[Footnote 2: Last Poems. By Edward Thomas. (Selwyn & Blount.)]
Our consciousness will have its record. The tradition of England in battle has its testimony7; our less traditional despairs will be compassed about by a crowd of witnesses. But it might so nearly have been in vain that we should seek an echo of that which smiled at the conclusions of our consciousness. The subtler faiths might so easily have fled through our harsh fingers. When the sound of the bugles8 died, having crowned reveillé with the equal challenge of the last post, how easily we might have been persuaded that there was a silence, if there had not been one whose voice rose only so little above that of the winds and trees and the life of undertone we share with them as to make us first doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the incessant9 pulses of which it is composed. The infinite and infinitesimal vague happinesses and immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound of speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself crumbles10 into dust—this very texture11 of the life of the soul might have been a gray background over which tumultuous existence passed unheeding had not Edward Thomas so painfully sought the angle from which it appears, to the eye of eternity12, as the enduring warp13 of the more gorgeous woof.
The emphasis sinks; the stresses droop14 away. To exacter knowledge less charted and less conquerable certainties succeed; truths that somehow we cannot make into truths, and that have therefore some strange mastery over us; laws of our common substance which we cannot make human but only humanise; loyalties15 we do not recognise and dare not disregard; beauties which deny communion with our beautiful, and yet compel our souls. So the sedge-warbler's
'Song that lacks all words, all melody,
All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me
Than sweetest voice that sings in tune16 sweet words.'
Not that the unheard melodies were sweeter than the heard to this dead poet. We should be less confident of his quality if he had not been, both in his knowledge and his hesitations17, the child of his age. Because he was this, the melodies were heard; but they were not sweet. They made the soul sensible of attachments18 deeper than the conscious mind's ideals, whether of beauty or goodness. Not to something above but to something beyond are we chained, for all that we forget our fetters19, or by some queer trick of self-hallucination turn them into golden crowns. But perhaps the finer task of our humanity is to turn our eyes calmly into 'the dark backward and abysm' not of time, but of the eternal present on whose pinnacle20 we stand.
'I have mislaid the key. I sniff21 the spray
And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember.
No garden appears, no path, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless without end.'
So, it seems, a hundred years have found us out. We come no longer trailing clouds of glory. We are that which we are, less and more than our strong ancestors; less, in that our heritage does not descend22 from on high, more, in that we know ourselves for less. Yet our chosen spirit is not wholly secure in his courage. He longs not merely to know in what undifferentiated oneness his roots are fixed23, but to discover it beautiful. Not even yet is it sufficient to have a premonition of the truth; the truth must wear a familiar colour.
'This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
Not like a peewit that returns to wail24
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants25 unswerving to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dark air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.'
Beauty, yes, perhaps; but beautiful by virtue26 of its coincidence with the truth, as there is beauty in those lines securer and stronger far than the melody of their cadence27, because they tell of a loyalty28 of man's being which, being once made sensible of it, he cannot gainsay29. Whence we all come, whither we must all make our journey, there is home indeed. But necessity, not remembered delights, draws us thither30. That which we must obey is our father if we will; but let us not delude31 ourselves into the expectation of kindness and the fatted calf32, any more than we dare believe that the love which moves the sun and the other stars has in it any charity. We may be, we are, the children of the universe; but we have 'neither father nor mother nor any playmate.'
And Edward Thomas knew this. The knowledge should be the common property of the poetry of our time, marking it off from what went before and from what will come after. We believe that it will be found to be so; and that the presence of this knowledge, and the quality which this knowledge imparts, makes Edward Thomas more than one among his contemporaries. He is their chief. He challenges other regions in the hinterland of our souls. Yet how shall we describe the narrowness of the line which divides his province from theirs, or the only half-conscious subtlety33 of the gesture with which he beckons34 us aside from trodden and familiar paths? The difference, the sense of departure, is perhaps most apparent in this, that he knows his beauty is not beautiful, and his home no home at all.
'This is my grief. That land,
My home, I have never seen.
No traveller tells of it,
However far he has been.
'And could I discover it
I fear my happiness there,
Or my pain, might be dreams of return
To the things that were.'
Great poetry stands in this, that it expresses man's allegiance to his destiny. In every age the great poet triumphs in all that he knows of necessity; thus he is the world made vocal35. Other generations of men may know more, but their increased knowledge will not diminish from the magnificence of the music which he has made for the spheres. The known truth alters from age to age; but the thrill of the recognition of the truth stands fast for all our human eternity. Year by year the universe grows vaster, and man, by virtue of the growing brightness of his little lamp, sees himself more and more as a child born in the midst of a dark forest, and finds himself less able to claim the obeisance36 of the all. Yet if he would be a poet, and not a harper of threadbare tunes37, he must at each step in the downward passing from his sovereignty, recognise what is and celebrate it as what must be. Thus he regains38, by another path, the supremacy39 which he has forsaken40.
Edward Thomas's poetry has the virtue of this recognition. It may be said that his universe was not vaster but smaller than the universe of the past, for its bounds were largely those of his own self. It is, even in material fact, but half true. None more closely than he regarded the living things of earth in all their quarters. 'After Rain' is, for instance, a very catalogue of the texture of nature's visible garment, freshly put on, down to the little ash-leaves
'… thinly spread
In the road, like little black fish, inlaid
As if they played.'
But it is true that these objects of vision were but the occasion of the more profound discoveries within the region of his own soul. There he discovered vastness and illimitable vistas41; found himself to be an eddy42 in the universal flux43, driven whence and whither he knew not, conscious of perpetual instability, the meeting place of mighty impacts of which only the farthest ripple44 agitates45 the steady moonbeam of the waking mind. In a sense he did no more than to state what he found, sometimes in the more familiar language of beauties lost, mourned for lost, and irrecoverable.
'The simple lack
Of her is more to me
Than other's presence,
Whether life splendid be
Or utter black.
'I have not seen,
I have no news of her;
I can tell only
She is not here, but there
She might have been.
'She is to be kissed
Only perhaps by me;
She may be seeking
Me and no other; she
May not exist.'
That search lies nearer to the norm of poetry. We might register its wistfulness, praise the appealing nakedness of its diction and pass on. If that were indeed the culmination46 of Edward Thomas's poetical47 quest, he would stand securely enough with others of his time. But he reaches further. In the verses on his 'home,' which we have already quoted, he passes beyond these limits. He has still more to tell of the experience of the soul fronting its own infinity:—
'So memory made
Parting to-day a double pain:
First because it was parting; next
Because the ill it ended vexed48
And mocked me from the past again.
Not as what had been remedied
Had I gone on,—not that, ah no!
But as itself no longer woe49.'
There speaks a deep desire born only of deep knowledge. Only those who have been struck to the heart by a sudden awareness50 of the incessant not-being which is all we hold of being, know the longing51 to arrest the movement even at the price of the perpetuation52 of their pain. So it was that the moments which seemed to come to him free from the infirmity of becoming haunted and held him most.
'Often I had gone this way before,
But now it seemed I never could be
And never had been anywhere else.'
To cheat the course of time, which is only the name with which we strive to cheat the flux of things, and to anchor the soul to something that was not instantly engulfed—
'In the undefined
Abyss of what can never be again.'
Sometimes he looked within himself for the monition which men have felt as the voice of the eternal memory; sometimes, like Keats, but with none of the intoxication53 of Keats's sense of a sharing in victory, he grasped at the recurrence54 of natural things, 'the pure thrush word,' repeated every spring, the law of wheeling rooks, or to the wind 'that was old when the gods were young,' as in this profoundly typical sensing of 'A New House.'
'All was foretold55 me; naught56
Could I foresee;
But I learned how the wind would sound
After these things should be.'
But he could not rest even there. There was, indeed, no anchorage in the enduring to be found by one so keenly aware of the flux within the soul itself. The most powerful, the most austerely57 imagined poem in this book is that entitled 'The Other,' which, apart from its intrinsic appeal, shows that Edward Thomas had something at least of the power to create the myth which is the poet's essential means of triangulating the unknown of his emotion. Had he lived to perfect himself in the use of this instrument, he might have been a great poet indeed. 'The Other' tells of his pursuit of himself, and how he overtook his soul.
'And now I dare not follow after
Too close. I try to keep in sight,
Dreading58 his frown and worse his laughter,
I steal out of the wood to light;
I see the swift shoot from the rafter
By the window: ere I alight
I wait and hear the starlings wheeze59
And nibble60 like ducks: I wait his flight.
He goes: I follow: no release
Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.'
No; not a great poet, will be the final sentence, when the palimpsest is read with the calm and undivided attention that is its due, but one who had many (and among them the chief) of the qualities of a great poet. Edward Thomas was like a musician who noted61 down themes that summon up forgotten expectations. Whether the genius to work them out to the limits of their scope and implication was in him we do not know. The life of literature was a hard master to him; and perhaps the opportunity he would eagerly have grasped was denied him by circumstance. But, if his compositions do not, his themes will never fail—of so much we are sure—to awaken62 unsuspected echoes even in unsuspecting minds.
[JANUARY 1919.
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1
resonant
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| adj.(声音)洪亮的，共鸣的 | |
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inscribed
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| v.写，刻( inscribe的过去式和过去分词 )；内接 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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fragrance
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| n.芬芳，香味，香气 | |
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evoked
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| [医]诱发的 | |
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testimony
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| n.证词；见证，证明 | |
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8
bugles
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| 妙脆角，一种类似薯片但做成尖角或喇叭状的零食； 号角( bugle的名词复数 )； 喇叭； 匍匐筋骨草； （装饰女服用的）柱状玻璃（或塑料）小珠 | |
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incessant
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| adj.不停的，连续的 | |
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crumbles
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| 酥皮水果甜点( crumble的名词复数 ) | |
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texture
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| n.(织物)质地；(材料)构造；结构；肌理 | |
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12
eternity
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| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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13
warp
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| vt.弄歪，使翘曲，使不正常，歪曲，使有偏见 | |
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14
droop
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| v.低垂，下垂；凋萎，萎靡 | |
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15
loyalties
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| n.忠诚( loyalty的名词复数 )；忠心；忠于…感情；要忠于…的强烈感情 | |
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16
tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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17
hesitations
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| n.犹豫( hesitation的名词复数 )；踌躇；犹豫（之事或行为）；口吃 | |
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18
attachments
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| n.（用电子邮件发送的）附件( attachment的名词复数 )；附着；连接；附属物 | |
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fetters
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| n.脚镣( fetter的名词复数 )；束缚v.给…上脚镣，束缚( fetter的第三人称单数 ) | |
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20
pinnacle
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| n.尖塔，尖顶，山峰；(喻)顶峰 | |
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21
sniff
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| vi.嗅…味道；抽鼻涕；对嗤之以鼻，蔑视 | |
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22
descend
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| vt./vi.传下来，下来，下降 | |
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23
fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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24
wail
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| vt./vi.大声哀号，恸哭；呼啸，尖啸 | |
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25
slants
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| （使）倾斜，歪斜( slant的第三人称单数 )； 有倾向性地编写或报道 | |
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26
virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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27
cadence
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| n.（说话声调的）抑扬顿挫 | |
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28
loyalty
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| n.忠诚，忠心 | |
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29
gainsay
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| v.否认，反驳 | |
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30
thither
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| adv.向那里；adj.在那边的，对岸的 | |
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31
delude
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| vt.欺骗；哄骗 | |
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32
calf
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| n.小牛，犊，幼仔，小牛皮 | |
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33
subtlety
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| n.微妙，敏锐，精巧；微妙之处，细微的区别 | |
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34
beckons
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| v.（用头或手的动作）示意，召唤( beckon的第三人称单数 ) | |
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35
vocal
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| adj.直言不讳的；嗓音的；n.[pl.]声乐节目 | |
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36
obeisance
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| n.鞠躬，敬礼 | |
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37
tunes
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| n.曲调，曲子( tune的名词复数 )v.调音( tune的第三人称单数 )；调整；（给收音机、电视等）调谐；使协调 | |
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38
regains
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| 复得( regain的第三人称单数 )； 赢回； 重回； 复至某地 | |
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39
supremacy
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| n.至上；至高权力 | |
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40
Forsaken
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| adj. 被遗忘的, 被抛弃的 动词forsake的过去分词 | |
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41
vistas
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| 长条形景色( vista的名词复数 )； 回顾； 展望； （未来可能发生的）一系列情景 | |
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42
eddy
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| n.漩涡，涡流 | |
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43
flux
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| n.流动；不断的改变 | |
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44
ripple
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| n.涟波，涟漪，波纹，粗钢梳；vt.使...起涟漪，使起波纹； vi.呈波浪状，起伏前进 | |
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45
agitates
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| 搅动( agitate的第三人称单数 )； 激怒； 使焦虑不安； （尤指为法律、社会状况的改变而）激烈争论 | |
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46
culmination
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| n.顶点；最高潮 | |
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47
poetical
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| adj.似诗人的；诗一般的；韵文的；富有诗意的 | |
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48
vexed
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| adj.争论不休的；（指问题等）棘手的；争论不休的问题；烦恼的v.使烦恼( vex的过去式和过去分词 )；使苦恼；使生气；详细讨论 | |
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49
woe
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| n.悲哀，苦痛，不幸，困难；int.用来表达悲伤或惊慌 | |
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50
awareness
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| n.意识，觉悟，懂事，明智 | |
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51
longing
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| n.（for）渴望 | |
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52
perpetuation
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| n.永存，不朽 | |
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53
intoxication
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| n.wild excitement;drunkenness；poisoning | |
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54
recurrence
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| n.复发，反复，重现 | |
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55
foretold
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| v.预言，预示( foretell的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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56
naught
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| n.无，零 [=nought] | |
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57
austerely
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| adv.严格地，朴质地 | |
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58
dreading
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| v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的现在分词 ) | |
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59
wheeze
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| n.喘息声，气喘声；v.喘息着说 | |
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60
nibble
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| n.轻咬，啃；v.一点点地咬，慢慢啃，吹毛求疵 | |
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61
noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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62
awaken
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| vi.醒，觉醒；vt.唤醒，使觉醒，唤起，激起 | |
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