The road enables him to experience a complete lack of relation with
what he passes, a placelessness which ironically resembles the unhappiness
of one of the suburb-dwellers whose attitudes he has supposedly left
behind: ‘He could never take it as a matter of course to pass, to be
continually surrounded by, thousands of whom he knew nothing, to
whom he was nothing. Well did they keep their secrets, this blank or
shamefaced crowd of discreetly dressed people who might be anywhere
tomorrow.’^48 Thomas too might be anywhere tomorrow, and so might
the country people he most admires.The South Country’s tramp, the
‘simplest, kindest and perhaps the wisest of men’, likewise ‘had no
country’ and ‘is still on the road’, and is one with the watercress man of
The Heart of England, Jack Noman in ‘May 23 ’, the wandering ‘Lob’
whose ‘home was where he was free’, and all the disreputable umbrella-
menders, gypsies and travellers whom Thomas encounters as fellow
pilgrims throughout his prose.^49 Unlike them, Thomas did have a fixed
home to go to, but his restlessness there is particularly evident in the three
poems to which R. George Thomas gives the title ‘Home’: the first
declares that ‘that land / My home, I have never seen’:
And could I discover it,
I fear my happiness there,
Or my pain, might be dreams of return
Here, to these things that were.‘Home’ always means yearning to be somewhere else. A similar contra-
diction animates the end of ‘Home [ 3 ]’ where the word ‘homesick’ is
‘playfully’ suspended between being sick for home and sick of home: the
poem ends with a wish to end his ‘captivity’, but delicately and self-
distrustingly refuses to limit that captivity to the temporary home that
was army camp. And where the first stanza of ‘Home [ 2 ]’ promises an
experience of settledness, it actually and joyfully delivers the opposite:
Often I had gone this way before:
But now it seemed I never could be
And never had been anywhere else;
’Twas home; one nationality
We had, I and the birds that sang,
One memory.He ‘had never been anywhere else’ although he had ‘come back / That
eve somehow from somewhere far’. It is April, and the birds are thrushes,
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 89