LITMIR.BIZ

       2

       Poetry and Oral Literature

      [The Forest miners] singing their yearning hymns through the dark, wet woods on their way home.

      Dennis Potter¹

      In Thomas’s writings he alluded to a language of the physical environment, an anonymous language residing in features of the land or in the birdsong that emanates from it. He repeatedly examined the distance between this language and contemporary human forms of articulation like human song, speech or poetry. However, he also used oral tradition to link the language inscribed in or expressed by the physical environment to the written text of poetry. Such language of oral tradition is a near cousin to the language of the land, sharing its quality of anonymity, distanced from it only relatively recently, and holding within it records of the land, as Thomas made clear in his preface to the retold legends in Norse Tales (1912):

      These stories are taken from poems in the Old Norse tongue. The stories, created in the ninth and tenth centuries, remain in touch with ancient pagan traditions. Their names have been lost, their poems confused and mutilated, in the course of a thousand years. Even the land where they wrote is unknown, and scholars have tried to discover it from the nature of the landscape and the conditions of life mentioned in the poems.²

      This link with the land helps explain the power Thomas saw imbued in oral tradition, positing it as a key to the invigoration of imaginative writing in his time:

      I cannot help wondering whether the great work done in the last century and a half towards the recovery of old ballads in their integrity will have any effect … Can it possibly give a vigorous impulse to a new school of poetry that shall treat the life of our time and what in past times has most meaning for us as freshly as those ballads did the life of their time? It is possible; … their style is commonly so beautiful, their pathos so natural, their observations of life so fresh, so fond of particular detail – its very lists of names being at times real poetry.³

      Thomas’s early championing of the poet W. H. Davies was closely connected with his sense of the importance of oral tradition to poetry. His first review of Davies, in 1905, highly favourable, was given the title ‘A Poet At Last!’⁴ He supported Davies in other ways. Almost immediately after their first meeting, Thomas invited Davies to share his study cottage, which Davies did for over a year. After that period, Thomas continued working very closely with him, advising and encouraging him as a poet and frequently reviewing him. He presented Davies to the public as an exciting and unusual figure, emphasizing his unique success as a contemporary writer in remaining in connection with the neglected heritage of folksong, ballads and the oral tradition. He described Davies’s work as part of ‘an old literary mode charmingly and unconsciously revived, without any sense of artifice’, and praised Davies’s drinking songs in New Poems (1907) for ‘their vigour, their truth, their splendid spirit [which] is inestimable’. It is clear that, for Thomas, Davies formed a model of the invigorating power of old songs. Davies’s poems represented the ‘vigorous impulse’ referred to in The South Country in two ways. They were a source of stimulation for further ‘vigorous’ writing by Davies or other poets, and also embodied the results of such an impulse. Thomas attributed their vigour to Davies’s refreshing and unusual lack of education and literary knowledge, writing that his poetry came from a ‘strange, vivid, unlearned, experienced’ condition and quoting G. B. Shaw’s response to Davies’s collection, The Soul’s Destroyer, as a delight in its ‘freedom from literary vulgarity … like a draught of clear water in a desert’.⁵

      Thomas made use of the ‘vigorous impulse’ of old songs and ballads in his own mature poetry, composed several years after the discovery of Davies’s work. A considerable number of Thomas’s poems lean significantly on traditional oral sources: his two ‘Old Songs’; his three ‘Songs’, as they were entitled in the 1978 edition of his poems; the reference to traditional music in ‘The Penny Whistle’; the reinvigoration of a ballad in ‘The Ash Grove’; and the reworking of proverbs and folk tales in ‘Lob’. ‘An Old Song II’ refers directly to the practice of drawing on folk lyric. The speaker imitates the song of a robin, also represented as a shade, shadow or echo. The word ‘repeat’ refers to the refrain from the folksong around which the whole poem is built. Thus, four lines of the poem comprise a neat acknowledgement of the debt it owes to birdsong and folksong:

      A robin sang, a shade in shade:

       And all I did was to repeat:

       ‘I’ll go no more a-roving

       With you, fair maid.’⁶

      These lines also evoke Thomas’s comment to Farjeon on 2 August 1914: ‘I may as well write poetry’, beginning ‘at 36 in the shade’, thus reinforcing the reading of these lines of ‘An Old Song II’ as an allusion to his debt as a poet to ballad, song and forgotten verse ‘in the shade’.⁷

      BEGINNING AGAIN: RETURNING TO THE OLD LORE

      To make new boots from the remains of old

       Oxford English Dictionary ⁸

      The final years of the nineteenth century corresponded with the beginning of Thomas’s writing career. Linda Dowling’s Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle observes the growing doubts at this time about the imaginative life of English literary language. She connects this with nineteenth-century developments in comparative philology, referring to the ‘fin de siècle linguistic self-consciousness as it floated between the artificial dialect of literature and the “barbaric yawp” of vernacular speech’. She writes:

      Spoken dialects, that is to say, not only more perfectly reflected language reality than did written languages; they also persisted in their linguistic purity, whereas written languages, already falsified by orthography, compounded their falsity by incorporating the vogue words and constructions of civilized fashion. Thus did nineteenth-century linguistic science end by fully ratifying Wordsworth’s belief in rural speech as the real language of men, and by deeply undermining Coleridge’s idea of literature and the literary dialect as a lingua communis.⁹

      Dowling’s reference to rural speech as ‘real language’ resonates with Thomas’s preference for the spoken vernacular and oral tradition. This was clearly stated by him in September 1913, the same month he attempted his own ‘ember’ / ‘September’ poem, when he extolled the poems of one contemporary, Ralph Hodgson, for their pre-Victorian, pre-Keatsian flexibility: ‘They recall what poetry was before Keats and Tennyson had so adorned it that it could run and sing too seldom, when words were, and more often than they now are, dissolved and hidden in the beauty which they created.’¹⁰

      Thomas’s reviews often show him rejecting the more embellished poetic diction of recent Victorian verse and harking back to a Wordsworthian or pre-Wordsworthian approach to language. He praised Davies for writing ‘much as Wordsworth wrote, with the clearness, compactness, and felicity which makes a man think with shame how unworthily … he manages his native tongue’.¹¹ Frost was applauded for the way in North of Boston he cast off out-worn literary conventions and ‘refused the “glory of words” which is the modern poet’s embarrassing heritage’. North of Boston was also lauded for its ‘natural delicacy like Wordsworth’s, or at least Shelley’s, rather than that of Keats’.¹²

      Thomas’s dissatisfaction with an ‘embarrassing heritage’

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