It is liberty to ‘dream what we could do if we were free’ (l. 10 ), but
those dreams would be about using the hours spent dreaming of freedom
for something more worthwhile, or for not caring about their loss. It is
liberty to dream about the freedom of not dreaming about freedom, in
other words; the more liberty is insisted upon, the more it becomes mired
in self-absorption, regretting its own regrets and all the while freely doing
nothing. Hence the conclusion that he is ‘half in love with pain, with
what is imperfect... with things that have an end’ is not only a
declaration for the earthly limitation his freedom laments, but for the
imperfections of that free lamentation. Appropriately enough for a poem
which will not divide freedom from constraint, what looks at first like
blank verse actually rhymes twenty-four of its lines at varying, unpredict-
able intervals; appropriately for a poem about imperfection, it leaves three
as awkward half- or vowel-rhymes only, ‘I’, ‘grave’ and ‘away’.
These three words set the tone for the poem written just over a month
later that is Thomas’s most direct reply to Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’.
It amplifies Frost’s later comment on the confluence of Thomas’s turn to
poetry with his becoming a soldier, but its more enigmatic title, ‘Roads’,
elides even the moment of choice on which Frost meditates:
Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance.Exposed in the solitude of the ‘loops over the downs’ rather than alone
in a wood, Thomas’s walking has only one road to take, and its interest is
not in the conscious act of choosing such a road, but how the road makes
an inseparable, interdependent relation with its traveller:
The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.
They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only.
From dawn’s twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.Edward Thomas in ecstasy 101