would be a remarkable declaration of Thomas’s poetic alienation from the
language of trees and birds, were it not for what Thomas actually says a
language not to be betrayed is like: that it comes in ‘whispers’, like the
‘breeze / That hinted all and nothing spoke’, a phrase whose off-rhymes
with ‘crocuses’ and ‘hook’ are making his point about indirection in
another way. ‘Some goal / I touched then’; unidentified, the goal must
be unpredicted and only founden route, and it is exactly the regular form
that makes such distracted satisfaction possible. ‘I never expected anything
/ Nor yet remembered’, for example; the usual stress of ‘a ́nything’ moves
quickly across the line-ending onto ‘nor’ and cuts short the verse’s
demand for a full stress on ‘thing’ – as if the reader were not expecting
the end of the line – so that the rhyme with ‘sing’ two lines later refers
back to a sound which has gone by without being fully noticed, and yet,
like the unidentified goal, must always have been there. This movement is
characteristic of the poem as a whole, its two easy, almost natural
sentences winding down across line-breaks and between stanzas, so that
its rhythmic boundaries and unstressed or half-rhymes seem to happen
only in passing.
The paradoxical demands of this self-evasive goal seeking underlie not
only Thomas’s verse-form, but his entire poetic career, from its begin-
nings in his nature writings and criticism to its end in the war. It was a
suspicion of too determined an approach to poetic goals that caused him
to distance himself from both Georgian and Poundian verse, a suspicion
which has left its traces above when Thomas gently reminds Lawrence’s
potential readers that this ultra-modern direct poetry is not more ‘intense’
(i.e. concentrated) or unchangeable (i.e. its form is inseparable from its
content) than poetry written in eras less obsessed with the elimination of
rhetoric. If poetry is poetry whatever its author set out for it to be, then it
will not come of deliberation. This welcome of the unsought and dispos-
sessing power of poetry was part of his own desire to eliminate a rhetorical
self-awareness, but escaping from such awareness, and the outdoor life
Thomas associated with that escape, was also part of his subsequent
attitude towards enlisting and the probability of death in France. When
asked what he was fighting for, he reportedly picked up a handful of earth
and let it crumble between his finger and thumb, saying ‘literally, for this’,
which is usually thought of as a nature-lover’s patriotism.^13 But the
gesture’s bivalence between a love of the earth and the funeral rites that
accompany the words ‘dust to dust’ is telling; in ‘The Signpost’, it is a
‘mouthful of earth’ that will ‘remedy all’ the speaker’s regrets and wishes.
Nevertheless, this desire for self-avoidance meant that while death is
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 67