For Edward Thomas

Tomorrow will be the 100th anniversary of the death of Edward Thomas at the Battle of Arras.  In 1917, April 9 fell on Easter Monday.

Thomas wrote the following poem on April 6, 1915:  two days after Easter Sunday.  He enlisted three months later.

               In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)

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.

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

At times, Thomas's poetry sounds like an anticipatory, exploratory elegy for himself.  Which is not to say that his poetry is "confessional" or self-obsessed.  Rather, it is simply the case that he had an elegiac view of the World:  he was always  aware that he was a small part of a World that is ceaselessly passing and vanishing.  He was forever saying farewell.

             How at Once

How at once should I know,
When stretched in the harvest blue
I saw the swift's black bow,
That I would not have that view
Another day
Until next May
Again it is due?

The same year after year --
But with the swift alone.
With other things I but fear
That they will be over and done
Suddenly
And I only see
Them to know them gone.

Edward Thomas, Ibid.

This is a variation upon "First Known When Lost," which he wrote a year and a half earlier:  "I never had noticed it until/'Twas gone . . ."

John Nash (1893-1977), "A Gloucestershire Landscape" (1914)

I suspect that more poems have been written about Edward Thomas than about any other English poet.  Elected Friends: Poems for and about Edward Thomas (compiled by Anne Harvey) (Enitharmon Press 1991) collects 80 poems about him by 69 different poets.  As one might expect, the most affecting of these poems were written by those who knew him.

                    To E. T.: 1917

You sleep too well -- too far away,
     For sorrowing word to soothe or wound;
Your very quiet seems to say
     How longed-for a peace you have found.

Else, had not death so lured you on,
     You would have grieved -- 'twixt joy and fear --
To know how my small loving son
     Had wept for you, my dear.

Walter de la Mare, Motley and Other Poems (Constable 1918).

Thomas and de la Mare were close friends.  I find this poem to be particularly moving and beautiful because it poignantly conveys, in a short space, both the intense grief felt by de la Mare (and his family) at the loss of Thomas and the essence of Thomas:  that combination of melancholy, sensitivity, kindness, charm, and unbridgeable solitariness.

Also quite revealing is this:  "had not death so lured you on."  De la Mare knew Thomas well.

            Out in the Dark

Out in the dark over the snow
The fallow fawns invisible go
With the fallow doe;
And the winds blow
Fast as the stars are slow.

Stealthily the dark haunts round
And, when a lamp goes, without sound
At a swifter bound
Than the swiftest hound,
Arrives, and all else is drowned;

And star and I and wind and deer
Are in the dark together, -- near,
Yet far, -- and fear
Drums on my ear
In that sage company drear.

How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.

Edward Thomas, in Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems.

"Out in the Dark" is Thomas's penultimate poem.  He wrote it on Christmas Eve, 1916.  He departed for France on January 29, 1917.

John Nash, "Ripe Corn" (1946)

Like many people, I came to know Edward Thomas through "Adlestrop," which I happened upon in an anthology in the early 1980s.  "Adlestrop" is wonderful, of course.  (It is one of those poems you know by heart after reading it two or three times, without setting out to memorize it.)  However, the poem that made me realize I had found an essential companion for life was this:

            The New House

Now first, as I shut the door,
I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
Began to moan.

Old at once was the house,
And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
Of what was foretold,

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain:  old griefs, and griefs
Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learnt how the wind would sound
After these things should be.

Edward Thomas, in Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems.

As I noted in my March 12 post on E. K. Chambers's poem in memory of Thomasine Trenoweth, the realization that one is in the presence of unforgettable beauty is, for me at least, accompanied by physical and emotional reactions:  a catch of breath, a feeling of being gently knocked back in one's chair, and, finally, a shaking of the head in wonder and delight.  This is what happened to me the first time I read "The New House."  And it still happens each time I read it.

John Nash, "Dorset Landscape" (c. 1930)

When one becomes acquainted with the poetry and prose of Edward Thomas, it is natural to feel affection for him as a person, and to grieve at the tragedy of his death at too young an age.  It is thus understandable that a great deal of biographical attention has been paid to him in recent years. However, I fear that a preoccupation with the particulars of his life may carry us away from his writing, which ought to be our primary focus.

It is a difficult balance to strike, for, as John Bayley observes in the following passage, the relationship between Thomas's life and his writing is significant:

"The poet who adds a new world to our experience -- as Auden does, as Larkin does -- is for that reason the kind of poet who really counts.  Such a poet is naturally unaware of what he is doing because he is becoming himself in his poetry, his true and involuntary self, not making and remaking himself, by the poetic will, as Yeats did, and as Frost did.  Yeats and Frost are great poets of course, but their greatness is of a quite different kind.  They do not bring a new sort of poetic world, the world of themselves, involuntarily into being."

John Bayley, "The Self in the Poem," in Jonathan Barker (editor), The Art of Edward Thomas (Poetry Wales Press 1987), page 40.

The intertwining of Thomas's life and poetry, and how that intertwining affects us, is captured in this lovely poem by W. H. Auden.

                                        To E. T.

Those thick walls never shake beneath the rumbling wheel
     No scratch of mole nor lisping worm you feel
          So surely do those windows seal.

But here and there your music and your words are read
     And someone learns what elm and badger said
          To you who loved them and are dead.

So when the blackbird tries his cadences anew
     There kindles still in eyes you never knew
          The light that would have shone in you.

W. H. Auden, Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928 (edited by Katherine Bucknell) (Princeton University Press 1994).  The poem, in Auden's handwriting, is found on "the blank leaf facing the last poem" in Auden's copy of the 1920 edition of Thomas's Collected Poems.  Ibid, page 100.  It was likely written in the summer of 1925, when Auden was 18 years old.  Ibid.

John Nash, "The Cornfield" (1918)