"Edward Thomas In Heaven"

On this date 96 years ago Edward Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras. In 1917, April 9th fell on Easter Monday.

Laura Knight, "Cornfield" (c. 1953)

               Edward Thomas in Heaven

Edward, with thinning hair and hooded eyes
Walking in England, haversack sagging, emptied of lies,
Snuffing and rubbing Old Man in the palm of your hand
You smelled an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.

In France, supposing the shell that missed
You and sucked your breath out as it passed
Released your soul according to the doctrine
You disbelieved and were brought up in,
From slaughtered fields to Christian purgatory?
(Assuming your working life, the sad history
You sweated through, and marvellous middens of rural stuff
You piled together were not purgatory enough?)
Are you now a changed person, gay and certain?
Your eyes unhooded, bland windows without a curtain?
Then it would not be heaven.  It would be mere loss
To be welcomed in by an assured Edward Thomas.
There must be doubt in heaven, to accommodate him
And others we listen for daily, who were human,
Snuffing and puzzling, which is why we listen.
How shall we recognise the ones we love
If next we see them fitting round God's finger like a glove?
While close-by round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire
And angels of Breconshire and Hereford
Sing for them, and unimaginable Edward?

P. J. Kavanagh, Edward Thomas in Heaven (1974).

Laura Knight, "Wheatfield" (c. 1953)

Line 3 is an allusion to Thomas's poem "Old Man," which contains these lines:

I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
Always in vain.

There are a number of poems by Thomas to which line 4 ("an avenue, dark, nameless, without end") may allude, given the fact that he so often wrote about roads and paths.  Perhaps Kavanagh has in mind either "After Rain" ("The leaflets out of the ash-tree shed/Are thinly spread/In the road, like little black fish, inlaid,/As if they played") or "Interval" ("Where the firm soaked road/Mounts and is lost/In the high beech-wood/It shines almost").  Other candidates might be "The Other," "The Path," "Roads," "The Green Roads," and "The Lane."

And, finally, "Adlestrop" is the source of the last five lines of the poem:

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

Laura Knight, "A Valley at Evening"

"Green, Blue, Yellow And Red -- God Is Down In The Swamps And Marshes"

As I have noted previously, Patrick Kavanagh experienced a poetic renaissance in the mid-1950s while recovering from successful surgery for lung cancer.  Many of the poems from this "Canal Bank period" are approximately (by hook or crook) sonnets.  The following fourteen lines capture both Kavanagh's free-floating exhilaration at having dodged a bullet and the expansive feeling that accompanies the arrival of Spring.

Seeing the magnolias and dogwoods and cherries in nearly full blossom this week, I agree wholeheartedly.

Christopher Sanders, "Study of Long Grass Near Polstead" (c. 1961)

                         The One

Green, blue, yellow and red --
God is down in the swamps and marshes,
Sensational as April and almost incred-
        ible the flowering of our catharsis.
A humble scene in a backward place
Where no one important ever looked;
The raving flowers looked up in the face
Of the One and the Endless, the Mind that has baulked
The profoundest of mortals.  A primrose, a violet,
A violent wild iris -- but mostly anonymous performers,
Yet an important occasion as the Muse at her toilet
Prepared to inform the local farmers
That beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God
Was breathing His love by a cut-away bog.

Patrick Kavanagh, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960).

In order to create a passable sonnet in this instance, Kavanagh breaks "incredible" at "incred-" in line 3 in order to obtain a rhyme for "red" in line 1.  Given his joy over Spring, I think that he should be forgiven.  And what but joy could lead to the rhyming of "marshes" and "catharsis"?

"Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God/Was breathing His love by a cut-away bog" is marvelous.  (Although I'm not certain that "God" and "bog" is a true rhyme!)

Christopher Sanders, "Sunlight through a Willow Tree at Kew" (c. 1958)

Grass

I am easy to please.  All seems right with the world when, on a sunny spring day, I can hear the hum of lawnmowers from various points in the distance, and the scent of freshly-cut grass arrives on a soft breeze.  Who says that there is no such thing as Paradise on Earth?

Here is John Ruskin (in one of those extravagant, wide-ranging apostrophes of his that make reading his books such a delight):

"The Greek, we have seen, delighted in the grass for its usefulness; the medieval, as also we moderns, for its colour and beauty.  But both dwell on it as the first element of the lovely landscape; we saw its use in Homer, we see also that Dante thinks the righteous spirits of the heathen enough comforted in Hades by having even the image of green grass put beneath their feet; the happy resting-place in Purgatory has no other delight than its grass and flowers; and, finally, in the terrestrial paradise, the feet of Matilda pause where the Lethe stream first bends the blades of grass.

Consider a little what a depth there is in this great instinct of the human race.  Gather a single blade of grass, and examine for a minute, quietly, its narrow sword-shaped strip of fluted green.  Nothing, as it seems there, of notable goodness or beauty.  A very little strength, and a very little tallness, and a few delicate long lines meeting in a point, -- not a perfect point either, but blunt and unfinished, by no means a creditable or apparently much cared-for example of Nature's workmanship; made, as it seems, only to be trodden on to-day, and to-morrow to be cast into the oven; and a little pale and hollow stalk, feeble and flaccid, leading down to the dull brown fibres of roots.  And yet, think of it well, and judge whether of all the gorgeous flowers that beam in summer air,  and of all strong and goodly trees, pleasant to the eyes or good for food, -- stately palm and pine, strong ash and oak, scented citron, burdened vine, -- there be any by man so deeply loved, by God so highly graced, as that narrow point of feeble green."

John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Volume III (1856), Part IV, Chapter XIV, Section 51 (italics in original).

Stanley Spencer, "Landscape, Cookham Dean" (c. 1939)

Wordsworth considers the subject in the following untitled poem.

This Lawn, a carpet all alive
With shadows flung from leaves -- to strive
     In dance, amid a press
Of sunshine, an apt emblem yields
Of Worldlings revelling in the fields
     Of strenuous idleness;

Less quick the stir when tide and breeze
Encounter, and to narrow seas
     Forbid a moment's rest;
The medley less when boreal Lights
Glance to and fro, like aery Sprites
     To feats of arms addrest!

Yet, spite of all this eager strife,
This ceaseless play, the genuine life
     That serves the stedfast hours,
Is in the grass beneath, that grows
Unheeded, and the mute repose
     Of sweetly-breathing flowers.

William Wordsworth, Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (1835).

James Torrington Bell, "Carnoustie House" (1962)

Wordsworth's poem fits well with some further remarks by Ruskin:

"Observe, the peculiar characters of the grass, which adapt it especially for the service of man, are its apparent humility, and cheerfulness.  Its humility, in that it seems created only for lowest service, -- appointed to be trodden on, and fed upon.  Its cheerfulness, in that it seems to exult under all kinds of violence and suffering.  You roll it, and it is stronger the next day; you mow it, and it multiplies its shoots, as if it were grateful; you tread upon it, and it only sends up richer perfume.  Spring comes, and it rejoices with all the earth, -- glowing with variegated flame of flowers, -- waving in soft depth of fruitful strength.  Winter comes, and though it will not mock its fellow plants by growing then, it will not pine and mourn, and turn colourless and leafless as they.  It is always green; and is only the brighter and gayer for the hoar-frost."

John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Volume III, Part IV, Chapter XIV, Section 52 (italics in original).

A side-note:  given Ruskin's invention of the term "pathetic fallacy," it is interesting to find him describing the "humility" and "cheerfulness" of grass.

James McIntosh Patrick, "City Garden" (1979)

"Nothing Was Ever Beautiful In Vain, Or All In Vain Was Good"

Christina Rossetti never ceases to surprise me.  Given that she wrote so many poems (about a thousand), you never know what you will come across when you open one of her collections.  In this respect, she resembles Thomas Hardy:  you can read their poetry for years, yet still come across undiscovered gems.

Thus, I recently stumbled upon the following poem by Rossetti.  It is one of those poems by her that leaves you wondering:  where did that come from?

Stanley Spencer, "Peonies" (c. 1939)

                  Buds and Babies

A million buds are born that never blow,
     That sweet with promise lift a pretty head
     To blush and wither on a barren bed
          And leave no fruit to show.

Sweet, unfulfilled.  Yet have I understood
     One joy, by their fragility made plain:
     Nothing was ever beautiful in vain,
          Or all in vain was good.

Christina Rossetti,  A Pageant and Other Poems (1881).  Rossetti uses "blow" (line 1) in a sense that has now mostly disappeared, but was commonly used in Romantic and Victorian poetry:  "to burst into flower; to blossom, bloom."  OED.

I suppose that an argument could be made that "Buds and Babies" is a conventional, sentimental Victorian poem.  Perhaps this is true of its subject matter and of its first stanza.  Perhaps.  But the second stanza is another matter entirely:  it is timeless and placeless, both in terms of its art and in terms of its content.

As is always the case with something this good, I hesitate to pick it apart for fear of destroying it.  But consider the setting apart of the lovely "Sweet, unfulfilled" at the beginning of the stanza.  Or consider the sound and rhythm of "by their fragility made plain."

And what are we to make of the closing lines?  Are they a mere truism?  A pious homily?  Perhaps I am simple-minded, but to me they come out of the depths and/or the heights of I know not where.  I am reminded of another line by Rossetti:  "Love hath a name of Death."  Paraphrase would be both futile and impertinent.  I will take the coward's way out and fall back on Wittgenstein:  "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

Stanley Spencer, "Poppies" (1938)

"For Once, Then, Something"

In "Bond and Free," which appeared in my previous post, Robert Frost considers the relative claims of Love and Thought (or, earth and stars).  I suggested that Frost may not view Love and Thought as an either/or proposition, despite the suggestion in the poem's final stanza that Love trumps Thought.

Frost often confounds our expectations.  He is not the cracker-barrel Yankee philosopher that he is often made out to be.  The best example of this is, I think, "The Road Not Taken."  The closing lines ("I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference") have been turned into a self-help exhortation.  In fact, the poem can be read as a rueful (and ironic) expression of regret at having chosen that road.

In the following poem, Frost goes beyond the earth and the stars to look below ground.  In doing so, he may give us a closer approximation of how he sees himself (and us).  The Frostian slyness is still present, but there is a bit of self-revelation as well.

John Nash, "Berkshire Woods"

               For Once, Then, Something

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths -- and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out.  What was that whiteness?
Truth?  A pebble of quartz?  For once, then, something.

Robert Frost, New Hampshire (1923).

I have noted on another occasion that Philip Larkin, who greatly admired Edward Thomas, has made one of the acutest observations about Thomas and his poetry.  I believe that this observation applies to Frost and his poetry as well:

"What a strange talent his was:  the poetry of almost infinitely-qualified states of mind, so well paralleled by his verse."

Philip Larkin, Letter to Andrew Motion (May 16, 1979), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940-1985 (edited by Anthony Thwaite) (Faber and Faber 1992).

John Nash, "A Path Through Trees" (c. 1915)

"His Gains In Heaven Are What They Are"

I'd like to stay with the themes of "the lovely in life is the familiar" (Walter de la Mare) and "the seeing of small trifles . . . ./Real, beautiful, is good" (Ivor Gurney) for a moment longer.  As one might expect, Robert Frost takes an equivocal, and sly, view of such things in the following poem.

Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958), "The Road to the Hills"

               Bond and Free

Love has earth to which she clings
With hills and circling arms about --
Wall within wall to shut fear out.
But Thought has need of no such things,
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.

On snow and sand and turf, I see
Where Love has left a printed trace
With straining in the world's embrace.
And such is Love and glad to be.
But Thought has shaken his ankles free.

Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom
And sits in Sirius' disc all night,
Till day makes him retrace his flight,
With smell of burning on every plume,
Back past the sun to an earthly room.

His gains in heaven are what they are.
Yet some say Love by being thrall
And simply staying possesses all
In several beauty that Thought fares far
To find fused in another star.

Robert Frost, Mountain Interval (1916).

Harry Epworth Allen, "Summer" (1940)

The question immediately arises:  where do you stand on this Love versus Thought business?

I suspect that Frost comes down on the side of Love, but one can never be sure when it comes to Frost.  On the one hand, he titles the poem "Bond and Free," rather than "Bond or Free," so perhaps his view is that we are fated to continually move back and forth between Love and Thought.  It is not a matter of either/or.

On the other hand, the final stanza seems to come down on the side of Love:  "His gains in heaven are what they are" seems to suggest that the gains don't amount to much.  "Simply staying" seems to be the way to go. Or so "some say."  ("Some say" is a characteristic Frostian way of hedging: "Some say the world will end in fire,/Some say in ice.")

One commentator believes that a clue may lie in Frost's placing "Bond and Free" immediately prior to "Birches" in Mountain Interval, citing these lines in "Birches" as evidence that Frost opts for Love:  "Earth's the right place for love:/I don't know where it's likely to go better."  John Walsh, Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost, 1912-1915 (Grove Press 1988), page 250.

But, then again, the final lines of "Birches" suggest the back and forth of "Bond and Free":

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Robert Frost, Ibid (italics in original).

Yes, of course:  "Toward heaven."  Which fits quite well with:  "His gains in heaven are what they are."  (Whatever that means!)  Typical Frost: equivocal and sly.

Harry Epworth Allen, "A Derbyshire Farmstead"

Four-Line Poems, Part Six: "Of Humblest Friends, Bright Creature! Scorn Not One"

I would not describe William Wordsworth as a succinct poet.  He usually needs space to make his point.  However, there are exceptions.  For instance, there are the eight beautiful lines of "A slumber did my spirit seal."  And there is the following four-line poem, which came to mind in connection with my recent posts about the loveliness of familiar things.

                         To a Child
               Written in Her Album

Small service is true service while it lasts:
Of humblest Friends, bright Creature! scorn not one:
The Daisy, by the shadow that it casts,
Protects the lingering dew-drop from the Sun.

William Wordsworth, Poems (1845).

In commenting on the poem, Wordsworth stated:  "This quatrain was extempore on observing this image, as I had often done, on the lawn of Rydal Mount."

Stanley Spencer, "Lilac and Clematis at Englefield" (1954)

Wordsworth's poem is instructive:  we all ought to be on the look-out for dew-drops in the shadows of daisies.  Ivor Gurney offers similar advice.

                         The Escape

I believe in the increasing of life whatever
Leads to the seeing of small trifles . . . . .
Real, beautiful, is good, and an act never
Is worthier than in freeing spirit that stifles
Under ingratitude's weight; nor is anything done
Wiselier than the moving or breaking to sight
Of a thing hidden under by custom; revealed
Fulfilled, used, (sound-fashioned) any way out to delight.
.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .
Trefoil . . . . hedge sparrow . . . the stars on the edge of night.

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996). The ellipses in lines 2 and 9, and between lines 8 and 9, are in the original.

It is difficult to be as attentive to the world around us as William Wordsworth and Ivor Gurney were.  But Gurney is right:  we must be careful not to find ourselves "under ingratitude's weight," lest we miss a great deal. Trefoil.  Hedge sparrow.  The stars on the edge of night.

Stanley Spencer, "Landscape, Cookham Dean" (c. 1939)

"A Privileged Moment"

Walter de la Mare's "Night," which appeared in my previous post, closes with these lines:  "The lovely in life is the familiar,/And only the lovelier for continuing strange."  The lines bring to mind the following poem by C. Day Lewis, which explores similar territory.

Hubert Wellington, "The Lawyer's House, Walton, Staffordshire" (1915)

                A Privileged Moment

Released from hospital, only half alive still,
Cautiously feeling the way back into himself,
Propped up in bed like a guy, he presently ventured
A glance at the ornaments on his mantelshelf.

White, Wedgwood blue, dark lilac coloured or ruby --
Things, you could say, which had known their place and price,
Gleamed out at him with the urgency of angels
Eager for him to see through their disguise.

Slowly he turned his head.  By gust-flung snatches
A shower announced itself on the windowpane:
He saw unquestioning, not even astonished,
Handfuls of diamonds sprung from a dazzling chain.

Gently at last the angels settled back now
Into mere ornaments, the unearthly sheen
And spill of diamond into familiar raindrops.
It was enough.  He'd seen what he had seen.

C. Day Lewis, The Whispering Roots (1970).

Hubert Wellington, "Summer Day, Frampton Mansell" (1915)

Lately I have had Wordsworth on the brain, and the thought of the luminosity of familiar things leads back to "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," which begins:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
                To me did seem
            Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

In the Ode, Wordsworth laments the disappearance of "the glory and the freshness" as we age.  The loss is inevitable, of course:  like the puppy who chases the wind-blown leaf, our capacity for innocent wonder wanes.  But, as "Night" and "A Privileged Moment" suggest, something of the capacity always remains.  The Ode closes with these lines:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Hubert Wellington, "Overhanging Tree, Frampton Mansell" (1915)

Four-Line Poems, Part Five: "The Lovely In Life Is The Familiar"

I try my best to avoid the news of the world.  But this past week the word "Cyprus" has been insinuating itself into my consciousness.  It seems that something is happening there which ought to concern me.

I have never been to Cyprus.  I'm certain that it is a lovely land, and that the Cypriots are lovely people.  There it sits, a sun-bathed jewel in the blue Mediterranean, just offshore from the fabled lands that Herodotus wrote of long ago:  Phoenicia, Cilicia, Pamphylia, Lycia.

However, I confess that I cannot muster any concern for the liquidity of Cyprus.  For as long as I can remember (five-odd decades), I've been hearing that the world is on the verge of economic calamity.  But, as far as I can tell, economic history boils down to this:  "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye."

I know next to nothing about how to live.  I cannot claim to have gained any wisdom during my time on Earth.  But I have a sense that life is not as complicated as we make it out to be.

Roland Vivian Pitchforth, "Cottage, Bainbridge" (1928)

                                   Night

That shining moon -- watched by that one faint star:
Sure now am I, beyond the fear of change,
The lovely in life is the familiar,
And only the lovelier for continuing strange.

Walter de la Mare, Memory and Other Poems (1938).

Roland Vivian Pitchforth, "Hebden, Yorkshire"

Of course, our appreciation of the lovely familiars in life may be enhanced if we bear certain things in mind.

               Waiting

          'Waiting to . . .'
          'Who is?'
          'We are . . .
     Was that the night-owl's cry?'
'I heard not.  But see!  the evening star;
And listen! -- the ocean's solacing sigh.'
'You mean the surf at the harbour bar?'
          'What did you say?'
          'Oh, "waiting".'
          '"Waiting? " --
          Waiting what for?'
               'To die.'

Walter de la Mare, Ibid.

The reference to the sound of "the surf at the harbour bar" in line 7 brings to mind two other poems that have death as their subject:  Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" ("may there be no moaning of the bar") and Charles Kingsley's "The Three Fishers" ("though the harbour bar be moaning").

Roland Vivian Pitchforth, "Bainbridge" (1928)

"Stepping Westward"

In my previous post, I mentioned Philip Larkin's self-mocking quip about himself:  "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth."  This got me to thinking, not about deprivation, but about the poetry of William Wordsworth.

In August and September of 1803, Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge went on a tour of Scotland.  Dorothy Wordsworth's journal of the tour contains this entry for September 11 (Coleridge had set off on his own by this point):

The sun had been set for some time, when, being within a quarter of a mile of the ferryman's hut, our path having led us close to the shore of the calm lake, we met two neatly dressed women, without hats, who had probably been taking their Sunday evening's walk.  One of them said to us in a friendly, soft tone of voice, "What! you are stepping westward?"  I cannot describe how affecting this simple expression was in that remote place, with the western sky in front, yet glowing with the departed sun.  William wrote the following poem long after, in remembrance of his feelings and mine.

William Knight (editor), Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, Volume II (1897), page 105.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Boreland Mill, Kirkmichael" (1950)

               Stepping Westward

"What, you are stepping westward?" -- "Yea."
-- 'Twould be a wildish destiny,
If we, who thus together roam
In a strange Land, and far from home,
Were in this place the guests of Chance:
Yet who would stop, or fear to advance,
Though home or shelter he had none,
With such a sky to lead him on?

The dewy ground was dark and cold;
Behind, all gloomy to behold;
And stepping westward seemed to be
A kind of heavenly destiny:
I liked the greeting; 'twas a sound
Of something without place or bound;
And seemed to give me spiritual right
To travel through that region bright.

The voice was soft, and she who spake
Was walking by her native lake:
The salutation had to me
The very sound of courtesy:
Its power was felt; and while my eye
Was fixed upon the glowing Sky,
The echo of the voice enwrought
A human sweetness with the thought
Of travelling through the world that lay
Before me in my endless way.

William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) (italics in original).

Wordsworth prefaced the poem with an introduction that parallels Dorothy Wordsworth's journal entry:

While my Fellow-traveller and I were walking by the side of Loch Ketterine, one fine evening after sunset, in our road to a Hut where, in the course of our Tour, we had been hospitably entertained some weeks before, we met, in one of the loneliest parts of that solitary region, two well-dressed Women, one of whom said to us, by way of greeting, "What, you are stepping westward?"

Ibid, Volume II, page 14.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Stobo Kirk, Peeblesshire" (1936)

A poem like "Stepping Westward" reminds us how revolutionary Wordsworth's poetry was in its day, even though it seems very traditional to us now.  The poem is almost conversational, which is what Wordsworth was after: "the real language of men," as he described it in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads.  The "poetic diction" that he hoped to "avoid" is nearly absent.

Apart from a few archaisms, I can hear Edward Thomas in "Stepping Westward."  For example:  "In a strange Land, and far from home."  Or: "And stepping westward seemed to be/A kind of heavenly destiny."  And this:  "I liked the greeting; 'twas a sound/Of something without place or bound."  (Robert Frost can be heard in these lines as well, which is no surprise.)  The Thomas echo may also be traceable to Thomas's penchant for writing poems about encountering friendly strangers while walking in the countryside.

I think that Thomas's poetry in many ways brings Wordsworth's best intentions into being.  The last six lines sound like pure Thomas:

                   . . . and while my eye
Was fixed upon the glowing Sky,
The echo of the voice enwrought
A human sweetness with the thought
Of travelling through the world that lay
Before me in my endless way.

James McIntosh Patrick, "Castle in Scotland"