strangeness of the words as well as things... I was arrested by the
quaintness of Izaak Walton’s spelling’ but when he discusses these same
games, he does not italicise them.^60 Nor does Thomas ever italicise other
pieces of vivid folk-phraseology, such as the flower names ‘Traveller’s-joy’
or ‘Live-in-idleness’ which he relishes in ‘Lob’. Here, it makes their
colourful names look like academic specimens, pronounced with digni-
fied relish from one who was never a boy himself, pompous as the phrase,
‘The games at which boys bend thus’. So when the old man speaks, the
grouchy terseness of the words are rather abrupt after the pigs, tripods and
tortoises of the speaker’s striding-by. This non-event of a reply, however,
is the poem’s tacit focus, for it exposes the lack of fellow-feeling on both
sides. When the speaker notes that the man ‘took an unlit pipe out of his
mouth / Politely’, this ‘politely’ may imply ‘though he needn’t have done’
or ‘as he should have done’, but in either the forces of social division are
evidently at work before the two men have even met. And there is no need
to reply to the old man’s comment, for the contrast between the vigour of
‘while I strode by’ and the old man’s monotonous, lonely work is left to
speak for itself. Why is the man raking leaves in a wood (surely an
unending task?), and why is he working on a holiday? Whether he is a
gardener or a casual labourer, he is not well-off, and the speaker is left to
taste his comment’s unexpected bitterness in the telling. Left unassimil-
ated, it functions very like the quotation in another sketch of ‘animal
tranquillity and decay’,Wordsworth’s ‘Old Man Travelling’, where the
detached walking writer’s discerning critical insights are simply brought
up sharp against an old man’s unhappiness. Thomas’s loftiness in the
first part of the poem may then be an ironic echo of Wordsworth’s own,
which he disliked; as he wrote approvingly, Frost ‘sympathizes where
Wordsworth merely contemplates’.^61
Criticising a lack of sympathy, in other words, makes the poems’
encounters with the homeless and poor a paradoxical identification with
them, a common out-of-place-ness. But it was writing throughout 1915
and 1916 that gave Thomas powerful reasons for such an identification
that went beyond a generalised emotional correlation, as one of Thomas’s
least-understood poems, ‘The Gypsy’, indicates. It is tempting to dismiss
it on account of the conventional romanticism of its subject; being
inspired by ‘the spark / In the Gypsy boy’s black eyes’ is a cliche ́of
countless cheap romances of the period, and with it, part of the confident
race-typing and animalisation of their subject practised by Thomas’s
contemporaries in organisations such as the Gypsy Lore Society, whose
magazine combined a desire to take gypsy culture seriously with a lurid
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 95