"Interval"

"Fair after foul weather" -- the subject of my previous post -- got me to thinking about one of my favorite poems by Edward Thomas.  Thomas started writing poetry in December of 1914, and he wrote the following poem during that month.

When Thomas was debating with himself whether to begin writing poetry, Robert Frost suggested to him that he should, as a start, turn some of his descriptive prose passages into verse.  "Interval" is not, unlike some of Thomas's poems, traceable to a specific passage in his prose writings. However, one can see that he took Frost's advice to heart: the first six stanzas are wholly descriptive.  Of course, to call them merely "descriptive" is to sell them short: very few poets (or writers in general) are capable of writing with such deceptively simple depth.

Then, in the final two stanzas, the touch that makes Thomas who he is (and, I believe, a great poet) comes to the fore:  the sudden turn into a wider realm that is intensely personal and, at the same time, common to us all. Very few poets are capable of carrying this off on a consistent basis. Thomas is one of those who does so, again and again.

                                   Robin Tanner, "Martin's Hovel" (1927)

      Interval

Gone the wild day:
A wilder night
Coming makes way
For brief twilight.

Where the firm soaked road
Mounts and is lost
In the high beech-wood
It shines almost.

The beeches keep
A stormy rest,
Breathing deep
Of wind from the west.

The wood is black,
With a misty steam.
Above, the cloud pack
Breaks for one gleam.

But the woodman's cot
By the ivied trees
Awakens not
To light or breeze.

It smokes aloft
Unwavering:
It hunches soft
Under storm's wing.

It has no care
For gleam or gloom:
It stays there
While I shall roam,

Die, and forget
The hill of trees,
The gleam, the wet,
This roaring peace.

Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2008).

Note how each of the first six stanzas is a single sentence.  Each stanza is similar in spirit and in imagery (although not in form) to a haiku.  (I am not suggesting that Thomas modeled the stanzas on the haiku form.  This is simply how they strike me.)  The final two stanzas -- which make the turn into the wider realm -- consist of a single sentence that runs across the stanzas.

As is often the case in Thomas's poetry (and prose), death makes an appearance. But, please note: Thomas is not morbidly obsessed with mortality.  Honesty was always his instinctive governing principle.  If death makes an appearance -- or love or beauty -- so be it.  Whatever is in one of his poems is there because it is true to what Thomas thought and felt.  Remember: "True and not feigning."

                                  Paul Drury, "March Morning" (1933)