The Annotated Collected Poems by Edna Longley

Author:Edna Longley [Edward Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780370019
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Published: 2012-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

Will you come? (71)

25 March 1915

Most immediately, Will you come? is a love-song. Barker places it among those poems by Thomas that ‘adapt the short song line and exploit its simplicity of cadence to good effect’ (JB, 140). Yet, to quote John Pikoulis, the poem may equally be ‘a direct and passionate appeal to the Muse’ (‘Edward Thomas as War Poet’, JB, 123), and thus concern poetry’s ‘late’ or reluctant advent as much as belated or frustrated love (see note on Thomas’s love poems, 279). As a poem about poetry, or the inability to write it, Will you come? upsets the dynamic balance of Two Pewits. The poems are linked by the verb ‘ride’ and by chiaroscuro imagery; but the former, aligned with creative control, has ceased to govern the latter. The vocative case splits the double act of Two Pewits, and opposites no longer attract. The repeated ‘come’, the fruitless shifts of tense and time-setting, and the increasingly conditional mood dramatise an impasse. The reflexive dialectics between Two Pewits and Will you come? imply that form, like other kinds of integration, must be constantly renegotiated.

Ms: M1, BL. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 25 come, [BL] come [P, PTP] The omission of the comma seems to be an error.

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