 and his heralding of Frost’s North of Boston as ‘one of the most revolutionary books of modern times’ because it went ‘back, through the paraphernalia of poetry into poetry again’.21
Yeats expressed similar sentiments in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, pointedly snubbing the Victorian tradition as he traced the ancestry of the successful modern lyric:
During the first years of the century the best known [poets] were celebrators of the country-side or of the life of ships; I think of Davies and of Masefield; some few wrote in the manner of the traditional country ballad … [and] De la Mare short lyrics that carry us back through Christabel or Kubla Khan.22
Thomas internalized his own criticism of contemporary poetry. In May 1914, he wrote to Frost of wanting ‘to begin over again with them [his ideas about speech and literature] & wring the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’.23 Like Yeats in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Thomas evoked Verlaine, alluding to his expression ‘Take eloquence and break its neck’.24 In typical Thomas fashion, he inserted the image of a domiciled farmyard bird with a notoriously unmelodic call, a stark contrast to the wild song of the untamed bird. In order to ‘begin over again’, Thomas was turning to the unwritten vernacular of popular songs and proverbs, and the calls or song of wild birds in their natural environment: such songs as the dawn chorus recorded in ‘Insomnia’. For him, the sounds and rhythms of this environment and the vernacular formed the crucial preconditions of the composing process.
However, if Thomas saw creative writing as emerging from the natural physical environment, he also recognized the difficulties he and his contemporaries had in connecting with such pre-conditions of composition in the domiciled or urbanized settings of early twentieth-century towns. He often described himself as alienated from both wild birdsong and the vernacular: born in the suburbs of London, cut off from the rural countryside and from the vernacular of his indigenous Welsh roots. He borrowed the term ‘superfluous men’ from Turgenev to express this.25 He praised Turgenev’s novels and stories for the high value placed on the vernacular: ‘He sends us continually out into the fields and the streets to men and women, reminding us that not long ago the ordinary man was discovered, and that he is great’, and a passage from Memoirs of a Sportsman, in which Turgenev explored man’s desire to merge with the environment in images of woods as sea inhabited by fish, became a source of two Thomas poems:
’Tis a wonderfully agreeable occupation, to lie on one’s back in the forest, and stare upward! It seems to you as though you were gazing into a bottomless sea, that it spreads broadly beneath you, that the trees do not rise out of the earth, but, like the roots of huge plants, descend, hang suspended, in those crystal-clear waves; the leaves on the trees now are of translucent emerald, again thicken into golden, almost black green. Somewhere, far away, terminating a slender branch, a separate leaf stands motionless against the blue patch of transparent sky, and by its side sways another, recalling by its movements the play of a fish’s gills26
This image of a fish out of water in a wood reappears in Thomas’s ‘The Lofty Sky’ and ‘The Hollow Wood’, albeit with the introduction of a darker side. ‘The Lofty Sky’ includes a sense of imprisonment, as the speaker becomes a fish looking up through the sea of trees, desiring to escape and reach the surface ‘where the lilies are’ (p. 53). ‘The Hollow Wood’, written a few days earlier, accompanies the image of birds swimming in a dark wood like fish with a sense of mismatch and unhappiness. Their voices are discordant. They do not fit harmoniously with their environment. They ‘laugh and shriek’ in contrast to the bright singing of goldfinch in the light on the ‘thistle-tops’ (p. 48).
Thomas wrote that for Turgenev ‘no sentiment obtrudes … his observation is supreme. There is no greater praise to be given to an imaginative writer than that.’27 This reference to ‘supreme’ observation suggests the way forward for Thomas. Keen attention to features of the environment offers up poetic material. With such an approach, the land becomes a way of connecting with vanishing oral tradition, providing inklings of what has been lost.
BEGINNING AGAIN: VOICING THE LORE
Alec Finlay28
As his brother, Julian Thomas, has reported, Thomas cherished a Wordsworthian ambition to produce ‘prose, as he said to me shortly after he had finished his critical study of Walter Pater, “as near akin as possible to the talk of a Surrey peasant”’.29 This concern stemmed from Thomas’s acute awareness of the fragility of vernacular knowledge, hovering on the edge of extinction. It was present in his writing as early as 1895 in the essay, ‘Dad’, where he described an old countryman:
He certainly had no intention of allowing the old lore concerning herbs to die out. Dried specimens of any sort were always kept by him and roots of many more. Such knowledge as he was full of is fast decaying.30
The Norse Tales preface highlights the precarious existence of one form of vernacular knowledge, orally transmitted stories. The names of the storytellers ‘have been lost’; the surviving creative works are ‘confused and mutilated’. Their geographical sources too are ‘unknown’ and, by implication, also ‘lost’ or ‘mutilated’. Such stories remain in touch with an ancient tradition, with creators who were ‘for the most part Christians, living in the ninth and tenth centuries amidst a still keen aroma and tradition of Paganism’.31 This hint of antiquity coupled with their existence on the border of extinction contributed to their value for Thomas. In his ‘Note on sources’ in Celtic Stories, written a year earlier than Norse Tales, he declared: ‘it is one of the charms under the surface of these stories that we can feel, even if we can never trace, a pedigree of dimmest antiquity behind them’.32
The Norse Tales preface describes how such stories are handed down: ‘gradually collected and paraphrased … [t]he different poets tell them in their own ways, one often inventing or presenting scenes and characters incompatible with those in another’s poem’.33 These words, which could apply to Thomas’s activity compiling Celtic Stories and Norse Tales, suggest that he saw the task of compilers, editors and rewriters of old tales, preserving and reclaiming oral traditions, to be also part of oral tradition.
In his later series of reviews of reprints and anthologies, published in Poetry and Drama in 1914, he suggested that anthologies share that role. He defined ‘a genuine anthology, [as being] culled from obscure corners, from magazines, even from manuscripts’ and argued that ‘room should be found for songs, epitaphs, nursery rhymes, popular verse’.34 He took great pains to include the unknown, neglected or hidden in his anthologies. He talked of the need to avoid ‘Golden Treasury obviousness’ in The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air and celebrated the discovery of hitherto unprinted unknown material:
3 jolly unpublished sailors’ songs for the Anthology: also 2 little known songs from The Compleat Angler … But in my endeavour to keep clear of what Lucas & other open air anthologists have used I daresay my poetry is not all good & not all popular enough35
Similarly, the Pocket Book ‘Note by the compiler’ emphasizes the oral sources of the songs: ‘These Westmorland songs have, I think, never been published
