among things, and no man knows how they came together in just that
order when a beautiful thing is made like “full fathom five”. And so it is
that children often make phrases that are poetry.’^76 This endless road is
the opposite of roots, completion and everything that is proper to the
living self. In his travel books, among the tramps and gypsies or absorbed
in the countryside, Thomas was always someone passing through, never
someone who belonged. In other words, it would not be a matter of
choosing this solitary road, because it was where Thomas had always been.
In by-passing choice, Thomas’s road also skirts round consequences.
Frost’s traveller has a modicum of foreknowledge and circumspection,
since ‘knowing how way leads on to way / I doubted if I should ever come
back’. But Thomas’s walker is always gladly caught on the hoof, because
the end is already here:
No one knew I was going away
I thought myself I should come back some day
[.. .]
I’m bound away for ever,
Away somewhere, away for ever(‘Song [ 3 ]’)
The refrain of ‘bound away for ever’ suggests simultaneously being
tied up like a slave and perpetual journeying, being both ‘fixed and free’.
It is not meaningless to say that Thomas actually chose to go into the
army, but in his subtle meditation on enlisting, ‘As the Team’s Head
Brass’, that choice is expressly made part of a much larger network of
forces and relations that un-ground that supposedly free decision, and
with it the self-centred perspective on which choosing hinges. The
speaker sits on a fallen elm and talks about enlisting to a ploughman
with a curious mixture of self-preservation, black humour and suicidal
interest:
‘Have you been out?’ ‘No.’ ‘And don’t want to, perhaps?’
‘If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more....Indeed he would not, but it is not the ploughman’s aim to chivvy
him into enlisting. It turns out that the elm was knocked over the same
night as the ploughman’s mate was killed on his second day of active
service:
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 103