The first ‘voice’ speaks for (what should have been) zestfully confident youth. In fact, the gloom-quotient in Thomas’s early letters and diaries supports the second voice’s point that self-doubt is not age-specific. Seemingly older and wiser, like ‘another’ in November, this voice speaks for earthly existence with all its necessities and contradictions. Notes for the poem include: ‘When – / Will there come a day /When I could wish to be alive / Somehow 20 or 40 or not’ (FNB79).

11. One hazel lost a leaf of gold. This shorter line and a flattening out of stress in its first three syllables intensify ‘loss’. The contrasting anapaestic beat of l.12 epitomises a larger counterpoint between lyrical and folk-verse rhythms in Thomas’s couplets: tradition and the individual talent also meet at the signpost. Delicate variations of stress enhance the eerie setting: ‘chill’ sea, ‘shy’ sun, ‘skeleton weeds’. These images are among the ‘signs’ that the poem ‘reads’. But when the second voice takes over, stressed and unstressed syllables become more sharply distinguished, rhymes and line-endings more emphatic. ‘Be’, significantly, is rhymed three times.

13, 21. ’twould…’Twill. Such dialect contractions, most frequently ‘’twas’, recur in Thomas’s poems, not only where (as in Man and Dog) country people are speaking or spoken with. Depending on context and tone, Thomas also switches between them and Standard English in first-person lyrics. Indexed to the poem’s urgency, ‘’twas’ occurs four times in March. It appears in the last line of Ambition (an ironical usage); in l.39 of May 23 (a celebratory usage); and in l.4 of Home (81, an affirmative usage). But he slowed down ‘’Twas June’ in Adlestrop (l.4) to ‘It was late June’. According to his brother Julian, Thomas wished to make his later prose ‘as near akin as possible to the talk of a Surrey peasant’ (quoted, CET, Preface, 6). In The Signpost such talk adds to the archetypal aura, as do phrases like ‘it must befall’ and ‘between death and birth’. For Thomas’s interest in proverbial speech, see general note to Lob (215).

21-9. and your wish may be…out in the air. After reading ‘poems abounding in references to a future life’, Thomas reflected: ‘If we survived – “we” in any real sense – what joy could it be if from our thoughts this life were blotted?…And how “heavenly”? if we know not the lives beneath us, as poets and scientists know’ (Diary, 22 November 1901, NLW). ‘The life of Tirnanoge was all beautiful, being of a kind that men have always refused to think possible, because it was active and full of variety yet never brought death or decay, weariness or regret. This cannot easily be imagined by earthly men. They say that perfect happiness would be dull if it were possible. If they could imagine it, they would not love it so utterly when they possessed it like Ossian; many would refuse it because it wipes out the desire and the conscious memory of earth’ (CS, 78). Thomas often quotes or misquotes Wordsworth’s affirmation that ‘the very world’ (‘earth’ in Thomas’s versions) is ‘the place where in the end / We find our happiness, or not at all’ (1804 poem on the French Revolution). Even ‘a mouthful of earth’ is not a wholly ironical ‘gift’. Homesickness for earth, as predicted in these lines, also amounts to an ars poetica. Thomas lays out the conditions and materials of his poetry; sets its diurnal/seasonal coordinates; and attaches his underlying artistic ‘voice’ to someone ‘Standing upright out in the air /Wondering…’.

30.