lack
Of her is more to me
Than other's presence,
Whether life splendid be
Or utter black.

'I have not seen,
I have no news of her;
I can tell only
She is not here, but there
She might have been.

'She is to be kissed
Only perhaps by me;
She may be seeking
Me and no other; she
May not exist.'

That search lies nearer to the norm of poetry. We might register its
wistfulness, praise the appealing nakedness of its diction and pass on.
If that were indeed the culmination of Edward Thomas's poetical quest,
he would stand securely enough with others of his time. But he reaches
further. In the verses on his 'home,' which we have already quoted, he
passes beyond these limits. He has still more to tell of the experience
of the soul fronting its own infinity:--

'So memory made
Parting to-day a double pain:
First because it was parting; next
Because the ill it ended vexed
And mocked me from the past again.
Not as what had been remedied
Had I gone on,--not that, ah no!
But as itself no longer woe.'

There speaks a deep desire born only of deep knowledge. Only those who
have been struck to the heart by a sudden awareness of the incessant
not-being which is all we hold of being, know the longing to arrest the
movement even at the price of the perpetuation of their pain. So it was
that the moments which seemed to come to him free from the infirmity of
becoming haunted and held him most.

'Often I had gone this way before,
But now it seemed I never could be
And never had been anywhere else.'

To cheat the course of time, which is only the name with which we strive
to cheat the flux of things, and to anchor the soul to something that
was not instantly engulfed--

'In the undefined
Abyss of what can never be again.'

Sometimes he looked within himself for the monition which men have felt
as the voice of the eternal memory; sometimes, like Keats, but with none
of the intoxication of Keats's sense of a sharing in victory, he grasped
at the recurrence of natural things, 'the pure thrush word,' repeated
every spring, the law of wheeling rooks, or to the wind 'that was old
when the gods were young,' as in this profoundly typical sensing of 'A
New House.'

'All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learned how the wind would sound
After these things should be.'

But he could not rest even there. There was, indeed, no anchora