Cf. ‘nameless’, ‘flowerless’, ‘beeless’, ‘lightless’, ‘footless’, ‘sunless’, ‘branchless’. ‘Windless’ (Sowing) and ‘stormless’ (Haymaking) are more positive instances.

32. When all was open and common: an allusion to the time before the major phase of land enclosure, initiated by the government in 1760, sealed the transition from feudal to modern tenure. Even before the industrial revolution, this shift accelerated emigration from country to city. The girl’s story points to more recent rural depopulation (see Introduction, 23). The inn’s apparently odd position is due to the fact that ‘before the common of Froxfield, called the Barnet, was enclosed [in 1805] and farmed, an old road from Alton to Petersfield…came across the plateau past the inn, where a smithy and a pond met some other needs of eighteenth century travellers’ (WW, 32). The White Horse, known as ‘the pub with no name’ (because of the absent sign), also as ‘the highest pub in Hampshire’, currently flourishes amid further socio-economic and gastronomic shifts.

Ms: LML. Published text: CP1920. Differences from CP1978: 1 here! there! 3 such-like suchlike 9 London, London 10 the those 35/41 ‘The White Horse’ the ‘White Horse’ 45 homely, too, homely too 46 that knows who knows 50 inn; inn: 63 again – again, / – 64 ale ale, 72 these…gone: those…gone. 77 should could 79 a public-house and not a hermitage not a hermitage but a publichouse 90 the pond our pond 93 were was 96 wood fire woodfire 98 me: me. 106 distant far off Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [JT], which seems earlier than the typescript [MET] followed here as, except for minor discrepancies, in CP1920. CP1920, CP1928 and CP1944 omit ‘a’ before ‘waste’ in l.36.

November (34)

4 December 1914

FNB79 indicates Thomas’s obsession with weather: ‘After yesterday’s rain and a dull showery morning a glorious high blue winter [?sky]’, ‘up and down in deep muddy lanes among hopgardens’ (1 November 1914); ‘lovely cold bright pale blue cloudless day, almost windless after heavy rime frost’ (24 November); ‘a fine bright morning then sunny drops slanting a few in a sprinkle, then heavy rain and a blue and black sky where wind comes from. Then at 12-3 bright sun, clear sweet cold sky with a few white clouds low – the sky so bright and clear and clean, the roads all muddy with mashed leaves and twigs, and bare hedges and sodden fields. Clear till moon rise (big full white moon towards East and sun going crimson cloudless in West – When Jupiter was visible at 4.45 there was some wet sandcoloured cloud in West – a big rag of it. Beautiful hobnail pattern on path over reddish light ploughland’ (1 December); on opposite page: ‘fields stamped over by sheep – mud and mangolds’.

On 15 December Thomas accepted Frost’s criticisms of November and rejoiced in his first poetic riff: ‘I am glad you spotted “wing’s light word”. I knew it was wrong & also that many would like it; also “odd men” – a touch nearing facetiousness in it. I’ve got rid of both now. But I am in it & no mistake…I find myself engrossed & conscious of a possible perfection as I never was in prose’ (RFET, 38-9). The typescript sent to Frost has ‘And in amongst them clearly printed / The foot’s seal and the wing’s light word’ (lines 6-7) and ‘Only odd men (who do not matter) / Care’ etc (lines 11-12).

1. November’s days are thirty. Thomas liked ‘weather rhymes’ (see Lob, 100-1), which his own poems often are.

5-7. dinted…overprinted…charactered. These verbs imply a penetrating poetic ‘eye’ (l.33) that reads landscape like a text or palimpsest. The poem proceeds to a microscopic analysis of ‘mud’.

16. Condemned as mud: cf. ‘Few care for’ (l.12) and ‘all that men scorn’ (l.14). This sequence of phrases asserts an aesthetic that notices what other poets miss: ‘it is characteristic of modern poetry, as a criticism of life by livers, that it has left the praise of rain to hop farmers and of mud to shoe-blacks’ (RAP, 42).

21. after-tempest cloud: a favourite adjectival construction, cf. Two Pewits (‘after-sunset sky’), and in prose: ‘The moon was mounting the clear east, and Venus stood with Orion in the west above a low, horizontal ledge of darkest after-sunset cloud’ (IPS, 74).