Was vain: no more could the restless brook
Ever turn back and climb the waterfall
To the lake that rests and stirs not in its nook,
As in the hollow of the collar-bone
Under the mountain’s head of rush and stone.Not only do the end-rhymes become much more obvious, but the
internal chimes between ‘again’ and ‘vain’, ‘hollow’ and ‘collar’, ‘restless’
and ‘rest’ suggest that the past is no longer suddenly and captivatingly
reappearing: rather, in demanding to get back to this country of lost
content so much, the satisfactions of rhyme are also demanded more
often. Yet they are thereby more predictable; it is the mysterious grace of
the happenstantial rhymes at the poem’s beginning that confirm that the
speaker is out of his place, and on condition that he cannot get back there.
Ecstasy is not satisfaction or completion, but rather self-displacement,
which is why Thomas includes depression and happiness in the ‘Ecstasy’
essay, and in his poems, more often both at once:
When we two walked in Lent
We imagined that happiness
Was something different
And this was something less.But happy were we to hide
Our happiness, not as they were
Who acted in their pride
Juno and Jupiter:For the gods in their jealousy
Murdered that wife and man,
And we that were wise live free
To recall our happiness then.Happiness cannot be consciously held, just as to stress the word
‘happiness’ here in accordance with the verse-structure would be to force
it artificially, and it is not coincidental that the only full rhyme in this
poem is with ‘pride’. Yet to leave ‘happiness’, ‘different’ or ‘jealousy’ with
their third syllables unstressed ensures that the rhyme will never be full,
and happiness is always somewhere else than now. These unstressed /
stressed rhymes are simultaneously a recognition that happiness is unex-
pected, glancing like a by-product of the sentence’s turn, and ungraspable.
In ‘Beauty’, the moment when happiness unexpectedly interrupts him
comes with this unmarked harmony, which to stress for the rhyme would
be to ruin:
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 81