Mother, the root of this little yellow flower
Among the stones has the taste of quinine.
Things are strange today on the cliff. The sun shines so bright,
And the grasshopper works at his sewing-machine
So hard. Here’s one on my hand, mother, look;
I lie so still. There’s one on your book.
This item is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); © Edward Thomas, 1979, reproduced under licence from Faber and Faber Ltd.
‘The Child on the Cliffs’, March 1915, owes little to the notebook jottings that had formed some of the prose inspirations for Thomas’s earlier poems and is, instead, a hauntingly eerie evocation of childhood. The child asks his mother if she can hear what he can hear, ‘Far out’ over the sea, and this is clearly in reference to the sound of bells which seem to come from below the waves:
Fishes and gulls ring no bells. There cannot be
A chapel or church between here and Devon,
With fishes or gulls ringing its bell,—hark!—
Somewhere under the sea or up in heaven.
Writing to Eleanor Farjeon Thomas expressed his liking for this poem and explained that it was
‘a memory between one of my young brothers and myself which he reminded me of lately. He was most of the child and I have been truthful. I think I can expect some allowances for the “strangeness” of the day.’
As Edna Longley points out there is a tension in the poem between the word ‘strange’ and the world of familiarity. The scene is a domestic one with the child sitting close to his mother who is reading but there is an uncanny atmosphere which is heightened by the sun shining ‘so bright’ and the merging of the grasshopper with a little old lady working on her sewing-machine. The associations here are with the world of fairy-tale. In the second stanza the grasshopper is then seen as a figure from medieval fable, ‘a green knight’, and the boy can see ‘a white arm’ stretching out of the sea as if in an Arthurian romance. In the manuscript version of this poem the image is even more threatening, a ‘white beseeching arm’, as if the boy is being beckoned to join the world of the submerged Coed Arian (Silver Wood) drowned in Swansea Bay.