‘Forbidding her to pick’ evokes the Garden of Eden. Its wording and placing make the prohibition more forbidding than in the prose.

39. Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end. Here Thomas presents a prospect of ‘dissolution’ (see note on lines 6-8). But this pole of his dialectic may have less to do with the arbitrariness of language than with a psychic split in the speaker, or a cognitive breach between humanity and earth, or both. Yet, at all its removes from various origins, the poem itself serves as transposed memory. More disturbingly, it may ‘remember the future’.

Ms: LML. Published text: AANP, LP.

The Signpost (37)

7 December 1914

The Signpost may be in subtextual dialogue with Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth…

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Frost conceived ‘The Road Not Taken’ as a parody of Thomas, consciously assuming his friend’s more hesitant personality: ‘While living in Gloucestershire in 1914, Frost frequently took long walks with Thomas through the countryside. Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a “better” direction’ (SLRF, xiv). But Cooke questions Frost’s story as an ‘attempt to veil …secret places of his mind from the over-curious’ (WC, 206). Certainly, Frost objected to readers taking the ‘sigh’ of his last line straight, rather than as an ironical implication that no real ‘difference’ is at stake. On 26 June 1915 he wrote to Thomas: ‘I wonder if it was because you were trying too much out of regard for me that you failed to see that the sigh was a mock sigh, hypo-critical for the fun of the thing. I dont suppose I was ever sorry for anything I ever did except by assumption to see how it would feel. I may have been sorry for having given a certain kind of people a chance at me: I have passionately regretting exposing myself’ (RFET, 70). Here Frost is replying to a letter in which Thomas had both accepted the ‘sigh’ at face value, and represented ‘choice’ as illusory: ‘It is all very well for you poets in a wood to say you choose, but you don’t. If you do, ergo I am no poet. I didn’t choose my sex yet I was simpler then. And so I can’t “leave off” going in after myself tho some day I may’ (RFET, 63-4). Frost’s wariness of being seen to sigh and Thomas’s compulsion to ‘go in after myself’ cast light on their aesthetic ‘divergences’.

Even if he did not altogether know himself, Frost knew Thomas. That this poem’s ‘I’ (pursuing a kind of static quest) never leaves the signpost reflects patterns elsewhere: ‘I could not decide. If I went on foot, I could do as I liked on the Plain. There are green roads leading from everywhere to everywhere. But, on the other hand, it might be necessary at that time of year to keep walking all day, which would mean at least thirty miles a day, which was more than I was inclined for’ (IPS, 16). ‘I looked at my maps. Should I go through Swindon, or Andover, or Winchester, or Southampton? I had a mind to compass all four; but the objection was that the kinks thus to be made would destroy any feeling of advance in the journey’ (IPS, 26-7). The moral map (above all, the choice between enlisting and going to America) also exacted obsessive deliberation or retrospection. Thomas would ‘spend hours, when I ought to be reading or enjoying the interlacing flight of 3 kestrels, in thinking out my motives for this or that act or word in the past until I long for sleep’ (LGB, 129). With its echo of folk-tales in which travellers fatefully choose their road, The Signpost gives Thomas’s poetic journey ‘in after’ himself an archetypal starting-point. If his poems are stages in a quest or question, it stands as question mark.

8-10. A voice says…never been born.