british poetry in the age of modernism

the lines appear to come as free verse does, without overt reference to what
has gone before or suggesting what will come. When the poem is per-
ceived as a whole, however, outside the flow of words, each ending can be
seen to have its counterpart, so that the rhymes are both ‘fixed and free’.
This is the condition of the ecstatic, Thomas explains in the essay, because
when the mystic is removed from his time-bound private self he or she is
thereby enabled to see the true interconnection of the world:

‘A touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth’. That is to
say that a robin redbreast in a cage sets all heaven in a rage. Here is surely the
essence of ecstasy. The man who speaks so has stepped out of self into some
boundless world in which most men are isolated as in a diving bell without a
window. He has come clear of what belongs merely to the family, to the state,
clear as he thinks of all that is finite, space and time.

The poem emulates such mystic harmony: everything has its connec-
tion but in the limited time of its enunciation, those connections can’t be
foreseen or appropriated. It is a state ‘out of self’, and its ecstasy depends
on its formal pattern. Rhymes that are ‘fixed and free’ in ‘Over the Hills’
allow another ecstatic memory to reveal itself:

Often and often it came back again

To mind, the day I passed the horizon ridge

To a new country, the path I had to find

By half-gaps that were stiles once in the hedge,

The pack of scarlet clouds running across

The harvest of evening that seemed endless then

And after, and the inn where all were kind,

All were strangers. I did not know my loss

Till one day twelve months later suddenly

I leaned upon my spade and saw it all,

Though far beyond the sky-line.

In coming long after the ear has forgotten the first line-ending, the
unobtrusive rhymes (again/then, ridge/hedge, and so on) act like a Prous-
tian exploration of memory, where events in the present suddenly and
involuntarily recover an unexpected harmony with the past. But as the
poem continues with a disappointed admission that ‘recall was vain’, the
rhymes close up as well:

It became

Almost a habit through the year for me

To lean and see it and think to do the same

Again for two days and a night. Recall

80 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism