Soldiers in line, young English countrymen,
Fair-haired and ruddy, in white tunics. Drums
And fifes were playing “The British Grenadiers.”
The men, the music piercing that solitude
And silence, told me truths I had not dreamed,
And have forgotten since their beauty passed.
The emotion is nameless and indescribable, but the poet has intensely felt it and transmitted it to us who read his poem, so that we, too, feel it with the same intensity. Different aspects of this same nameless emotion of quiet happiness shot with melancholy are the theme of almost all Thomas’s poems. They bring to us precisely that consolation and strength which the country and solitude and leisure bring to the spirits of those long pent in populous cities, but essentialized and distilled in the form of art. They are the light that makes young again the tattered leaves.
Of the purely æsthetic qualities of Thomas’s poetry it is unnecessary to say much. He devised a curiously bare and candid verse to express with all possible simplicity and clarity his clear sensations and emotions.... “This is not,” as Mr. de la Mare says in his foreword to Thomas’s Collected Poems, “this is not a poetry that will drug or intoxicate.... It must be read slowly, as naturally as if it were prose, without emphasis.” With this bare verse, devoid of any affectation, whether of cleverness or a too great simplicity, Thomas could do all that he wanted. See, for example, with what extraordinary brightness and precision he could paint a picture:
Lichen, ivy and moss
Keep evergreen the trees