ecstasy in poetry‘Words’ ends ‘as poets do’, which might be glossed as ‘as we poets do’, or
‘as I do when being a poet’, or equally, ‘as I would do if I were a real poet’.
Six words after ‘ecstasy’, such delicate shades of self-criticism might seem
to poison it. They are so characteristic of Thomas’s poetry, with its yets
and buts and perhapses and almosts on which so much of his nuanced
uncertainty turns. But the poem’s point is that poetry, like ecstasy, is
never certain, because being a poet is not something the poet can be
wholly in charge of:
Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes –
As the winds use
A crack in the wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through –
Choose me,
You English words?It is not that poets do not work at their writing: they ‘make rhymes’,
and Thomas knew that ‘most writers are elaborate; and those certainly not
the least whose style is furthest removed from ornament, being simple and
natural’.^37 But words are more powerful than the poet, and Thomas is
careful to make sure that the self does not secretly reassert itself in making
this denial. Lest the Romantic associations of inspiration sound too self-
exalting, he gently deflates them by making the poet into a drain rather
than Coleridge’s Aeolian harp, and asks for ecstasy only ‘sometimes’, in
case it should become as predictable as Pater’s. It is this unpredictability
that then becomes the crucial factor in the ‘ecstasy’ of rhyme the poem
develops. ‘Words’ is free verse, in the sense that there is no pattern to the
number of beats per line, which range from one to three. However, it does
not sound like free verse, because of the frequency of rhymes – in fact,
every line has its companion, but those rhymes are often missed because
they come so far apart. In the passage above, ‘choose’ and ‘use’, ‘rhymes’
and ‘sometimes’ come with only a line between them, but ‘words’ does
not find its companion until line 18 and ‘me’ until line 26. This gives two
entirely different reading experiences: as it is being read through or heard,
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 79