Here is a final batch of four poems by Edward Thomas as promised a week or so ago. I could have posted several more!
The most well-known of these, at least in this country, is perhaps “Adlestrop”. (Adlestrop is a tiny village in the Cotswolds, in Gloucestershire, close to the Oxfordshire border, and about thirty miles north-west of Oxford itself. Some pictures and more information about the village can be found here:
http://www.astoft2.co.uk/glos/adlestrop.htm .) “Adlestrop” is another of Thomas’s poems about memory. As happens elsewhere, his approach to the elusive core of the memory is oblique. In this case he sets the poem up as a reply to a question posed by an unseen interlocutor. It is left to us to decide how confident is the “Yes” with which the poem begins. My own preference is to read it as implying a momentary hesitation which Thomas then overcomes as the details of the experience come back to him. At first all he remembers is the name. Certainly it
is an odd name, one that might well stick in the mind and remain quite unconnected with anything in particular. Prompted by the name, however, he attempts to recover the memory in the series of short declarative sentences which occupy the close of the first stanza and the first three lines of the second. At the end of the second, however, this process breaks down, and he has to begin again, repeating the name in an effort to conjure up the fleeting experience: “What I saw / Was Adlestrop – only the name.” And now the experience returns, not as before in a series of images each sealed off in its own sentence, but in a rush of a details, a congeries in which each item generates its successor: “willows” leads to “willow-herb” “-herb” leads to “grass”, “grass” to “meadow-” in “meadowsweet” and so onwards to “hay-“ in “haycocks”. And Thomas’s gaze shifts, too, outwards first and then upwards to the “high cloudlets in the sky”. In the final stanza, the process repeats itself and deepens but now does so spontaneously: Thomas no longer needs to trigger the memory by repeating the name. And the sounding of the name is replaced by sounds of a different kind, as hearing, not sight, becomes the key sense, and the memory opens out from what is close and directly experienced to what is distant and, beyond that, to what in the end can only be imagined:
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
As so often with Thomas, the sound of the verse is itself part of the magic. Here, for instance, while the first three stanzas are firmly rhymed, in the last stanza full rhyme dissolves into something softer (“mistier…Gloucestershire”), this pairing delicately echoed within the lines (“Farther and farther”, “Oxfordshire”) as if to mime the very thing the lines themselves describe. The result is a kind of Zen moment, to use a word Thomas perhaps would not have known or not have known in the sense I mean.
There are other things I could say about the sixteen lines of this very English poem. Let me just add this. I have mentioned before Thomas’s technique, but “Adlestrop” reminds me that in a successful poem – and I believe “Adlestrop”
is a successful poem – technique is a mode of imaginative invention. I very much like Valéry’s dictum: “Poetic necessity is inseparable from material form, and the thoughts uttered or suggested by the text of a poem are by no means the unique and chief objects of its discourse – but means which combine equally with the sounds, cadences, meter, and ornaments to produce and sustain a particular tension or exaltation”.
More briefly as to the other poems…
“The Gallows” owes a debt to the ballad tradition and to related forms of popular verse. It achieves a grimness I find very satisfying. There are some wonderfully tight-lipped phrasings here – “a thief and a murderer / Till a very late hour”, “this keeper / Made him one of the things that were”, “He could both talk and do – / But what did that avail?”, for instance – and an expressive handling of the relationship between metrical line and sentence. “The Combe” illustrates a species of mysticism which appears often in Thomas’s verse and feeds off an idea about the antiquity of the English landscape and its human and animal inhabitants. (It is evident in his prose writing, too.) “Thaw”, though brief, has greater imaginative strength than a casual reader might suppose.
In Thomas’s small output, there is a perhaps surprising number of memorable poems; there are also some which do not quite come off, even in their own terms, and others which changes in fashion have made less immediately attractive. No doubt sometimes we should be wary of what offers itself as immediately attractive; conversely, there are worthwhile poems – both contemporary and from the past – which we may well pass by if we are unwilling to make the small effort of learning how best to read them.
Clive Watkins
...
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 or 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.
THE GALLOWS
There was a weasel lived in the sun
With all his family,
Till a keeper shot him with his gun
And hung him up on a tree,
Where he swings in the wind and rain,
In the sun and in the snow,
Without pleasure, without pain,
On the dead oak tree bough.
There was a crow who was no sleeper,
But a thief and a murderer
Till a very late hour; and this keeper
Made him one of the things that were,
To hang and flap in rain and wind,
In the sun and in the snow.
There are no more sins to be sinned
On the dead oak tree bough.
There was a magpie, too,
Had a long tongue and a long tail;
He could both talk and do –
But what did that avail?
He, too, flaps in the wind and rain
Alongside weasel and crow,
Without pleasure, without pain,
On the dead oak tree bough.
And many other beasts
And birds, skin, bone, and feather,
Have been taken from their feasts
And hung up there together,
To swing and have endless leisure
In the sun and in the snow,
Without pain, without pleasure,
On the dead oak tree bough.
THE COMBE
The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.
Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn, and briar;
And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk
By beech and yew and perishing juniper
Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots
And rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter,
The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds
Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,
Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark
The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,
Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,
That most ancient Briton of English beasts.
THAW
Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flower of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.
[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited August 07, 2007).]
Linear Mode
