british poetry in the age of modernism

And all was earth’s, or all was sky’s;

No difference endured between

The two. A dog barked on a hidden rise;

A marshbird whistled high unseen;

The latest waking blackbird’s cries

Perished upon the silence keen.

The last light filled a narrow firth

Among the clouds. I stood serene,

And with a solemn quiet mirth,

An old inhabitant of earth.

The poems themselves are often meditations on somebody’s words,
like the old man’s ‘Happy New Year, and may it come fastish too’ in
‘The New Year’, or the child’s exclamation, ‘Nobody’s been here before’
in ‘The Brook’. As J. W. Haines recalled, so many of Thomas’s poems
were composed in trains by talking to himself when it became too dark
to read, and were only written down later.^44 This auditory self-evasiveness
is also important for suggesting the pull of half-heard memories lying
just under the surface of consciousness in a poem such as ‘The Un-
known Bird’, for example, where the notes of the bird themselves have
a rhythm that in music would be called three-over-two; that is, there is
space in the line for two beats, but the identical phonemes give no clues
as to where the stresses should fall. Are they ‘La ́-la-la ́!’, or ‘La-la ́-la ́!’, or
‘La ́-la ́-la!’? Not knowing the bird’s cry means there is no reason to prefer
any of these choices over another; the most likely outcome is to pro-
nounce the rhythm as if it belonged to all of them at once and none of
them entirely, hovering three-over-two in ‘La-la-la! he called, seeming
far off’ and ‘As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet’. This sweet uncer-
tainty then works its way into the rhythm of the opening three words, as if
the delightfully unpronounceable call is subconsciously directing his
description:

Three lovely noteshe whistled, too soft to be heard

Again, their uncertain weighting can be detected beneath the first
sentence of his declaration:

I never knew a voice,

Man, beast or bird, better than this. I told

The naturalists; but neither had they heard

Anything like the notes that did so haunt me

I had them clear by heart and have them still.

Edward Thomas in ecstasy 87