british poetry in the age of modernism

Afo ́rtnight before Chrı ́stmas Gypsies were e ́verywhere:

But no great damage is done to naturalness by reinstating the two lost
beats less forcefully, slowing the line down slightly but making the
subsquent rhyme with the stressed ‘fair’ more equal, and smoothing out
the very obvious six stresses of the next line:

Afo ́rtnight befo ́re Chrı ́stmas Gı ́psies were e ́verywhe`re:

Va ́ns were dra ́wn up on wa ́stes, wo ́men tra ́iled to the fa ́ir.

The conversation with the gypsy in lines three to six is similarly flexible.
It is quite impossible, though, to pronounce his subsequent rejoinder to
the girl as a six-stress line and not hear him pompous and afraid:

Unle ́ss yo ́u can give cha ́nge for a so ́vere ́ign, my dear

The sense demands that the awkward second stress falls heavily on ‘you’
(making the line sound like sarcasm directed at her lack of money) and
lengthens the word ‘sovereign’, as if relishing the sound of the large coin.
The girl’s reply, however, is subtly done. The four- or six-stress alternative
follows from the same choice in the previous line, like a conversation. If we
are to believe in the speaker’s good self and allow him four stresses, then she
responds in a genuine question with a rising tone at the end of the line:

Then just ha ́lf a pı ́peful of toba ́cco can you spa ́re?

But if he is pompous, then her question becomes tired, petulant: her
interest is elsewhere, bored with having to labour the request to another
snooty middle-class passer-by:

Then ju ́st ha ́lf a pı ́peful of toba ́cco ca ́n you spa ́re?

To stress ‘just’ and ‘half ’ together changes the words from appeal to
scorn, as if she couldn’t believe he was being so mean. Moreover, the three
stresses falling so heavily on the second half of the line makes it difficult to
read as the rising tone of a question, and this leaden fall on ‘spare’ makes the
question less personal, more as if she had said it hundreds of times before,
perhaps already looking for someone else to ask. He gives it and ‘with that
much victory she laughed content’, as if the exchange had been a battle, but
not a serious one – a mix of light-heartedness and aggression which leaves
the speaker still unsure whether he has been charitable (‘content’), unchar-
itable (‘I should have given more’), the loser or the better-off (‘and I paid
nothing then / As I pay nothing now’). The undecidable scansion of these

Edward Thomas in ecstasy 97