It is worth a guinea a mile he says, but he has grown fat on the beer which his daughters draw. On the wall of the taproom is a list of the officers of a slate club and also coloured diagrams illustrating certain diseases of the cow. The room smells as much of bacon and boiled vegetables as of ale and shag, and it is often silent and empty except for a painted wooden clock ticking loudly above the fire. Yet it is one of the pleasantest rooms in Hampshire, well deserving the footpaths which lead men to it from all directions over ploughland and meadow, and deserving as good a story as a man could write. [Not every erasure has been transcribed.]

Up in the Wind is Thomas’s closest approximation to the Robert Frost “eclogue” in which rural speakers tell or act out their story. In Frost’s dramatic monologue ‘A Servant to Servants’ a disturbed woman talks to strangers about her hard life in a lonely place. Yet, despite Frostian echoes, and the poets’ shared symbolism of houses and trees, Thomas establishes distinctive poetic co-ordinates. He sets London against ‘wild’ land, society (‘public-house’) against solitude (‘hermitage’). And he shows his power to imagine the English countryside historically. The poem traces shifting relations between family history and socio-economic history, between landscape and rural work. In Stan Smith’s words: ‘It compacts into a brief space an individual narrative which has the generations behind it’ (SS, 159).

1. ‘I could wring the old thing’s neck that put it here! In the poem, the woman’s voice becomes the main narrative voice. By giving primacy to speech-rhythms, Thomas lays down an aesthetic marker. A sixth of the poem’s blank-verse lines are monosyllabic (the proportion is high in Frost’s eclogues) and many have eleven or more syllables.

9. forest parlour. By replacing ‘taproom’ with ‘parlour’, Thomas brings ‘wild’ and ‘homely’ (l.45) into tension.

12-13. flashed up…shriek. These verbs (‘shriek’ recurs) might seem to exaggerate the girl’s ‘wildness’, but they signal its later inward turn. Her brooding on ‘wind’ prepares for the more purely psychological scenario of Wind and Mist.

15. I might have mused of coaches and highwaymen. William Cooke comments: ‘If Thomas had forced the “story” in 1911 it might have appeared as one of the romantic tales in Light and Twilight’ (WC, 166). He quotes from a passage in The Isle of Wight which also fertilised The Chalk-Pit (see 237): ‘there are other places which immediately strike us as fit scenes for some tragic or comic episode out of the common. I know a little white inn standing far back from the road, behind a double row of noble elms – an extraordinary combination, this house no bigger than a haystack, and these trees fit to lead up to a manor house where Sidney or Falkland was once a guest. You approach the inn from the road by crossing a stile and following a path among a tangle of gorse which is much overgrown by honeysuckle. Well, I never see this place, the gorse, the great trees, the house at their feet, without a story haunting my mind but never quite defining itself. To others more ready of fancy it is no doubt already a scene of some highway robbery, with blunderbusses, masks, pretty ladies, and foaming horses’ (IOW, 29). Yet the passage as a whole prefigures the poetic strategy whereby Thomas splits perspectives between different voices. Another speaker says: ‘I don’t know why you should want to fit a story to a scene like that. I am quite willing to wait until the tragedy or comedy arrives’ (IOW, 30).

20. houseless: a word, and construction, that Thomas repeats – perhaps because it combines presence and absence.