There are poems of the natural world, but with human implications, and there are poems with an explicit human content. In considering Tomlinson's work, the distinction, thus qualified, is a useful one. The terms may vary, however, to emphasize different aspects of the antithesis: sometimes the distinction we need to draw is not between the natural and the human, but between poems of perception or stillness or fixed relations in space and poems of process or movement or shifting relations in time. But whatever the subject matter, the experiences treated in Tomlinson's poems belong, conspicuously and emphatically, to one world, irreduceably various but still one world, a natural-human world. The categories of thought by which he organizes his understanding and moral discrimination of human being and action are the same as, or extensions of, those by which he organizes visual experience in his landscape poems.

One way of demonstrating this unity is to bring together several ‘natural’ and ‘human’ poems governed by the same patterns of thought. I have grouped them by motif. Selecting three image-ideas pervasive and fundamental in Tomlinson's work, under each heading—‘Meetings and Encounters’,‘Prospects'and ‘Perfections’— I have collected for comparison poems dissimilar in subject-matter but connected by belonging to a common frame of thought.

Before proceeding to the first of these groupings, however, I want to look closely at one poem, ‘The Atlantic’ (Seeing is Believing, 1958; CP p.17) which in the degree of emphasis laid on the human content stands somewhere between the poems of perception and those that delineate the human scene. It provides a very clear demonstration, on the one hand, of the separate existence of natural processes and human actions and, on the other, of the unity that overrides those differences.

‘The Atlantic’ is a visual and kinaesthetic image of the incoming tide as an assault launched against an immovable object, a perpetual re-enactment of force gathered and expended. As if it were a demonstration of the physical laws governing its motion, in regulated, invariable sequence the wave lifts, hangs and then ‘drops … over and shorewards’.