which is equally a dependent condition. The poem’s formal point is to
make them divergent and inseparable, for simply opposing exterior,
formal duty and interior flexible desire would obliterate the poem’s
theme, the reflexive, tangled and unpredictable relation between one’s
own life and other people’s. For all Leavis’s brilliant remark that in
Thomas’s verse, ‘the outward scene is accessory to an inner theatre’,
‘accessory’ makes the outward both a way in and something ultimately
disposable, which for Thomas it is not.^78 In this poem, as with the ecstasy
that Thomas always longed for, it is in being outside oneself that matters,
for ecstasy is not, finally, a private experience: the essay calls it ‘the only
harmony, through it alone can we make harmony, through it alone can
we recognise harmony’. Unlike Walter Pater’s perfect isolation and his
corresponding formal individualism that would eliminate exteriority,
ecstasy is where the interior self is taken outside itself towards others,
and this possibility has recently led the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy to
consider ecstasy a central idea of communal relations. ‘Ecstasy: which is to
say that such a consciousness is never mine, but to the contrary, I only
have it in and through the community.’ Such ecstatic consciousness,
beyond any self-founding notion of the ‘subject’, is brought about by
the end of what Nancy calls ‘immanence’, the folly of believing oneself or
any organisation the independent arbiter of reality, the producer of itself
and its own chief interest: ‘Community, which is not a subject, and even
less a subject (conscious or unconscious) greater than ‘myself,’ does not
haveor possess this consciousness: communityisthe ecstatic conscious-
ness of the night of immanence, insofar as such a consciousness is the
interruption of self-consciousness.’^79
Such radical reformulations of post-Romantic subjectivity may seem
far removed from Thomas’s trees and birds, but in fact Thomas had
expressed the same link between the community and the ecstatic de-
thronement of self-consciousness long before, in the conclusion to his
tract on the countryside:
The country relates us all to Eternity. We go to it as would-be poets, or as
solitaries, vagabonds, lovers,...toescape ourselves; and we do more than escape
them. So vastly do we increase the circle of which we are the centre that we
become as nothing. The larger the circle the less seems our distance from other
men each at his separate centre; and at last that distance is nothing at all in the
mighty circle, and all have but one circumference. And thus we truly find
ourselves.^80
The country interrupts self-consciousness to make a community from
those who have become ‘as nothing’ within its breadth. It is the non-place
106 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism