As the bird’s own song appeared ‘seeming far-off [.. .] as if the bird or I
were in a dream’, so the rhythm can be traced behind other phrases, as if it
were half-present to his consciousness. It is a rhythm that can’t be pinned
down, that floats within itself and floats through his mind, present behind
his memories but never captured. These uncertain beats haunt the poet, of
course, because they are the aural equivalent of his own emotional
uncertainty, the impossible conjunction of ‘’twas sad only with joy’,
where mutual exclusives are both true. No more than the bird’s rhythm
can his state of mind be separated out so that each emotion is in its proper
place, or be made finally recoverable for analysis; the poem is like
footprints left by a chase after its own out-of-place core. But such
displacement by birdsong would also be a definition of ecstasy:
The poets who could say that in words which can make me nothing but ear and
soul, as the Persian did that he was neither Christian nor Jew nor Moslem; that
he came not of any country, not of East or West, not of land or sea, not of this
world or the next, of Paradise or of Hell; for his place was the Placeless.
placelessnessThomas’s ideas about ecstasy were framed within his critical writings
about poetic form. As the quotation above suggests, though, being out
of place is equally evident in the content – the geography, theology and
social organisation of the world of Thomas’s poems. Although he is
usually thought of as a rural writer, his prose travel books usually consist
of a selection of nature-sketches that might have occurred anywhere in the
south of England – asThe South Countryadmits, its landscape is ‘a kind of
home, as I think it is more than any other to those modern people who
belong nowhere’.^45 Even when there is a definite route to his books, the
reader never knows very much about where Thomas is along it, as he tells
us that he used maps to know what to avoid. ‘I never go out to see
anything. The signboards thus often astonish me.’^46 AlthoughThe South
Country,In Pursuit of Spring,The Heart of EnglandandThe Last Sheafall
begin with an escape from the rootless jumble of suburbia into the
countryside, the journey is more important than the destination:
The end is in the means – in the sight of that beautiful long straight line of the
Downs in which a curve is latent – in the houses we shall never enter, with their
dark secret windows and quiet hearth smoke, or the ruins friendly only to elders
and nettles – in the people passing whom we shall never know though we may
love them.^47
88 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism