I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence

[larryhammer]

A Monday is a poetry Monday, and Monday is today, so here's a poem. Again, a bit longer than my rule of thumb but too good not to share:


Roads, Edward Thomas

I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favorite gods.

Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.

On this earth 'tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:

The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.

They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only.

From dawn's twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.

The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
Ancl black, may Hell conceal.

Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary,
As it winds on for ever.

Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
And the Mabinogion tales,
Is one of the true gods,

Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
That by the roadside be,

And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead;
And it is her laughter

At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer

Calls back to their own night
Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps’ press,
As Helen’s own are light.

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
and their brief multitude.


I haven't been able to confirm the date of composition, but this was first published in Last Poems and seems clearly to have been written after his enlistment as a soldier, and so it almost certainly a response to Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," which was written about Thomas and his habitual indecisiveness -- and which provoked Thomas into enlisting (further details). (Contrariwise, the Poetry Foundation thinks Frost was responding to this poem -- and that essay's worth reading too.)

---L.

Subject quote from "The Road Not Taken," Robert Frost.

Comments

[sovay]

The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favorite gods.

This is my favorite image of the poem, although "Now all roads lead to France" is the famous one, but the second verse makes me wonder where Tolkien fits in.

[larryhammer]

Indeed. The poem's content is strong throughout, but no imagery is quite as strong as the opening.

I also wonder about this poem's influence on Auden.

[sovay]

I also wonder about this poem's influence on Auden.

I'm missing the reference.

[larryhammer]

Echoes in "Spain," mostly. Glancing around, I don't see much use of that image cluster -- roads to Auden are more transformations than destinies.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I did not know that about Thomas! About "The Road Not Taken," I mean.

[larryhammer]

I knew it was for/about Thomas, as that's mentioned in a lot of anthology intros, but not the full context.

[sovay]

I knew it was for/about Thomas, as that's mentioned in a lot of anthology intros, but not the full context.

I didn't know until I read this article a couple of years ago, and then I wished my high school English teacher had mentioned it. All of the Frost I read otherwise was just in collections that my parents or grandparents owned.