Thomas is usually at his weakest where he personifies natural phenomena.

30-1. silence / Stained with all that hour’s songs. When Thomas took opium in his early twenties, it intensified his hearing: ‘I experienced for 1st time since I was about 10 my early wild sensations of silence…It was to ordinary silence what shouting is to speech’ (Diary, 8 March 1901, NLW). H. Coombes says: ‘we feel the silence not only as something enjoyed and as perhaps heralding a near spring but also as the silence which always comes back and which exists at the back of every sound; we note too that for the poet the silence was stained, equivocally but not deprecatingly – stain may beautify or mar, or beautify while it mars’ (HC, 197-8). That Thomas packs so much into ‘silence / Stained’, with its hint of stained glass, its synaesthesia of ear and eye, is one reason for regarding this version of the line as his improvement on that cited below.

Ms: LML. Published text: LP. Differences from CP1978: 15 lost too…chill lost, too,…cold 25 screamed; screamed, 26 soft; soft, 31 Stained with all that hour’s songs Rich with all that riot of songs Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [JT] rather than LP, mainly cognate with another typescript [MET] which [see above] seems preferable on aesthetic grounds.

Old Man (36)

6 December 1914

Appropriately, many experiential and textual strata underlie this poem (for Thomas and memory, see Introduction, 23). Like Up in the Wind, Old Man was first written as prose: ‘Old Man’s Beard’ (LML, 17 November 1914). But, in contrast to the narrative expansiveness of ‘The White Horse’, ‘Old Man’s Beard’ sounds like a prose poem or prose from which poetry is trying to get out. Similarly, the blank verse of Old Man is braced by assonance and refrain, by the ghost of stanzaic structure. In combining blank-verse freedoms (including lines that run to twelve or thirteen syllables) with lyrical intensity, the poem pioneers one of Thomas’s distinctive forms.

Old Man’s Beard

Just as she is turning in to the house or leaving it, the baby plucks a feather of old man’s beard. The bush grows just across the path from the door. Sometimes she stands by it squeezing off tip after tip from the branches and shrivelling them between her fingers on to the path in grey-green shreds. So the bush is still only half as tall as she is, though it is the same age. She never talks of it, but I wonder how much of the garden she will remember, the hedge with the old damson trees topping it, the vegetable rows, the path bending round the house corner, the old man’s beard opposite the door, and me sometimes forbidding her to touch it, if she lives to my years. As for myself I cannot remember when I first smelt that green bitterness. I, too, often gather a sprig from the bush and sniff it and roll it between my fingers and sniff again and think, trying to [remember] discover what it is that I am remembering. [but in vain.] I do not wholly like the smell, yet would rather lose many meaningless sweeter ones than this bitter [unintelligible] one of which I have mislaid the key. As I hold the sprig to my nose and slowly withdraw it, I think of nothing, I see, I hear, nothing; yet I seem too to be listening [as I hold the sprig to my nose and withdraw it], lying in wait for whatever it is I ought to remember but never do. No garden comes back to me, no hedge or path, no grey-green bush called old man’s beard or lad’s love, no figure of mother or father or [chil] playmate, only [an endless] a dark avenue without an end. [Not every erasure has been transcribed.]

On 11 November Thomas had noted: ‘Old Man scent, I smell again and again not really liking it but venerating it because it holds the secret of something very long ago which I feel it may someday recall, but I have yet no idea what’ (FNB79). The plant’s names appear in a list of ‘Associations’ in a 1908 notebook (FNB19); and R. George Thomas quotes from an unpublished story ‘The Old House’ (1909) in which ‘Mr Banks’ sniffs ‘a feathery sprig of grey green’ and tries ‘to think and smell at the same time, closing his eyes, as if he were diving through some new medium into a strange land, – but in vain’ (CP1978, 380).

Memory and childhood gardens come together in Thomas’s prose: ‘I confess to remembering little joy, but to much drowsy pleasure in the mere act of memory. I watch the past as I have seen workless, homeless men leaning over a bridge to watch the labours of a titanic crane and strange workers below in the ship running to and fro and feeding the crane…I recall many scenes: a church and churchyard and black pigs running down from them towards me in a rocky lane – ladslove and tall, crimson, bitter dahlias in a garden – the sweetness of large, moist, yellow apples eaten out of doors – children: I do not recall happiness in them, yet the moment that I return to them in fancy I am happy’ (SC, 127). ‘I once saw a girl of seven or eight years walking alone down a long grassy path in an old garden…For the child there was no end to the path. She walked slowly, at first picking a narcissus or two, or stooping to smell a flower and letting her hair fall over it to the ground; but soon she was content only to brush the tips of the flowers with her outstretched hands, or, rising on tiptoe, to force her head up amongst the lowest branches of cherry-bloom. Then she did nothing at all but gravely walk on into the shadow and into Eternity, dimly foreknowing her life’s days’ (SC, 139-40). ‘[In a friend’s] back garden I first saw dark crimson dahlias and smelt bitter crushed stalks in plucking them. As I stood with my back to the house among the tall blossoming bushes I had no sense of any end to the garden between its brown fences: there remains in my mind a greenness, at once lowly and endless’ (CET, 15-16).