Eratosphere - EDWARD THOMAS (1878-1917)

Here are three more short poems by Edward Thomas. (I may post a final batch in a further few days.) Since I suspect Edward Thomas may not be well-known to some members, please excuse these few paragraphs by way of introduction.

Thomas, a Londoner of Welsh extraction, was born in 1878 and educated at St Paul’s School and Oxford. After university, he earned a precarious living writing reviews, essays and books about the English and Welsh countryside and by editing anthologies. It was an existence he found frustrating and unrewarding. In 1914, at the age of thirty-six, he met Robert Frost, who in the summer of that year had brought his wife and family to England. He and Thomas were next-door neighbours in Dymock, a small village in Gloucestershire, and during the few months that Frost was in England (he left in 1915), they became close friends. Frost is rightly credited with encouraging Thomas to compose verse: though others had made this suggestion before, it was Frost who gave him the confidence to do so. Remarkably, every one of his 143 poems was written in the fourteen months between December 1914 and January 1917 when he left for France. Thomas had enlisted in 1915, though, given his age, he need not have done so. He was killed on Easter Monday, 1917, when a shell exploded close to an observation post he was manning. (Fuller biographical details can be found here: http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/thomas.htm .)

Thomas’s habitual locations are rural, but he was born a townie, and, for all his absorption in the natural world, he approached it from the outside. Indeed, it might be argued that the particular quality of his observation – its intensity, but also its nostalgic colouring – springs from this fact. He belongs to a tradition of topographical writing about the British countryside that included George Borrow (1803-1881), W H Hudson (1841-1922) and Richard Jefferies (1848-1887). Borrow, Hudson and Jefferies were prose writers, but so for most of his adult life was Thomas. His prose books, for instance, include such titles as The Heart of England (1906), The South Country (1909) and The Icknield Way (1913). (The Icknield Way is a prehistoric trackway still traceable on the ground running south-west from Norfolk, in East Anglia, through Cambridgeshire to the Thames Valley and beyond.)

Thomas’s poems, like his prose, convey a strong sense that the landscape he loved and its way of life, though ancient, was ineluctably subject to change. This nostalgia reflected real social conditions: since the 1860s there had been a long recession in the agricultural economy. (Hardy reflects this, for example; my own grandparents and great-grandparents, both in England and in Wales, experienced it directly.) But the nostalgia is also an aspect of Thomas’s melancholic temperament. At various stages of his life he suffered from depression. One of his ways of coping with this was to go for long solitary walks. From such walks much of the overt material of his poems stems. The threat of war and its arrival became intertwined with this sense of something precious that was coming to an end, a mingling that gives particular resonance to several poems, including those below.

An interesting feature of Thomas’s writing is the relative plainness of his diction, which means that the effects he achieves arise largely from the organization of his materials – in their conceptual patterns, in his characteristic syntax, in the handling of metre and in patterns of sound. One does not look to Thomas for high-energy verbal fireworks. His is a quiet voice: in his best poems (such as “Old Man”) diffidence is structural and a form of imaginative strength.

“Fifty Faggots”, like many of his poems, sets different time-frames or, rather, different perceptions of time against one another. The faggots that “once were underwood of hazel and ash” are now stacked by the hedge. In due time they will become the ash of “several Winters' fires”. To the birds, the stack “will remain Whatever is for ever to a bird”. The poignant playfulness of “Whatever is for ever to a bird” might make us miss the low-key ironic precision of the verb, “will remain”. In this context, the way Thomas specifies certain details – there are exactly fifty faggots, the copse is named for (or belongs to) a particular person, Jenny Pinks, the terms “mouse” and “wren” are simultaneously generic and specific (this wren, that mouse) – subtly draws attention to their transience. It is perhaps interesting to compare this poem with Hardy’s much more famous “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’” from 1915, which I post here without further comment:

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow, silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half-asleep as they stalk.

Only thins smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties die.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by;
War's annals will fade into night
Ere their story die.

In “The Owl”, Thomas builds his poetic argument (that is, the imaginative shape of his poem) by setting out and qualifying in the first stanza the terms – hunger, cold, tiredness – that will occupy him in the second and which he will echo in a significantly modified form in the last stanza. There, while hunger and tiredness are mentioned (“salted was my food, and my repose”), cold is not specifically named. Rather, it is implied in the call of the owl and the reference to those who “lay under the stars”, a tact typical of Thomas at his best.

“The Cherry Trees” takes a set of thoroughly conventional images and works them into what for me is an aesthetically and emotionally satisfying pattern. Once again, Thomas manipulates time-frames: the present of the cherry trees is set against the antiquity of the empty road and the past into which those who once travelled along it have now vanished. In this context the earliness of the morning and of the month (“This early May morn”) seems to imply a contrasting but unnamed time and month – say, the evening of a January day – but Thomas is content to leave this merely implied. The separation of verb and object (“are shedding…petals”) makes it at first unclear whether we are in autumn, the cherry trees shedding their leaves, or, as it turns out, in spring; and this autumnal cast is heightened by the images of age and death which intervene before the clarifying “petals”. It might seem that the third line for a moment holds back these morbid connotations, but by now the provisional and hypothetical status of “as for a wedding” is clear. The first four words of the last line are now charged with a poignant irony, and the poem runs out with heartbreaking flatness. Then there is the effect of the rhymes: “shedding… dead… wedding… wed.” A purist might object to these – for instance, that they are too close in sound or that “wedding” and wed” are variants of the same word. In my view, this is a triumph of subtlety. Technically, one could describe it as consisting of alternating feminine and masculine rhymes organized so that, taken as couplets, the paired words constitute an instance of “broken rhyme” – that is, where a final stressed syllable rhymes with a stressed penultimate syllable. (Interestingly, this is a standard feature of Welsh verse, as Thomas almost certainly knew, though how conscious he was of echoing this pattern here I cannot say.) The resulting effect in the dullness of the repeating “ed”-sound is, to my ear, expressive of the inescapable tragedy which underlies the poem and is its emotional source.

Given that Thomas wrote verse for little more than a year, I find such imaginative and technical assurance amazing and am humbled by what it can teach me. Anyway, I hope that some members at least will find things in these poems to enjoy – and perhaps to learn from.

Clive Watkins

...

FIFTY FAGGOTS

There they stand, on their ends, the fifty faggots
That once were underwood of hazel and ash
In Jenny Pinks's Copse. Now, by the hedge
Close packed, they make a thicket fancy alone
Can creep through with the mouse and wren. Next Spring
A blackbird or a robin will nest there,
Accustomed to them, thinking they will remain
Whatever is for ever to a bird:
This Spring it is too late; the swift has come.
'Twas a hot day for carrying them up:
Better they will never warm me, though they must
Light several Winters' fires. Before they are done
The war will have ended, many other things
Have ended, maybe, that I can no more
Foresee or more control than robin and wren.

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 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.

[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited July 30, 2007).]