which means that they have recently returned from winter in southern
Europe, so evidently the one nationality he shares with them is not
restricted to a single place. In fact, Thomas’s ‘Home’ is a place of
unresolvable contraries: the mist is ‘familiar [.. .] and strange / Yet with
no bar’, the labourer’s cottage is ‘dark white’, he walks ‘half with weariness
half with ease’, and his sound ‘rounded all / That silence said’. Thomas’s
poems are so often situated at transition points – at crossroads, bridges,
dawn, twilight, between winter and spring or rain and sun, pausing at
doorways – because ecstasy’s placelessness belongs neither to one world
nor the other. The ecstatic moment in ‘The Lane’ is described as ‘a kind
of spring’, but then ‘for heat it is like summer too’, and yet ‘this might be
winter’s quiet’. The dark hollies ‘glint’, the inaudible harebells ‘ring’, until
‘little I know / Or heed if time be still the same, until / The lane ends and
once more all is the same’: the repeated ‘same’ suggesting simultaneously a
return to everyday flatness and, grammatically, that the ecstasy is always
continuing.
Of course, these situations of betweenness, belonging to neither and
both at once, are the counterparts of his contrary emotional situation of
‘both tears and mirth’ (‘Liberty’). The thought occurs in ‘The Wind’s
Song’ that
There could be no old song so sad
As the wind’s song; but later none so glad
Could I remember as that same wind’s song.Thomas’s cross-hatched emotions refuse the either/or that diagnosis
demands:
But if this be not happiness, who knows?
Some day I shall think this a happy day,
And this mood by the name of melancholy
Shall no more blackened and obscured be.(‘October’)
The philosophic Thomas-double inThe Icknield Way, the book that
immediately preceded ‘Ecstasy’, cannot decide whether he belongs ‘half to
happiness and half to melancholy, or [whether] to cross out one or the
other of these headings as being in his case tautogical’.^50 His double
appears in ‘The Chalk-Pit’:
At orts and crosses Pleasure and Pain had played
On his brown features; – I think both had lost; –
Mild and yet wild too.90 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism