See, too, ‘The Perfume of an Evening Primrose’, W.H. Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia (1893).

1. Old Man, or Lad’s-love: folk-names of the long-cultivated plant ‘southern-wood’ or artemisia abrotanum, which played a continuing part in Thomas’s life and now grows on his grave in Agny. A mundane explanation for the plant’s contradictory names is that the former derives from its silvery-‘feathery’ foliage (‘old man’s beard’ as a name for ‘traveller’s joy’ derives from that plant’s seed-heads); the latter from its use in lovers’ bouquets – hence another folk-name: ‘maiden’s ruin’. Old Man, with its bitter taste as well as scent, has many traditional uses in herbal medicine, and is combined ‘with rosemary and lavender’

for drawer sachets etc. Writing from Wick Green in April 1910, Thomas told Gordon Bottomley: ‘The Old Man or Lad’s Love you gave me is now a beautiful great bush at my study door’ (LGB, 201). A cutting from this bush was planted in the Thomases’ garden at Yew Tree Cottage: the poem’s immediate setting. ‘I hope you have a dooryard as neat as ours is, with all the old man & rosemary & lavender strong & the vegetable rows fairly continuous & parallel & the may thick in the hedge’ (RFET, 57).

6-8. Half decorate, half perplex…And yet I like the names. Stuart Sillars argues that Thomas’s approach to language anticipates the poststructuralist stress on the non-identity of word and thing: ‘dissolution of self and dissolution of language in relation to objects’ (Structure and Dissolution in English Writing [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999], 178). Besides pondering contradictory names, Old Man variously terms its central image ‘herb’, ‘bush’, ‘almost a tree’. Yet, rather than an insuperable gulf between the human mind and the world it aspires to name, such variants may mark their fluid intercourse in time and space. Thus Thomas brings the different faces of ‘Old Man’ closer together in the freshly coined oxymoron ‘hoar-green’. Cf. the metamorphoses traced in Fifty Faggots (see note, 240). Thomas recoiled from Walter Pater’s style precisely because ‘We are forced to regard the words as words, and only in part able to think of the objects denoted by them’ (WP, 125). At one level, Old Man reflects on poetry-as-language. The poem begins with (or from) the allure of words (‘decorate’); then probes their failure to pin down ‘the thing it is’ (‘perplex’). But this discrepancy or mystery, perhaps the founding impulse of poetry, neither invalidates the poet-speaker’s ‘liking’ for words, nor cancels their associations with the phenomenal world, even if ‘the things are forgotten, and it is an aspect of them, a recreation of them, a finer development of them, which endures in the written words’ (RJ, 298). Poetry, like memory, functions at a remove: further mysteries are latent in the conundrum of ‘how much’ the child ‘will remember’.

10. the child: Myfanwy Thomas, on whom (as in Snow and The Brook) Thomas usually bases his generic ‘child’. In the Romantic tradition, he situates children close to the threshold of vision. The speaker’s own consciousness moves between adult and childhood selves.

14-15. perhaps / Thinking, perhaps of nothing: a rhetorically cunning line-break. The verb ‘think’ is as central to the poem as the verb ‘remember’. The tension between them suggests that memory, and certain kinds of ‘meaning’, operate in zones unreachable by the conscious mind or zones that only poetry might reach: ‘try /…to think what it is I am remembering’ (lines 27-8). In l.33, where ‘thinking of nothing’ becomes scarier, ‘nothing’ carries its full weight as ‘no thing’.

19-24. And I can only…Forbidding her to pick. As with the speculative movement of the opening lines, Thomas plays syntax against metre. This rhythmical crescendo, like its darker counterpart (lines 36-9), emerges from ‘Old Man’s Beard’.