british poetry in the age of modernism

lines reflects an encounter with someone that cannot be weighed up in
terms of duties and obligations. It is an operation of ‘grace’, as opposed to
the profit and loss of the fair’s normal business of selling animals for
slaughter, weighed down by seven heavy stresses:

Pı ́g, tu ́rkey, go ́ose, and du ́ck, Chrı ́stmas Co ́rpses to be ́.

The question which lies behind ‘Christmas Corpses’ is, however, rather
more serious than the price of a meal. For the gypsy’s tune is ‘Over the
Hills and Far Away’, suitable for someone who will vanish tomorrow, but
originally an eighteenth-century army recruiting song:

Hark! Now the Drums beat up again

For all true Soldiers Gentlemen

Then let us list, and march I say

Over the Hills and far away.

Over the Hills and o’er the Main

To Flanders Portugal and Spain

Queen Ann commands, and we’ll obey

Over the Hills and Far Away.^68

Underneath the poem’s sudden turn from gypsy Bacchanalia to the
‘hollow wooded land’ of ghosts, then, is the question whether Thomas
will enlist and risk being a Christmas Corpse next year.^69 But the appeal
of the gypsy’s song is not to bravery or patriotism, but to someone already
dead, a ‘ghost new-arrived’ in the underworld. The pre-war notebook
source for this passage saw this living death as melancholy solitude, like a
ghost ‘friendless, vacant hopeless’ in the dark.^70 Two years later, the
gypsy’s tune peoples the underworld, as his eyes light it up, because
enlisting means being in step with the gypsies, always ‘over the hills and
far away’. Becoming a soldier would make Thomas join the ageless
continuity of homeless wanderers his prose had always admired from
the outside and whose music he had tried to find in thePocket Book of
Songs of the Open Air. In Thomas’s poetry, tramps, gypsies and vagrants
are not just Romantic ideals, but always also what their author was
waiting to become, sleeping outdoors like ‘A Private’, alone in the night
and the cold like the ‘soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice’ of ‘The Owl’,
passing into the dark like the tramp in ‘Man and Dog’:

‘Many a man sleeps worse tonight

Than I shall.’ ‘In the trenches.’ ‘Yes, that’s right.

But they’ll be out of that – I hope they be –

98 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism