wonderful sense of humanity and lightness, making us regard our ordinary
personality in its dusty stock of little thoughts or feelings with astonishment,
even contempt.^21
The rapidity with which Thomas moves from ecstasy as self-forgetfulness
to ecstasy as self-contempt suggests that ecstasy’s happiness may be closer
to its opposite than one would think. For ecstasy is not a word one would
normally associate with Thomas’s miserably self-absorbed verse, the re-
lentless self-interrogation of phrases such as ‘I cannot bite the day to the
core’ or the ‘avenue, dark, nameless, without end’ of his childhood
memories. Thomas then confesses his own awareness of this contradic-
tion: ‘My chief ground and qualification for making this choice [to write
on ecstasy] was my intimate acquaintance with the opposite. I knew so
well the grief without a pang, described by Coleridge with some flattery,
in “Dejection: An Ode” [quoted] where lack of ecstasy seems to become
an ecstasy itself ’. Poetry in despair is still a kind of ecstasy, because in both
rapture and melancholy, there is a sense of being carried out of one’s
proper self. Ecstasy is ‘the condition of being out of place, being out of the
accustomed, or if you like, the proper place... the term for alienation or
distraction of mind’.
If ecstasy is not the first term that springs to mind in describing
Thomas’s poetry, alienation or distraction of mind might be closer. His
poems are famously thickets of yets, ifs and buts, whose process of
perpetual qualification and hesitations defies any settled resolution. Some-
times the speaker’s mind seems gripped by a word which it cannot let go,
helpless and insistent as the vowel-sound in the last stanza of ‘Aspens’
suggests:
Wecannot other than an aspen be
That ceaselessly, unreasonablygrieves,
Or so men think who like a different tree.The words and sounds, like the grief, return again and again, causeless
and inevitable. Mulling over the name of ‘Old Man, or Lad’s-love’ is the
verbal equivalent of smelling the plant again and again, and thinking of
nothing, for ‘in the name there’s nothing’ either:
Even to one that knows it well, the names
Half-decorate, half-perplex, the thing it is:
At least, what that is clings not to the names
In spite of time. And yet I like the names.70 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism