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.’
