Sunday 6 January 2013

Edward Thomas - 'The Father Of Us All'


Two years ago, I attended a lecture by Matthew Hollis on Edward Thomas at the Ways With Words Festival at Dartington Hall. However, it was not until last November, when I was reading the Sunday Times Culture Section, that I was struck by a curiosity to find out more about him. 
 


In direct contrast to the vitriolic verse of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and the patriotic poetry of Rupert Brooke, is the oeuvre of Edward Thomas, whose poems do not deal directly with the war that shaped his final years, but are perhaps one of the most moving memorials to it. His closest friend, fellow poet Robert Frost, spoke thus of Thomas’s poetry: ‘He didn’t think of it for a moment as war poetry, though that is what it is. It ought to be called Roads to France.’ Against an evocative backdrop of lyricism, his work illuminates the innocent world left behind; yet it is what Thomas does not say in his poems that renders them so poignant.

            In a recent article for the Sunday Times, A.A. Gill observed that ‘the bright and dreadful canon of poetry that is the cultural orphan of the Great War has been repeated so often and so mellifluously that it loses its hard focus. Not its power, exactly, but as with great music used to sell sliced bread and holidays, the misuse of its power grates.’ Robert Fisk had previously tuned into such a feeling in an article for The Independent last year, where he too reflected on how the true meaning and potency of things is diluted by misappropriation and overuse. Fisk made the point that, ‘All kinds of people who had no idea of the suffering of the Great War – or the Second, for that matter – were now ostentatiously wearing a poppy for social or work-related reasons, to look patriotic and British when it suited them, to keep in with their friends and betters and employers.’ It is his belief, instigated by his father, that in the century that has passed since WWI, poppies have lost their actual purpose, and that the soldiers’ ‘sacrifice has been turned into a fashion appendage.’ Gill does not seek to suggest that those prodigious poems grown from the seed of WWI should be made redundant; he instead proposes a candidate for the greatest war poet of that era that may surprise some of his readers, as his choice does not seem the most obvious of contenders: he argues it is to Edward Thomas that we should look.

            Thomas never intended to be a poet; he made his living instead as a freelance writer and critic, yet he was discontent with the work he was given, tormented by feelings of failure from having to fulfill his contractual obligations, and plagued by depression for the duration of his life. Encouraged by Frost, however, Thomas began to turn his ear towards a different form of writing: that which is metrical and memorable, driven by rhythms of speech. Both he and Frost entertained similar ideas concerning poetry, observing with a measure of disdain the florid bombast of the Georgians and the acute self-awareness of the Imagists, the two main poetic bodies at that period. It was Frost’s theory that good poetry finds its provenance in the ‘sound of sense’, where the lines communicate tonally as well as literally. Rhythms of speech should guide the ear when writing; ‘words exist in the mouth, not in books.’ Thomas too had developed these opinions that, without cadence, a poem contains no aural relish, and can appeal only to the intellect. When the two poets met, their common beliefs were evident, and on long ‘talks-walking’, a meeting of minds was established through their ideas about the hallmarks that elevated verse: speech rhythms, uncluttered diction, cadence, auditory appeal and sound-sense. It was this friendship that ultimately proved to be the catalyst for one of the most fertile outpourings of poetry, before Thomas’s tragic death on Easter Monday 1917 at the Battle of Arras.

            He became a fruitful producer of verse after deciding to try his hand at poetry in November 1914; writing ten poems in two weeks, he continued at this prolific rate for the remainder of his life, penning 144 poems in the space of under two and a half years. He was never without a notebook, in which he jotted down observations of his surroundings; this proved invaluable in his poetry writing, as he found a cornucopia of ideas from his previous prose. Perhaps his best-loved, and most anthologized poem is ‘Adlestrop:

Yes, I remember Adlestrop --
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop -- only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

            Written in 1915, and published three weeks after Thomas’s death, this gently wistful poem portrays an overwhelming bucolic scene which is imbued with a deep nostalgia for the countryside of England. It is what is not said that renders it a compelling war poem; the implicit regret for a time that was rapidly becoming engulfed by the war creates a deeply moving poem, one that Ivor Gurney would describe as ‘nebulously intangibly beautiful.’ It is interesting to note, however, that this poem finds its roots in the soil of prose written on 24th June from the previous year; travelling with his wife Helen from Paddington to Malvern, Thomas noted:

‘Then we stopped at Adlestrop, tro the willows cd be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12:45 & one thrush & no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam. Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willow herb & meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel- looking out on great dry stones between metals & the shiny metals & over it all the elms willows & long grass- one man clears his throat- and a greater rustic silence. No house in view. Stop only for a minute until signal is up.’

             1915 saw several poems written that could be interpreted as war poetry. ‘A Private’ reads:

This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors
Many a frozen night, and merrily
Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:
"At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush," said he,
"I slept." None knew which bush. Above the town,
Beyond `The Drover', a hundred spot the down
In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps
More sound in France -that, too, he secret keeps.

This reflects not on the brutal death of an unknown soldier on the fields of No-Man’s Land, but is rather an understated, euphemistic tribute to his reserved life in England, with the title containing a subtle double entendre. It is typical of Thomas in these lines to blend events of the war with ones in England; he links the death of a soldier with a habitual action of happier days, and the contrast between the two is poignant.

            Throughout his life, Thomas was surprised by and loathed in equal measure the propaganda, jingoism and racism incited by nationalists and the press, and ‘This Is No Case Of Petty Right Or Wrong’ is perhaps his angriest response to the war. In it, we are given a truly patriotic view, which contrasts with Rupert Brooke’s more conventional and idealistic opinions: Thomas, an avid birdwatcher and plant expert, who once claimed his truest fellow co-nationals were the birds, saw the countryside with an intense emotional realism, and, at times, the poem appears almost as an ode to ‘an England clear and beautiful’. Furthermore, this poem was written several months after Thomas had voluntarily enlisted to fight: a testament to his deep love of his country. When questioned why, as a married man too old to be conscripted, he had chosen to join the army, his response was to pick up a handful of dirt and reply, ‘Literally, for this.’

This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
Beside my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true:-
A kind of god he is, banging a gong.
But I have not to choose between the two,
Or between justice and injustice. Dinned
With war and argument I read no more
Than in the storm smoking along the wind
Athwart the wood. Two witches' cauldrons roar.
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
Out of the other an England beautiful
And like her mother that died yesterday.

Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
The phoenix broods serene above their ken.
But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate our foe.

            Thomas feels no hate for the Germans, but no love either for his narrow-minded, nationalist countrymen. Instead, his love for his country is stemmed from what it truly is, and not created through a hatred of the enemy: he even goes as far as to exercise a degree of admiration for Kaiser Wilhelm, who is a ‘kind of god… banging his gong.’

            There is no evidence to suggest that Thomas was ever in the company of his contemporary W.B Yeats, but it seems likely that their paths would have crossed in the small sphere of London poetry. However, during his work as a reviewer, Thomas appraised the Irishman’s work fourteen times between 1902 and 1913, and felt that his reputation was ‘not only assured, but pre-eminent among the distinguished poets still in their prime.’ He admired him greatly, and, when reading his poetry, perceived: ‘I seem to find, with astonishment, that verse is the natural speech of men, as singing is of birds’; this concept would become fundamental to Thomas’s own poetry a decade on.

            ‘This Is No Petty Case Of Right Or Wrong’ is redolent of Yeat’s ‘An Irish Airman Forsees His Death’, written three years on. Lines such as ‘Those that I fight I do not hate/ Those that I guard I do not love’ chime with ‘I hate not Germans, nor grown hot/ With love of Englishmen,’ whilst ‘Nor law, nor duty bade me fight/ Nor public man, nor cheering crowds/ A lonely impulse of delight/ Drove to this tumult in the clouds’ is reminiscent of Thomas’s message as well: both men are concerned with carrying out actions through a true love of something.

            A master of the brief lyric, in ‘In Memoriam’ [Easter 1915], Thomas shows how the war invades even pastoral England, so beloved to him:
           
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.

An economic, yet profoundly moving poem, this concise, four-line vignette contemplating the loss suffered back in England is infused with a deep sense of grief. There is a profusion of flowers, but no men to pick them: ironically, the reader is reminded of death through Nature’s excess. Using a heart-wrenching syntax, Thomas allows his reader the tantalising possibility that perhaps the men will be returning to their loved ones, before snatching this away through the final four words.

            Mirroring this poem is another, written the following year, entitled ‘The Cherry Trees’:

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding,
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.

            Many parallels can be drawn between this and ‘In Memoriam’. They both take the form of elegiac quatrains, with an ABAB rhyme contained in a sophisticated, yet succinct, stanza. They are also both concerned with the tragedy of the losses sustained during World War I, and use Nature as a vessel to demonstrate the painful echoes of the conflict, and the absences that it creates. The shedding of the blossom is a reminder of life’s transience; more poignant still is the second line, where the reader is informed that the soldiers that passed gaily along the road on their way to war are now dead, as was the case with many young men who departed for France. The petals are like confetti on a wedding day, but there is no longer anyone present to wed, as Thomas confirms in the shattering final line. Like the abundance of flowers in ‘In Memoriam’, the ‘early May morn’ in the idyllic English countryside now serves as a reminder of the thousands of soldiers dying on foreign soil. Again, both poems offer a morsel of solace, which is then swiftly removed: the prospect that the petals are being strewn for a wedding gives hope that perhaps there will be one in the near future; this is then eradicated by the direct reminder that there are ‘none to wed.’

            In his study, ‘A Literary Pilgrim In England’, Thomas visited those places that were special to writers, from William Blake and John Keats in London and the Home Counties, to Robert Burns and R.L Stevenson in Scotland, and William Wordsworth and Emily Bronte in the North. He may have drawn on this experience, adopting the persona of a literary wayfarer, to write ‘The Owl’:

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved,
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the north wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry.

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.
And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered too, by the bird's voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

            The opening word, ‘downhill’, is an authorial nudge that indicates failure and depression. The first consonant heard is hard and offers no respite to the listener; it is akin to the start of Wilfred Owen’s, ‘The Send-Off’: ‘Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way.’ Echoed at the end of the line in ‘starved’, they act almost as bookends; there are many more dental consonants to be found, however, in words such as ‘cold’, ‘against’ and ‘tired’. The owl’s call is no source of joy; Thomas instead intends this as a lament, showing the loss and unhappiness of a country endangered by the darkness of war. The fate of those soldiers is present in many of his poems, and, as Owen said, ‘The poetry is in the Pity.’ Thomas shows himself again to be an engaging elegist for an England that was changing even as he wrote.

            He is the subject of a recent play, ‘The Dark Earth and the Light Sky’, which explores the final years leading up to his death, centred on his turbulent relationship with his wife Helen, his uplifting friendship with Frost, and his transition to verse, as he mined a rich seam of expression. One focus of the play is Thomas’s compulsive walking; he was, in essence, a tramp, and this exercise was one of the few activities that could raise him from the depression that he was so often overwhelmed by. Three weeks into the war, he was walking with Frost, and, observing the scenery around him, jotted in his notebook:

‘A sky of dark rough horizontal masses in N.W. with a 1/3 moon bright and almost orange low down clear of cloud and I thought of men east-ward seeing it at the same moment. It seems foolish to have loved England up to now without knowing it could perhaps be ravaged and I could and perhaps would do nothing to prevent it.’

            He may have been indifferent to the politics of the war, but it was these feelings, a deeper awareness of the plight of his country, that led Thomas to enlist as a soldier. It is also speculated that Frost’s poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’, contributed to his decision to join up, which ultimately led to his death. Thomas showed a keen interest in roads; they are one of the most frequent objects of his work, as well as his means of journeying. One poem, simply entitled ‘Roads’, is purely a celebration of just these, and commences with the gently praising statements:
I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favourite gods.

Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.

            However, Thomas is not to be mistaken for merely a pastoral poet; his work teems with ghosts. The final three stanzas reflect this:

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.

            In typical Thomas style, he writes understatedly, and with nimbleness to his words.  Professor Peter Sacks said of them: ‘Sinuous, deft, wedding speech and song in their syntactic and prosodic mastery, the poems lightly mould themselves to a shape which they seem to hold without clutching. They move as Thomas would have walked - lithely, observantly, not wishing to disrupt the stir or shieldings of life along the edges of his path.’ These unsettling verses above are perhaps a reflection of his disturbed state of mind, yet, ‘Now all roads lead to France’ is a most decisive line, showing his final choice with regard to the war and his part in it. His job as a map-instructor in England in the army was perfectly sufficient for a man of his age, yet he was adamant that he desired more, and persistently requested to be sent to the front line. Upon arrival in France, his spirit was not daunted, and he thrived in the war environment; whilst not a violent man, it appears that he felt fulfilled when defending England. He was still greatly preoccupied by his surroundings, which possibly weighed on his mind more than the actual conflict: seldom did he look out over no-man’s land and contemplate the human suffering. Despite the proximity of the German trenches, brief notes from his diary in the early months of 1917 reveal his true thoughts, with observations on nature present in nearly every entry:

February 23rd- ‘The shelling must have slaughtered many jackdaws but has made home for many more.’
February 25th- ‘Chaffinches and partridges, moles working on surface… Does a mole ever get hit by a shell?’
March 11th- ‘At 6:15 all quiet and heard blackbirds chinking. Scene peaceful, desolate like Dunwich moors except sprinkling of white chalk on the rough brown ground.’
March 31st- ‘Blackbirds in the clear cold bright morning early in black Beaurains. Sparrows in the elder of the hedge I observe through a cherry tree just this side of the hedge makes a projection in trench with its roots. Beautiful clear evening everything dark and soft.’
April 5th- ‘Sods in f/c’s dugout begin to be fledged with fine green feathers of yarrow - yarrow. Beautiful pale hazy moonlight and the sag and flap of air.’

On the last pages of the diary, he simply recorded:

‘The light of the new moon and every star
And no more singing for the bird…
I never quite understood what was meant by God
The morning chill and clear hurts my skin while it delights my mind.
Neuville in early morning with its flat crest with trees and houses - the beauty of this silent empty scene of no inhabitants and hid troops, but didn’t know why I could have cried and didn’t.’

Pencilled on the back of a scrap of paper were also found the lines:

‘Where any turn may lead to Heaven
Or any corner may hide Hell
Roads shining up like river up hill after rain.’
           
            He may have written verse for only a short period of time, but Thomas’s enduring work has not diminished in its poignancy or impact. Much of it was engendered by the war, but he did not allow it to be overwhelmed by the conflict and negativity. Although his subject choices are not particularly grand, the crisp yet graceful execution of his poems provides a deep insight into the loveliness of England. The seamless and skilful marriage of pastoral charm with the slaughter of warfare is a testament to his poetic ability, which flourished rapidly during those fleeting years, and there is a hint of the numinous in his work, fringing both his private elation with the beauty he witnessed, and despair at the destruction around him.  Thomas gave life to a whole new way of considering poetry, in relation to the ordinary speech of humans, and employed those everyday phrases and rhythms into his own work. Other poets have since paid homage to him: Dylan Thomas recorded that, ‘The shy, passionate love he breathed into his compassionate poems lives now in a number of people. His love has multiplied. He has grown, simply and surely, into our language’; Ted Hughes distilled it to ‘He is the father of us all.’