And her brother who hides apart in a thicket,
Slowly and surely playing
On a whistle an olden nursery melody,
Says far more than I am saying.‘Slowly and surely’ and ‘olden’ are pure cliche ́, ‘nursery melody’ is a
jingle, and the present participle of the last line invites the reader to feel
Thomas’s dislike with his own poem. This sense of uselessness and
disconnection as a middle-class writer are also subtly up for scrutiny in
‘The New Year’. It begins as a description of an old man encountered
in the woods, but the terms used also suggest an unflattering superiority in
the speaker’s attitude. The man is bestial and grotesque, ‘far less like a
man than / His wheelbarrow was in profile like a pig’. He forms a ‘strange
tripod’, with a head ‘like a tortoise’s’ and calls to mind someone bending
over for leap-frog. Shabby old men occur like saintly visions throughout
Thomas’s books, appearing for good luck at the beginning of journeys, or
as symbols of life halfway between human and natural, like the Watercress
man at the beginning ofThe Heart of England, who is ‘in the penultimate
stage of a transformation like Dryope’s or Daphne’s’ or the tramp inThe
South Country, who thinks ‘only “green thoughts” under the branches of a
wood’.^59 But the tone and description here is not so much appreciative or
incisive as slightly patronising, for the animal similes declare themselves so
definitely with an end-stopped line (as nowhere else in the poem and
unusually in Thomas’s verse) that it is as if the statements are pausing for
audience laughter:
Thus he rested, far less like a man than
His wheel-barrow in profile was like a pig.
But when I saw it was an old man bent,
At the same moment came into my mind
The games at which boys bend thus,High-cockolorum,
OrFly-the-garter, andLeap-frog. At the sound
Of footsteps he began to straighten himself;
His head rolled under his cape like a tortoise’s;
He took an unlit pipe out of his mouth
Politely ere I wished him ‘A Happy New Year’,
And with his head cast upward sideways muttered –
So far as I could tell through the trees’ roar –
‘Happy New Year, and may it come fastish, too’,
While I strode by and he turned to raking leaves.This subtle sense of superiority is continued by the italicisation of
children’s games. In hisChildhood, Thomas tells us that he loved ‘the
94 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism