british poetry in the age of modernism

this is often taken for Thomas’s own rueful confession of his Balham
roots, yet ‘superfluous’ reappears in 1913 inThe Happy-Go-Lucky-Morgans
(a book which begins ‘my story is of Balham’) as a compliment. It is
applied to Mr Aurelius, the gypsy and ‘the most lightsome of men,’ whose
superfluity to civilisation is itself a warning to society that production
and consumption are not the point. He is the antithesis of productive
work, for as one of Aurelius’s masters said before sacking him, ‘such
people were unnecessary. Nothing could be done with them.’ Aurelius
evades all fixed points, for between his mysterious birth somewhere
‘between the moon and Mercury’ and his perpetual disappearances, we
learn that he has been an under-gardener, bookseller’s assistant, waiter,
commercial traveller and a circus trainer, and ‘everyone thought him a
foreigner’. Mr Aurelius is one of Nature’s ‘by-products,’ created without
intention or reason, and it is hinted he writes poetry; in other words, he is
a fantasy shaped by the self-displacement that became so important to
Thomas’s own writing.^58

self-displacement

It is exactly this desire not to rest in himself, though, that makes Thomas’s
actual poems refuse to sit too comfortably with Borrovian fantasies about
being a brother to tramps and gypsies. We can hear the squeals of
rhetoric’s neck being wrung in ‘The Penny Whistle’, which assembles
its ecstatic ingredients promisingly in the nomadic poor of the charcoal-
burners and a series of dark–light oppositions characteristic of Thomas’s
neither-nor geography:

The new moon hangs like an ivory bugle

In the naked frosty blue;

And the ghylls of the forest, already blackened

By Winter, are blackened anew.

Like so many of Thomas’s mutually contrary situations, the forest,
water and sky are dark against the ivory moon and frosty sparkle. But
when he attempts to draw human beings into this opposition, the tone
becomes more awkward; the phrasemaking of ‘The charcoal-burners are
black, but their linen / Blows white on the line’ tries to raise the poetry
stakes with an echo of Blake’s ‘Little Black Boy’ (‘And I am black / But
oh, my soul is white’). The rather rhetorical inversions of the next couplet
do not help (‘And white the letter the girl is reading / Under that crescent
fine’), and the last stanza admits the game is up:

Edward Thomas in ecstasy 93