of consciousness – a preacher who exhorts the crowd to ‘forget yourselves in
prayer, forget yourselves in love’ – and the second about an orphan boy
whose father lived and died as a tramp outdoors, ‘buried by robins’, and
whose meetings with a mysterious girl make him feel that he too is living in
the ‘eternal present of nature’s unconsciousness’. Like most of Thomas’s
fiction, the story goes nowhere, but the situation and phrases from this
manuscript are the genesis of lines in his poems. The mysteriously lovely
girl appears in ‘The Unknown’ and ‘Celandine’, the boy sees animals
hanging from a tree in indifference to weather and time, as in ‘The Gallows’
and the green stoat of ‘Under the Wood’, and he hears a fairy story which
compares the ‘crescent moon’ to the ‘huntsman’s ivory horn’, an image
which begins ‘The Penny Whistle’.^18 Of course, neither of these prose
explorations was completed either; the preacher manuscript is marked
‘dropped at Ledington April 1914 ’, which is a significant place for it to be
dropped, for it was at Ledington over this time that Frost cajoled him into
believing what Farjeon had suggested, that his prose work was secretly the
work of a poet. Six months later the first poem appeared. Of course, the
travel, historical and literary books Thomas had to write contain proto-
poetic material as well, but the sequence of writings from ‘Ecstasy’ is
important because Thomas began them all for his own sake, the first
lappings of the ‘strong warm tide’ that turned into the flood of poems,
written at the rate of more than one every five days for two years.
Secondly, the ‘Ecstasy’ essay is important because in it ecstasy is
synonymous with the poet’s highest goal. The original opening sentence
was: ‘Where the life of the great known or unknown poet culminates,
there is ecstasy: they are exalted out of themselves, out of the street, out of
mortality’.^19 The greatest moment in a poet’s life is to be lifted out of it;
the poet may be famous or obscure because ecstasy makes such consider-
ations irrelevant. Poetry’s ultimate aim is greater than the poet’s private
self: the mystics, Thomas continues, thought ‘the essence of true ecstasy
was self-forgetfulness, and that no delight dependent on personal desire,
should be given the holy name’. Ecstasy is ‘self-surrender’, a word which
reappears in Eliot’s famous call for the artist’s ‘continual surrender’ of
himself to the Tradition.^20 And like ‘Tradition and the Individual
Talent’, the desire for impersonality is related to a strong sense of personal
suffering, as Thomas continues:
When we are carried out of the daily humour of consciousness, in the rare,
magnificent moments when love is admiration of something outside ourselves,
[it] causes us to obliterate our personal tendencies, having at the same time a
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 69