edna longley
which ‘A mighty fountain momently was forced’, and also the sacred river’s ‘mazy
motion’.^23 Thomasblends these ‘waters’ with Coleridge’s ‘voices prophesying war’:
‘So by the roar and hiss|And by the mighty motion of the abyss|Iwasbemused,
that I forgot my friend.’ The dreamer awakes, ‘Saying: ‘‘I shall be here some day
again’’ ’.
A second pair of poems, ‘Haymaking’ and ‘The Mill-Water’, move from quint-
essential pastoral to pastoral’s negation. As ‘Haymaking’ reflects on constructions
of rural life, including its own, Thomas reaches back through English literary and
visual traditions to agricultural origins:
All was old,
This morning time, with a great age untold,
Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome,
Than, at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home,
A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.
Under the heavens that know not what years be
The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements
Uttered even what they will in times far hence—
All of us gone out of the reach of change—
Immortal in a picture of an old grange.^24Another ambiguous ending faces into history. ‘Immortal’ and ‘out of the reach
of change’ subliminally suggest that what the poem ‘utters’ or ‘pictures’ could
represent the last of—not only English—pastoral. In ‘The Mill-Water’ the word
‘changelessly’ obliterates mankind. A site of rural dereliction, which also encodes
wartime depopulation, has been taken over by wild nature. Uncontrolled water
marks the absence of cultivation, cognition, and utterance: ‘All thoughts begin
or end upon this sound,||Only the idle foam|Of water falling|Changelessly
calling,|Where once men had a work-place and a home.’^25
First World War pastoral does more than ‘hint by antithesis at the indescribable’,
to quote Fussell. The process may work the other way: the interruption may
define the georgic. As the founding poetry of civilization, pastoral potentially
clarifies what the ‘indescribable’ throws into question: ‘a work-place and a home’.
The most interesting patriotic pastorals are predicated on a distinction between
official ‘England’, British war aims or war conduct, and a felt relation to specific
countryside. One of Charles Sorley’s sonnets hauntingly equates war with the
Wiltshire uplands: ‘A homeless land and friendless, but a land|I did not know and
that I wished to know.’^26 Thomas writes more positively: ‘Something, I felt, had
to be done before I could look again composedly at English landscape, at the elms
(^23) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’, inSamuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 102–4.
(^24) Thomas, ‘Haymaking’, inCollected Poems, 82. (^25) Thomas, ‘The Mill-Water’, ibid. 85–6.
(^26) Charles Sorley, ‘Two Sonnets’, inThe Collected Poems of Charles Hamilton Sorley,ed.Jean
Moorcroft Wilson (London: Cecil Woolf, 1985), 87.