‘Some goal / I touched then’; Davies and de la Mare have attained poetry
precisely because they resist such Nietzschean self-assertions.
This equation of the poetic with the self-transcending of ecstasy also
suggests why Thomas’s own turn to poetry did not adopt a Lawrencian
free verse, however much he admired Lawrence’s bravery in doing so. For
like Pater, Lawrence’s verse ‘sacrifices everything to intensity’, but as
Thomas remarked in the essay, ecstasy cannot happen if there is nothing
but intensity since it needs the unnotable and common moments as much
as the great ones. Lawrence’s ‘metrical changes are part of a personality
that will sink nothing of itself in what is common’, but the common
metrical grounding of regular verse, with its necessary lack of intensity at
certain points, may be less a hindrance than part of self-dispossession he
hoped for.^35 Or to put it another way, a certain exteriority of form to
content may be necessary for the ‘ec-’, the ‘outside’ of ecstasy. Thomas’s
paraphrase of ecstasy as ‘distraction’ contains the same etymological
point: distraction means being drawn in two directions at once, whereas
free verse and the whole Romantic–Symbolist tradition behind it try to
find a form which frees the word, line or self to be itself alone, to follow its
own rhythm. As Clive Scott has remarked, ‘free verse acted as a release of
the present from its assimilation by the past and the future, and into its
own changing instantaneousness’, for in free verse ‘the measure can
become a self-sustaining entity’.^36 Thomas’s formal rhythms and rhymes
mean that words and lines are never self-sustaining, but are always being
traversed by patterns and forces beyond themselves, where, in the prayer
of ‘Words’, Thomas’s poem about writing poetry, they become both
‘fixed and free’:
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb
Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do.For Thomas, ecstasy is a state which can be manifest in poetic struc-
tures as much as personal experiences, and tracing itsmodus operandi
provides a way into understanding the distinctive character of Thomas’s
own poetry – a poetry that as here, is always in the process of disowning
itself.
78 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism