british poetry in the age of modernism

himself had been seeking for so long, combining his desire to ‘wring the
necks of all my rhetoric’, as he described it to Frost, with his lifelong and
consuming relationship with the natural world. The comment about
rhetoric was written within days of the Flint review, in a letter that asks
Frost teasingly ‘whether you can imagine me turning to verse?’; if free
verse were sincere, sensitive and natural, it is a fair question to ask why
Thomas did not write it.^11
In fact, he did, but Thomas’s free verse is mostly of a kind that is not
usually recognised as such, because of the preponderance of other patterns
in it, and in general most of Thomas’s verse is carefully formal – as, for
example, a poem on the topic of natural poetry itself:

I never saw that land before,

And now can never see it again;

Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar

Endeared, by gladness and by pain,

Great was the affection that I bore

To the valley and the river small,

The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees,

The chickens from the farmsteads, all

Elm-hidden, and the tributaries

Descending at equal interval;

The blackthorns down along the brook

With wounds as yellow as crocuses

Where yesterday the labourer’s hook

Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze

That hinted all and nothing spoke.

I never expected anything
Nor yet remembered: but some goal
I touched then; and if I could sing
What would not even whisper my soul
As I went on my journeying,
I should use, as the trees and birds did,
A language not to be betrayed;
And what was hid should still be hid
Excepting from those like me made
Who answer when such whispers bid.^12
The poem celebrates, as so many of Thomas’s poems do, an unforeseen
and vanishing instant of rapture, but in a verse that, like its speaker, is all
too aware of the before and after in its regular rhymes and rhythms. It

66 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism