Soar in lone flight
So far,
Like a black star
He seems –
A mote
Of singing dust
Afloat
Above,
That dreams
And sheds no light.
I know your lust
Is love.The endlessly enjambed lines isolating each couple of words for inspec-
tion would make this poem almost Imagistic, were it not for the fact that
each line has an unpredictable rhyme, and so turns out to be linked to
something beyond itself. Plain speech in this poem is inseparable from a
meaning hidden from its speaker; if lust/dust and love/above are a
conventional opposition, the lark who is the ‘you’ belongs to both worlds
at once, a piece of singing dust and black star. Plain speech is only one
side of the ‘dark’ and ‘different’, and the poem’s form is continually
bringing the other side out.
This is not to say that Thomas was not interested in speech at all,
though. As he wrote to Frost:
You really should start doing a book on speech and literature, or you will find me
mistaking your ideas for mine and doing it myself. You can’t prevent me from
making use of them: I do so daily and want to begin over again with them and
wring the necks of all my rhetoric – the geese. However, my Pater would show
you I had got on to the scent already.^38
But in Thomas’s book on Pater, speech is not held up as a model of
poetry. Pater’s problem was that his self-consciousness made him use
‘words as bricks’, with nothing of the ‘sincere expressive style’ of speech.
Speech and its rhythms indicate a core of emotion that it is beyond the
power of the self-conscious writer to alter. Instead of reinstating speech as
a literary ideal, though, Thomas then changes the argument. It is not a
solution to write as one speaks, either, for the problem is with expression
of any kind:
Men now understand the impossibility of speaking aloud all that is in them, and
if they do not speak it, they cannot write as they speak. The most they can do is
write as they might speak in a less solitary world... there would be no poetry if
men could speak all that they think and all that they feel.( 208 – 9 )
84 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism