Letter from Edward Thomas to the poet Gordon Bottomley. Sent from Dolau Cothi Arms, Pumsaint, Carmarthenshire. Archival ref: 424/1/1/1/10/160
“ Dolan Cothi Arms”
Carmarthenshire
19 IX 11.
My dear Gordon
When I am at Swansea I always get a letter from you, and I am sorry I didn’t answer it from there last week. But I wrote off at once to Thorpe about the Welsh folklore. I left home nearly 3 weeks ago in rather a worse state than usual. I have been trying to rest but can only do so up right. So I am learning to saunter instead of swinging along as I used to even when tired : it is all the easier because I am so weak. I suppose it is continual slight worry and the recunidaian of sins and years that has done it. A breakdown would be far better because it would make rest inevitable.
I wish I knew what “Welsh metrics amount to”. There is I believe a good deal that Welsh is the only key to : many tales of the princes : The Mabinogion is the only viable translation of Welsh, even the considerable - like the “ four bodies of Ancient Welsh “ - are few. Shall I send Marie Trevelyan’s collection of Glamorgan folk stories? These are crude at times but usually quite literal and unpretending. If I hear of the other book of course you would like that first. Probably I shall be home in a week and will call at Thorpe’s on my way.
Perhaps I did say something inaccurate about (illegible). Very likely. But I hope I did not imply that poetry could not be naked. I think it can and it was not because it approached nakedness that I thought “Marianne” near prose. It was only because I found no effects in it which was not the sum of its parts, - I was going to say its words. But how do I know? I have thought and said many fuddled things in those late hurry I worry
of many books 1 x big garden. We are thinking of a cottage and a village school (or an intermediate school) as a solution- to reduce the necessity for more over production. But we are likely to leave it to fate to compel us to something in the end.
I have been staying first at Swansea looking at the smoke the chimneys the mountains and the sea and then in a big village with the bard Gwili. I can’t imagine what his poetry is like but it might be good. He is in many ways a coarse barbarian outwardly but with a near fineness of spirit as well as a twist of English culture. Oxford in 3 years didn’t even teach him to eat silently. It taught him a little Greek and to take his own boots off which his mother or some other woman always used to do. He is 39 and a boy, but fit, scant of teeth. I only understand half he says because he laughs continually. He is not the bard in “Rest, Unrest” tho the bard’s mother and sister are his mother’s sister . It was like stupidity not to make the thing above his suspicion. He hasn’t seen it yet. I wish he had and ignored or forgiven it.
It is being discussed whether I shall do books on Pater and Swinbourne and Borrow and De Quincy. Laugh then pity me. I both laugh and pity myself. I am also offering to do a book on Wales again, “not verse now, only prose”. i.e. with an honest topophilical basis. My “Icknield Way” has been the stepping stone to this possibility- More than half of it is quite literal and open to everyone to check. Check! —, Gordon, my Gordon, - but that is only half sincere, I am really beginning to see myself. I suppose it is a good thing. Will mystery or the light of (illegible) succeed to the mist to it cried to (illegible) mystery?
My love to you and Emily
ET.
Don’t write here. I am walking about while the fine weather lasts, with nothing but comb, toothbrush, maps, and Shakespeare’s Histories.