’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 anchorage in the enduring to be found by one so keenly aware of the flux within the soul itself.  The most powerful, the most austerely imagined poem in this book is that entitled ‘The Other,’ which, apart from its intrinsic appeal, shows that Edward Thomas had something at least of the power to create the myth which is the poet’s essential means of triangulating the unknown of his emotion.  Had he lived to perfect himself in the use of this instrument, he might have been a great poet indeed.  ‘The Other’ tells of his pursuit of himself, and how he overtook his soul.

  ’And now I dare not follow after
  Too close.  I try to keep in sight,
  Dreading his frown and worse his laughter,
  I steal out of the wood to light;
  I see the swift shoot from the rafter
  By the window:  ere I alight
  I wait and hear the starlings wheeze
  And nibble like ducks:  I wait his flight. 
  He goes:  I follow:  no release
  Until he ceases.  Then I also shall cease.’