Sam Reads Poetry

Old Man

Old Man, or Lad’s-love – in the name there’s nothing
To one that knows not Lad’s-love, or Old Man,
The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree,
Growing with rosemary and lavender.
Even to one that knows it well, the names
Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:
At least, what that is clings not to the names
In spite of time. And yet I like the names.

The herb itself I like not, but for certain
I love it, as some day the child will love it
Who plucks a feather from the door-side bush
Whenever she goes in or out of the house.
Often she waits there, snipping the tips and shrivelling
The shreds at last on to the path, perhaps 
Thinking, perhaps of nothing, till she sniffs
Her fingers and runs off. The bush is still
But half as tall as she, though it is as old;
So well she clips it. Not a word she says;
And I can only wonder how much hereafter
She will remember, with that bitter scent,
Of garden rows, and ancient damson-trees
Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door,
A low thick bush beside the door, and me
Forbidding her to pick.

			As for myself,
Where first I met the bitter scent is lost.
I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,
With no meaning, than this bitter one.

I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember:
No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush
Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end. 

Edward Thomas

Why I like it:

I read this to one of my senior English classes, and the stillness in the room as I got into the poem had me feeling quite exposed, like I was reading from my own diary. I guess that comes down partially to Thomas being a poet who feels close to my heart, and partially due to his being such a disarming and intimate writer.

I think the first hush came over the class as I read the line “And yet I like the names.” There’s something about this line – maybe its unexpected simplicity as an answer to such a complex philosophical question: what do names do? Do they decorate a thing? Perplex it? We name a thing and call it that for centuries, or millennia, and yet nothing in the thing itself retains that name – it takes our calling it that to keep the name alive. And what is the thing itself, anyway? I hear that question implied here too. “What that is”, he calls it. Not “the herb itself” yet – just, “what that is”. Because “herb” is another name. He strips the thing of all names here. 

I’m reminded of a story about a teacher interested in zen, who holds up a piece of chalk and asks his class, “what is this?”, and when a student inevitably answers “a piece of chalk,” he answers “no, it’s this!” and throws the chalk at them. 

What is a name? What is a thing? Endless literature has been written on that kind of question. Here, Thomas simply says, “And yet I like the names.” I have to wonder if the student had said “I like it” in response to the teacher’s question, if he would have been satisfied and not thrown the chalk. 

—

This poem stands simultaneously at the end of memory, as a man looking back, following a scent that he’s smelled before, and at the beginning of a memory, as a child walking through the scene, seeing the sights and smelling the smells that will eventually, possibly, comprise a memory. It’s incredibly fortunate that this poem should have been written about a plant with both the common names “Old Man” and “Lad’s-love”. Even in the name of the thing there’s a question not just of what the thing is, but when it is. 

Of the two, Thomas chooses “Old Man” for the title, and the poem ultimately sides with that end of memory. In this poem I hear the question, is memory an act of creation, or a process of dissolution? Is it the daughter, who unthinkingly participates in what will become a memory, or is it the man, in whom the memory of the thing has become so vague that it has lost all connotation. Interestingly, the meaning-making-mind, that hyper-active component of the human brain, is quiet on both ends. The girl is “perhaps thinking, perhaps of nothing” – may not remember any of this. The man remembers nothing. Both experiences feel naked and meaningless, which, when you’re a child is delightful, and when you’re grown is terrifying.

Speaking of nakedness: I’ve remembered the line “I have mislaid the key” since I first read this poem seven or eight years ago. When do we feel more naked than when we suddenly realize we have no access to shelter? Clothes suddenly feel insignificant at those times. What a potent metaphor for memory that is – the idea that the memory alone isn’t enough: you have to remember the key, too. Here the speaker is caught outside his own memory, even though he knows it must be there. So often, smells are the key to a memory, but here, the speaker finds the smell, the name of the thing, and even the scene of a new little life going through the act of memory-making the way he must have also done once, to be insufficient.

A note on the form:

The punctuation in this poem does a lot for the intimacy of its tone. The first 12 lines of the poem can be divided into three 4-line units, where each unit ends with a period (full end-stop). The regularity of this meter mirrors the measured pace of the speaker’s thinking in these lines. Rather than end the second stanza after 8 lines, two of these end-stopped 4-line-units, as he did the first stanza, the 8th line is enjambed, running into the next, as is the 12th, and the 16th is end-stopped with a comma instead of a period. This more fluid section of the poem describes a little girl whimsically picking at a plant and running off. The sound makes sense. The lines only meet a full end-stop again when describing the man, “forbidding her to pick.” 

When we come to the penultimate stanza, the fourth line, where we might have come to expect an end-stop, is the only line that doesn’t end in punctuation, and so the poem builds momentum. The following stanza, compared to the rest of the poem, is full of caesura (punctuation within the line, rather than at its end), and is constantly throwing us from one line into the next with colons and semicolons. The stanza, with stops where you expect continuity, and continuity where you expect stops, tumbles into the final, heavily punctuated image of “an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.” The speaker has become choked up, as he realizes where his thought is going, and has to push each word out individually, the way we say things that we really don’t want to say.