The truth of speech in poetry is there when it is being overheard by
someone else, and so many of Thomas’s poems begin as if the speaker
suddenly overheard someone, in the manner of ‘Up in the Wind’ (‘I could
wring the old thing’s neck that put it there!’) or ‘A Gentleman’ (‘He has
robbed two clubs’). Or we overhear the poet thinking, as in ‘The Barn’
(‘They should never have built a barn there, at all’), interrupting himself,
as in ‘But these things also are Spring’s–’ or more generally, just talking to
himself. In a beautiful image, Walter de la Mare described Thomas’s
poetry as a rehearsal: ‘We listen to a kind of monologue, like one of his
own nightingales softly practising over its song, as though in utmost
secrecy we were overhearing a man talking quietly to himself, or to some
friend silent and understanding’.^42 Hearing a nightingale is perhaps an
over-familiar poetic trope, but de la Mare’s image comes from a nature-
lesson he had from Thomas (recorded in the poem ‘Sotto Voce’), when
on an afternoon walk Thomas suddenly hushed him to hear the faint
notes of a nightingale practising the song he would use that night. The
implication is that it is easy not to hear Thomas’s voice not only because
it seems to be preparing to say something, but also because the listener is
not expecting to hear it at all.
It is this unexpectedness in overhearing that makes de la Mare’s
metaphor and Frost’s sound of sense germane to Thomas’s self-evasive
agency. A spectator is always on the edge of their visual space, able to
perceive it as a whole, and ascertain to some extent what will happen next
and to orient him- or herself accordingly, as words such as ‘foresee’ and
‘speculate’ suggest. This distancing Thomas associated with self-protect-
ing connoisseurship: Pater ‘has no sense but vision’ and consequently
always ‘admires at a distance’.^43 Even when a sight is unexpected, one
comes upon it; it occurs in the direction one is already facing, so to
speak. By contrast, an auditor is in the middle of his or her world, and
the ears are involuntarily awake to sounds that may occur around and
behind. This state of permeability suggests why sound is so important to
Thomas’s rare moments of happiness. In ‘Home [ 2 ]’, the sense of home-
coming, where suddenly ‘it seemed I never could be / And never had been
anywhere else’ is accompanied by the fading of light and the sounds of
animals, the speaker surrounded by them, peacefully able to hear their
interruption of silence because he is not involved in doing or expecting
anything else. ‘The call of children in the unfamiliar streets’ with the
twilight birdsong ‘completes a magic of strange welcome’ in ‘Good-
night’; the ‘moments of everlastingness’ in ‘The Other’ are more heard
than seen:
86 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism