british poetry in the age of modernism

All happiness is a state of suspension in this poem. Grammatically, the
last stanza might be a statement of what happened, but equally a condi-
tional dependent on the ‘as if’ of the girl singing (and the word ‘sing’ itself
is suspended between full and a half-stress running over according to
whether the line is hexameter or pentameter: the poem gives no help).
And the original moment of happiness seems never firmly there either: it
was an ‘interval’ whose walls the speaker passed through without noticing
(as the poem’s sentence passes through the wall of the stanza without
noticing) and in passing through walls, as well as being ‘something unwill-
ing to die’, this moment anticipates the ghost that the speaker becomes in
reliving it. It is fitting that ‘unwilling to die’ itself is a rhyme without
completion: the rhyme scheme of aaba, bbcb and so on means that each
third line is picked up in the next stanza except this one, left in expectation
for a resolution that the form simultaneously ensures will not come.

the sound of sense

Understanding how Thomas’s formal poetic structures are part of his
ideas about ecstasy distinguishes him from the modernist tradition of
Walter Pater. However, it should also be evident that neither is Thomas’s
poetic one of clear observation reported by a stable subject in simple
speech, a version of Thomas that would turn him into a conspicuously
ordinary, empirically British Movement poet. Ecstasy is precisely when
the normal and everyday fall away: ‘all the products of the merely
reflective faculties partake of death’, remarks the ‘Ecstasy’ essay. And for
Thomas, plain speaking was not enough, as the form of ‘After You Speak’
illustrates:

After you speak

And what you meant

Is plain,

My eyes

Meet yours that mean –

With your cheeks and hair –

Something more wise,

More dark,

And far different.

Even so the lark

Loves dust

And nestles in it

The minute

Before he must

Edward Thomas in ecstasy 83