‘After-tempest’ appears in a passage that parallels the trajectory of lines 28-36: ‘Just before night the sky clears. It is littered with small dark clouds upon rose, like rocks on a wild and solitary coast of after-tempest calm, and it is infinitely remote and infinitely alluring. Those clouds are the Islands of the Blest. Even so alluring might be this life itself, this world, if I were out of it’ (SC, 216).

28-36. One imagines…skies. The ‘one’ who ‘imagines a refuge’, and fails to grasp the interdependence of ‘earth’ and ‘sky’, may represent Thomas’s former literary self. Romantically vague language (‘in the pure bright’) parodies the writer who could ask of sunset clouds in ‘Recollections of November’ (HS, 86-102): ‘To what weird banquet, to what mysterious shrine, were they advancing?’ ‘Another’ (l.31), whose ‘clear’ sight seems endorsed by the poem, knows how to value ‘earth and November’. Despite the second stanza’s skyward movement, ‘earth’ occurs five times, exerting a gravitational rhythmic pull. The dialectic here resembles that at the end of The Signpost (see note, 153).

Ms: LML. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: title: November [P] November Sky Note on title: CP1978 follows a typescript [JT]. ‘Sky’ is cancelled in PTP.

March (35)

5 December 1914

March complements November. Together they initiate the seasonal movement that occurs between, and within, many of Thomas’s poems. They also promise that his diurnal time-settings (a day’s seasons) will be precise. March may be a direct result of Frost’s telling Thomas to turn passages from In Pursuit of Spring into poetry (see Introduction, 15). Reciprocally, March may have influenced Frost’s ‘Our Singing Strength’, in which a snowstorm prompts massed birds to ‘sing the wildflowers up from root and seed’. The first chapter of In Pursuit of Spring records volatile March weather:

Snow succeeded, darkening the air, whitening the sky, on the wings of a strong wind from the north of north-west, for a minute only, but again and again, until by five o’clock the sky was all blue except at the horizon, where stood a cluster of white mountains, massive and almost motionless, in the south above the Downs, and round about them some dusty fragments not fit to be used in the composition of such mountains. They looked as if they were going to last for ever. Yet by six o’clock the horizon was dim, and the clouds all but passed away, the Downs clear and extended; the blackbird singing as if the world were his nest, the wind cold and light, but dying utterly to make way for a beautiful evening of one star and many owls hooting.

The next day was the missel-thrush’s and the north-west wind’s. The missel-thrush sat well up in a beech at the wood edge and hailed the rain with his rolling, brief song; so rapidly and oft was it repeated that it was almost one long, continuous song But as the wind snatched away the notes again and again, or the bird changed his perch, or another answered him or took his place, the music was roving like a hunter’s…

…[days] of cloudy brightness, brightened cloudiness, rounded off between half-past five and half-past six by blackbirds singing. The nights were strange children for such days, nights of frantic wind and rain, threatening to undo all the sweet work in a swift, howling revolution. Trees were thrown down, branches broken, but the buds remained…With the day came snow, hail, and rain, each impotent to silence the larks for one minute after it had ceased. (IPS, 26-7)

Thomas writes of another March evening: ‘All the thrushes of England sang at that hour, and against that background of myriads I heard two or three singing their frank, clear notes in a mad eagerness to have all done before dark; for already the blackbirds were chinking and shifting places along the hedgerows’ (IPS, 178).

March blends several March days and Thomas’s perennial ‘pursuit of Spring’ into a quintessential symbol. He identified with an English Spring’s halting progress: In Pursuit of Spring takes three hundred pages to find ‘Winter’s grave’. A favourite poem was William Morris’s ‘The Message of the March Wind’: ‘Fair now is the springtide, now earth lies beholding / With the eyes of a lover, the face of the sun…’ Given the radical thrust of Morris’s ‘message’, March may have Romantic-visionary as well as psychological resonances. At one level, the irrepressible birdsong, and the way in which it energises the rhythm, affirm Thomas’ paradoxical ‘hoar Spring’ (It was upon) as man and poet. In celebrating Spring’s moral victory here, he celebrates his own. He, too, would ‘pack into that hour / [His] unwilling hoard of song’.

7-9. The sun…tears of joy. Cooke finds these lines ‘unsatisfactory’ (WC, 130), because they approach too nearly the inflated style of a prose equivalent: ‘Day after day the sun poured out a great light and heat and joy over the earth and the delicately clouded sky…So mighty was the sun that the miles of pale new foliage shimmered mistily like snow’ (LAT, 1).