We were sealed thus,
Like tombs. Nor until now could I admit
10 That all I cared for was the pleasure and pain
I tasted in the stony square sunlit,
Or the dark cloisters, or shade of airy plane,
While music blazed and children, line after line,
Marched past, hiding the ‘Seventeen Thirty-Nine’.
What will they do when I am gone? It is plain
That they will do without me as the rain
Can do without the flowers and the grass
That profit by it and must perish without.
5 I have but seen them in the loud street pass;
And I was naught to them. I turned about
To see them disappearing carelessly.
But what if I in them as they in me
Nourished what has great value and no price?
10 Almost I thought that rain thirsts for a draught
Which only in the blossom’s chalice lies,
Until that one turned back and lightly laughed.
Rise up, rise up,
And, as the trumpet blowing
Chases the dreams of men,
As the dawn glowing
5 The stars that left unlit
The land and water,
Rise up and scatter
The dew that covers
The print of last night’s lovers –
10 Scatter it, scatter it!
While you are listening
To the clear horn,
Forget, men, everything
On this earth newborn,
15 Except that it is lovelier
Than any mysteries.
Open your eyes to the air
That has washed the eyes of the stars
Through all the dewy night:
20 Up with the light,
To the old wars;
Arise, arise!
When first I came here I had hope,
Hope for I knew not what. Fast beat
My heart at sight of the tall slope
Of grass and yews, as if my feet
5 Only by scaling its steps of chalk
Would see something no other hill
Ever disclosed. And now I walk
Down it the last time. Never will
My heart beat so again at sight
10 Of any hill although as fair
And loftier. For infinite
The change, late unperceived, this year,
The twelfth, suddenly, shows me plain.
Hope now, – not health, nor cheerfulness,
15Since they can come and go again,
As often one brief hour witnesses, –
Just hope has gone for ever. Perhaps
I may love other hills yet more
Than this: the future and the maps
20 Hide something I was waiting for.
One thing I know, that love with chance
And use and time and necessity
Will grow, and louder the heart’s dance
At parting than at meeting be.
‘He rolls in the orchard: he is stained with moss
And with earth, the solitary old white horse.
Where is his father and where is his mother
Among all the brown horses? Has he a brother?
5 I know the swallow, the hawk, and the hern;
But there are two million things for me to learn.
‘Who was the lady that rode the white horse
With rings and bells to Banbury Cross?
Was there no other lady in England beside
10 That a nursery rhyme could take for a ride?
The swift, the swallow, the hawk, and the hern.
There are two million things for me to learn.
‘Was there a man once who straddled across
The back of the Westbury White Horse
15 Over there on Salisbury Plain’s green wall?
Was he bound for Westbury, or had he a fall?
The swift, the swallow, the hawk, and the hern.
There are two million things for me to learn.
‘Out of all the white horses I know three,
20 At the age of six; and it seems to me
There is so much to learn, for men,
That I dare not go to bed again.
The swift, the swallow, the hawk, and the hern.
There are millions of things for me to learn.’
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
5 Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.
Many a road and track
That, since the dawn’s first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
10 Deceived the travellers
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.
Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends,
15 All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.
There is not any book
20 Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter and leave alone,
I know not how.
25 The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
30 And myself.
The long small room that showed willows in the west
Narrowed up to the end the fireplace filled,
Although not wide. I liked it. No one guessed
What need or accident made them so build.
5 Only the moon, the mouse and the sparrow peeped
In from the ivy round the casement thick.
Of all they saw and heard there they shall keep
The tale for the old ivy and older brick.
When I look back I am like moon, sparrow and mouse
10 That witnessed what they could never understand
Or alter or prevent in the dark house.
One thing remains the same – this my right hand
Crawling crab-like over the clean white page,
Resting awhile each morning on the pillow,
15 Then once more starting to crawl on towards age.
The hundred last leaves stream upon the willow.
It stands alone
Up in a land of stone
All worn like ancient stairs,
A land of rocks and trees
5 Nourished on wind and stone.
And all within
Long delicate has been;
By arts and kindliness
Coloured, sweetened, and warmed
10 For many years has been.
Safe resting there
Men hear in the travelling air
But music, pictures see
In the same daily land
15 Painted by the wild air.
One maker’s mind
Made both, and the house is kind
To the land that gave it peace,
And the stone has taken the house
To its cold heart and is kind.
Some day, I think, there will be people enough
In Froxfield to pick all the blackberries
Out of the hedges of Green Lane, the straight
Broad lane where now September hides herself
5 In bracken and blackberry, harebell and dwarf gorse.
Today, where yesterday a hundred sheep
Were nibbling, halcyon bells shake to the sway
Of waters that no vessel ever sailed…
It is a kind of spring: the chaffinch tries
10 His song. For heat it is like summer too.
This might be winter’s quiet. While the glint
Of hollies dark in the swollen hedges lasts –
One mile – and those bells ring, little I know
Or heed if time be still the same, until
15 The lane ends and once more all is the same.
Out in the dark over the snow
The fallow fawns invisible go
With the fallow doe;
And the winds blow
5 Fast as the stars are slow.
Stealthily the dark haunts round
And, when a lamp goes, without sound
At a swifter bound
Than the swiftest hound,
10 Arrives, and all else is drowned;
And star and I and wind and deer
Are in the dark together, – near,
Yet far, – and fear
Drums on my ear
15 In that sage company drear.
How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
20 If you love it not, of night.
The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow
And true love parting blackens a bright morrow.
Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair
Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear
5 Above the storm the heavens wait to be seen.
But greater sorrow from less love has been
That can mistake lack of despair for hope
And knows not tempest nor the perfect scope
Of summer, but a frozen drizzle perpetual
10 Of drops that from remorse and pity fall
And cannot ever shine in the sun or thaw,
Removed eternally from the sun’s law.
Up in the Wind (31)
3 December 1914
Edward Thomas’s field notebook for October-December 1914 (FNB79) contains jottings that enter his first poems. Here anticipations of Up in the Wind are set out like poetry: ‘I could wring the old girl’s neck / That put it here / A public house! (Charcoal burner) / But she’s dead long ago / by bringing up and quite outdoing / The idea of London / Two woods around and never a road in sight / Trees roaring like a train without an end / Only a motorist from far away / Or marketers in carts once a fortnight / Or a few fresh tramps ignorant / of the houselessness’. On 27 November Thomas noted: ‘Clothes on the line violently blowing in wind crackle like a rising woodfire’. Up in the Wind, like Old Man, also began as a prose sketch: ‘The White Horse’ (LML, 16 November). In each case, comparison between the two versions suggests what it means to move from one medium to the other. The setting of Up in the Wind and ‘The White Horse’ is a pub on the Froxfield plateau, above Steep, in the parish of Prior’s Dean.
The White Horse
Tall beeches overhang the inn, dwarfing and half hiding it, for it lies back a field’s breadth from the byroad. The field is divided from the road by a hedge and only a path from one corner and a cart track from the other which meet under the beeches connect the inn with the road. But for a sign board or rather the post and empty iron frame of a signboard close to the road behind the hedge, a traveller could not guess it an inn. The low dirty-white building looks like a farmhouse, with a lean-to, a rick and a shed of black boarding at one side; and in fact the landlord is more than half farmer. Except from the cottages which are scattered far around, only one of them visible from the inn, customers are few. And yet it is almost at a crossing of roads. One field away from the field with the signpost the byroad crosses a main road at a high point on the table land: the inn itself stands so high that its beeches mark it for those who know and form a station for the eyes of strangers, many miles away on 3 sides. But both roads lack houses and travellers, especially on the main road, are motorists from the ends of the earth and farmers going to market from remote villages. The main road runs for one length of 4 miles without a house of any sort. Once the land was all common. Many acres of it are still possessed by gorse and inhabited chiefly by linnets and a pair of stone curlews. The name of Common clings to it though it is hedged. Gorse and bracken mingle with the hedgerow hawthorns and keep memories of the old waste alive. Few trees of any age stand alongside the road, and as the hedges are low and broken, and everywhere gorse is visible, even the [traveller] stranger has whiffs of the past and tastes something like the olden sensation of journeying over wide common, high and unpopulated, higher than anything except Butser Hill far behind him and Inkpen far before him northward.
The farmhouses naturally then are placed far back behind the gorse or the fields once belonging to it and are reached by lanes of various lengths out of the main road.
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