Here the phrase ‘the names’ itself becomes what it describes, a name
whose repeated turning-over thickens it into a thing itself, shadowing its
referent. As Wordsworth says, the repeated words interest the speaker’s
mind ‘not only as symbols of the passion, but asthings, active and
efficient, which are themselves part of the passion’.^22 Yet ‘name’ is only
the most obvious of the many repetitions in the poem: as well as the herb,
‘garden’, ‘sniff ’, ‘think’, ‘feather’, ‘tree’, ‘bush’, ‘shrivel’, ‘bitter’, ‘scent’
‘perhaps’ and ‘nothing’ all return at shorter or wider intervals, as if the
mind in talking to itself is being brought up against its own terms, terms
which reveal nothing further other than the effort to remember (‘try /
Once more to think what it is I am remembering, / Always in vain’). But
like the scent, these words are also something to cling to, as if they held
firm while the speaker drifts. They are repetitions without an original
memory to ground them, and this sense of displacement is amplified by
the simultaneous question of the poem:
And I can only wonder how much hereafter
She will remember, with that bitter scent,
Of garden rows, and ancient damson trees
Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door,
A low thick bush beside the door, and me
Forbidding her to pick.The present-tense clauses make the poem’s voice blend into whatwill
be the words of the child probing and recalling the scene in her own
future. In other words, the poem’s present is not just about failing to
remember but simultaneously becoming somebody else’s history; its own
narration does not belong to itself either. Perhaps most subtle are the
fleeting suggestions of rhymes buried within the blank verse: the ‘tree /
Growing with rosemary’, ‘snipping the tips... so well she clips it’, ‘a low
thick bush beside the door, and me / Forbidding her to pick’, ‘I have
mislaid the key... I see and I hear’. These are rhymes that, without
rhythmic prominence, might be coincidences; heard only in passing, they
echo like a memory that cannot place when or where, or know whether it
is significant or not.
These processes of self-distraction and alienation are exemplified in
one of Thomas’s most famously despairing poems, ‘Rain’. As the six
stresses of the first line weigh its rhythm down, the poem seems melan-
cholically unable to lift away from the title word, turning it over and
over:
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 71