Published text: AANP, LP.

Interval (39)

December 1914

For date, see general note to After Rain (154). While After Rain and Interval seem closely linked by December weather and moods, the latter’s aural rather than visual emphasis echoes a passage in The South Country: ‘The wind reigns …in the surging trees…yet in the open there is a strange silence because the roar in my ears as I walk deafens me to all sound…And yet once more the road pierces the dense woodland roar, form and colour buried as it were in sound’ (SC, 217-18).

3. makes way. ‘I mean in “Interval” that the night did postpone her coming a bit for the twilight. Night might have been expected to come down on the end of day and didn’t. “Held off” would have been stricter’ (EF, 110). ‘Makes way’, which suggests that night relinquishes a position already gained, aligns ‘brief twilight’ with unexpected remission in some psychic ‘storm’. Cf. The Ash Grove (l.5), where the word ‘interval’ also has temporal, spatial and psychological aspects.

22. Unwavering. The contrast with ‘Uncountable’ (After Rain, l.24) stakes out the poems’ shared poles of stability and flux.

24. ‘…“under storm’s wing” was not just for the metre’ (EF, 110).

32. This roaring peace. Cf. ‘stormy rest’. The oxymorons of Interval, set off by the poem’s strong beat and short line, complement the tessellated effects of After Rain. For Vernon Scannell: ‘all Edward Thomas’s poems show a deliberate and fruitful opposing of contrasting moods and attitudes and a counterpoising and reconciling of the language in which these attitudes are embodied. They reflect the ceaseless inner conflict and the struggle for peace which never seemed to give him respite. [Interval] shows clearly the way in which Thomas used opposites to create associative tensions which move gradually towards the final reconciliation of “This roaring peace”, the calm which is actually a suspended violence’ (VS, 17-18).

Ms: none. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 1 day: day. 6-8 Mounts and is lost / In the high beech-wood / It shines almost. Mounts beneath pines / To the high beech wood / It almost shines. 15 Above, the cloud pack Above it the rack 29 Die, Die Note: CP1978 follows a typescript [MET] rather than P. At the points of difference, MET seems rhythmically cruder.

The Other (40)

December 1914

For date, see general note to After Rain (154). The Other reads like a prophetic microcosm of Thomas’s brief poetic career. Its allegorical landscape – in part, a transposed Wiltshire – spans his poetic habitats, and contains the seeds of later poems. As in The Signpost, but more elaborately, he adapts folk motifs (forest, haunted quest, helpers and frustrators of the questing hero, the Doppelgänger legend, signs and omens) to modern psychodrama. His symbolism of the journey taps into its archetypal sources. The result is what Louis MacNeice, in Varieties of Parable (London: Faber, 1965), calls ‘parable’ or ‘double-level writing’.