Wondering where he shall journey, O where?’ In coming full circle, the poem confirms a preference for earthly doubts over heavenly answers. To be is a question.

Ms: LML. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 5 the traveller’s-joy traveller’s-joy 14 see, see 24 birth, – birth, 27 Spring, – Spring, Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [MET] where it diverges from P.

After Rain (38)

14 December 1914

After Rain is the first poem in Thomas’s working notebook M1. No manuscript of the four poems printed next in this edition (Interval, The Other, Birds’ Nests, The Mountain Chapel) survives. Nor can any of these poems be precisely dated (some may antedate After Rain), although they were written before The Manor Farm (24 December). All five poems have been placed in a sequence chosen by the editor.

‘Each autumn a dozen little red apples hung on one of [the apple-tree’s] branches like a line of poetry in a foreign language, quoted in a book’ (HGLM, 145). ‘[?]Dripping clear (wind light) after days of rain and about 12 yellow apples are scattered smooth bright all over big crab in leafless dark copse…all boughs and berries plastered with raindrops…Rain shines on boughs and drops on dead leaves Stone has a green edge of grass but also under that a purple narrowed edge of dead moist leaves thick together’ (14 December, FNB79). As Coombes says, an ‘interesting “rain” anthology could be compiled from Thomas’s writings’ (HC, 89):

At all times I love rain, the early momentous thunder-drops, the perpendicular cataract shining, or at night the little showers, the spongy mists, the tempestuous mountain rain. I like to see it possessing the whole earth at evening, smothering civilisation, taking away from me myself everything except the power to walk under the dark trees and to enjoy as humbly as the hissing grass, while some twinkling house-light or song sung by a lonely man gives a foil to the immense dark force. I like to see the rain making the streets, the railway station, a pure desert, whether bright with lamps or not. It foams off the roofs and trees and bubbles into the water-butts. It gives the grey rivers a daemonic majesty. It scours the roads, sets the flints moving, and exposes the glossy chalk in the tracks through the woods. It does work that will last as long as the earth. It is about eternal business. In its noise and myriad aspects I feel the mortal beauty of immortal things. (SC, 274-5)

The ‘myriad aspects’ of rain are central to Thomas’s symbolism. It can suggest an alien or alienated ‘immense dark force’ (Rain) or softer qualities and a more sympathetic universe: ‘Half a kiss, half a tear’ (Sowing). In After Rain it is ‘both dark and bright’: a destroyer that has ravaged the scene (perhaps also interior) and a creator, an artist, adding new beauties.

17-18. like little black fish, inlaid, / As if they played. In Thomas’s fantasy ‘The Castle of Leaves’ children watch, when the castle falls, ‘the dead leaves swim by like fishes, crimson and emerald and gold’ (HGLM, 214). Thomas maintained a polite argument with Eleanor Farjeon over these lines: ‘“As if they played” I was anxious to have in. It describes the patterns of the fish but it comes in awkwardly perhaps after inlaid.’ Six days later: ‘I wonder whether I can do anything with “inlaid” and “played”. The inlaid, too, is at any rate perfectly precise as I saw the black leaves 2 years ago up at the top of the hill, so that neither is a rhyme word only’ (EF, 110-11). ‘Inlaid’ is an inlaid word.

24. Uncountable. This one-word, off-rhymed, run-on line breaks the poem’s formal mould just as it and the rainless lull end. Also placed in a sequence of liquid sounds, the line brims with the subliminally therapeutic return of rain. Thomas employs the same ‘limping’ couplet form to different effect in Head and Bottle.

Ms: M1.