It is impossible to separate out road and wayfarer as it is day or night-
time, perceiver and perceived, interior and exterior: there is no independ-
ent self to make sense of these oppositions, but only one carried along the
road by the road itself. InThe South Country, the expansive road has
figured as the opposite of ecstasy:
A yawning pit, yet not only beneath me but on every side – infinity, endless time,
endless space; it was thrust upon me, I could not grasp it, I only closed my eyes
and shuddered... How unlike it was to the mystic’s trance, feeling out with
infinite soul to earth and stars and sea and remote time and recognizing his
oneness with them. To me, but later than that, this occasional recurring
experience was an intimation of the endless pale road, before and behind, which
the soul has to travel; it was a terror that enrolled me as one of the helpless,
superfluous ones of the earth.( 75 )
But as the superfluous man of the prose becomes the ecstatic poet, so
this earlier nightmare of helplessness has now become inseparable from
mystical happiness. ‘I love roads’, the poem begins, simply, and it is on
the road that Thomas is walking along both utterly in the moment, ‘in
remote time’ with the Roman soldiers into Wales and with the dead
back from France, and also with Wordsworth, who loved a public road
and met the discharged soldier on it. ‘It is always going: it has never gone
right away, and no man is too late’, and the road’s perpetual going
makes the certainty that everything will pass away into a kind of
continuity:
Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.
On this earth ’tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure.^75
‘Roads’ shuns definite starts and stops: living and dying become con-
tinuous, just as Thomas’s favourite enjambed rhyme slides ‘are’ into
‘forgotten’, like the trace of the star seen always as it is vanishing. The
present continuous tense weaves itself into Ariel’s song (‘Nothing of him
that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change’), a text about deathly
transformation which Thomas, like Eliot, had long wondered at for its
lack of a beginning: ‘The magic of words is due to their living freely
102 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism