“He reminds us that words are alive, and not only alive but still half-wild and imperfectly domesticated.”
Edward Thomas (1878-1917) could have been speaking for himself and “the curious life of words in the hands of those who love all life so well that they do not kill even the slender words but let them play on.” As it happens, he had in mind the astonishing poet of rural England a century earlier, John Clare, who loved best “tracking wild searches through the meadow grass.” Like Clare, Thomas owned close knowledge of animals and plants, which showed him “what life is, how our own is related to theirs,” our “responsibilities and debts among the other inhabitants of the earth.”
“Birds’ Nests,” echoing Clare’s poem of the same name, ends on one of those meadow searches:
That leaves and berries fell into;
Once a dormouse dined there on hazel nuts;
And grass and goose-grass seeds found soil and grew.
Innocent-seeming, like so much in Edward Thomas, this verges on chance and mortality while holding out chances of life.
One of his signature poems, “Tall Nettles,” shows the deeper, darker touch that would mark Thomas as a war poet:
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.
This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bloom upon a flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.
Again the wear of time: rusty harrow, worn-out plow, overgrown nettles, dust. But like the birds’ nest berries, nuts, and seeds, they’re given a keen eye and animating touch.
Thomas was born in London in 1878, of Welsh parents. His early memories are of “wild unconscious play” in the fields, then “the time of collecting eggs, flowers and insects,” and later “when we read poetry out of doors.” A school friend recalls “Talking, and looking at the earth and the sky, we just walked about until it was dark,” attending to “the general life of the common birds and animals, and to the appearances of trees and clouds and everything upon the surface that showed itself to the naked eye.”
Thomas had an older friend called “Dad,” a sunburnt sinewy gamekeeper and poacher who climbed trees for nests and dug into thorn bushes, who could imitate “the hollow note of the bullfinch . . . the chiding of a sparrow hawk at its prey . . . a young rook’s cry whilst gobbling a worm: it was perfectly true to nature.” Dad knew the curative power of every herb, a knowledge “fast decaying,” Thomas wrote in 1895.
Already at 19, learning from “my favorite–Thoreau,” he published The Woodland Life, vibrant sketches of the southern English countryside. “Still the pewits move uneasily in the open, always facing the wind and the thin wall of snow bearing down upon them.” Clearly his love fed his literacy when it came to nature. They both show his zeal, long before this was in vogue, to respect wildness for its own sake, and ours as well. He went on to write Beautiful Wales, The Heart of England, The South Country, The Country, and In Pursuit of Spring.
Casting back and forth from landscape to literature, Thomas by 1913 had produced 25 books, plus essays and reviews, but no poetry. Then one encounter released a new voice. Robert Frost, feeling stymied in America, had taken his family to England. In October 1913 the two met and took to each other, Frost empathizing with Thomas’s marital and literary anxieties, while Thomas deepened Frost’s botanical savvy. One night in rural Gloucestershire they hunted rare ferns by matchlight. Just days before war broke out in August 1914, the friends returning from one of their long rambles witnessed “A wonder!” that reappeared in Frost’s “Iris by Night”: a watery moon-made rainbow whose “two mote-swimming many-colored ends” gathered into a ring, “And we stood in it softly circled round.”
Reading Thomas’s prose account of a biking journey, Frost decided his new friend had poems to write, drawn from passages such as this, about pewits on Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge:
writes Thomas, and the Plain becomes “a sublime, inhospitable wilderness. It makes us feel the age of the earth.” Thoreau had called English poetry “tame and civilized.” For Thomas, the wintry plain proves “the earth does not belong to man, but man to the earth.”
Frost heard what he liked, a lyric voice in natural speech. So when Frost’s North of Boston came out in 1914, their kinship led Thomas to review it not twice but three times. “This is one of the most revolutionary books of modern times. . . . It speaks, and it is poetry.” Now he began finding verse rhythms in his own countryside prose. “I am in it now & no mistake,” he wrote Frost, and in December sent him his first poems, including “Birds’ Nests.”
With the European war only miles away, Thomas, aged 36 with three children, debated whether to enlist or accept Frost’s invitation to come farm and write in New England. “Something, I felt, had to be done before I could look again composedly at English landscape, at the elms and poplars about the houses, at the purple-headed wood-betony with two pairs of leaves on a stiff stem, who stood sentinel among the grasses or bracken by hedge-side or wood’s-edge.” Seeing a moonrise and wondering about “those who could see it” in France if they were “not blinded by smoke, pain, or excitement,” he is pierced by a willingness to die for England. When asked what he was fighting for, “He stooped, and picked up a pinch of earth. ‘Literally, for this.’ He crumbled it between finger and thumb, and let it fall.”
Thomas enlisted in July 1915, training and teaching map-reading in the south of England until January 1917. By then he’d written the 143 poems upon which his reputation rests.
But what could wartime poems do if “Literature,” as Thomas said, “sends us to Nature principally for Joy”? “The sun used to shine,” a poem from May 1916, recalls August 1914, his daily forest walks with Frost prospecting for flowers and talking of everything. “We turned from men or poetry”
Only till both stood disinclined
For aught but the yellow flavorous coat
Of an apple wasps had undermined.
Disinclined to talk of war, they savored the present moment, yet did speak of war, and spotted that fallen apple, perished, with somber undertones from Frost’s “After Apple-Picking.” “Ed ward’s poems do not directly discuss the war,” said his wife Helen, “but they do mention it and the war gave point to what he was describing.”
The point is, Thomas will not suppress either his outdoors gusto or his inward concern: They interact. With a rough-cut candor not unlike Frost’s, he says for them both,
Came back to mind with the moonrise
Which soldiers in the east afar
Beheld then.
Compact verse yields phrasings and line breaks that wedge the war into a summer saunter. No escapism here, or in “Haymaking,” written when Thomas enlisted. Starting with “night’s thunder far away,” we only then enter a cold clear morning of “perfect blue.” Ease and harmony seldom come simply for Thomas, but rather through paradox or a strong poise. (No wonder he was deeply struck by the closing lines of Frost’s “The Wood-Pile,” its cordwood left “To warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay.”)
“Haymaking” settles into a scene, as from Brueghel or Constable, of laborers at rest after mowing:
Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood
Without its team; it seemed it never would
Move from the shadow of that single yew.
Peaceable, yes, a “morning time” poised against change like the breaks in those run-on lines.
But still. And all were silent.
In “On the Grecian Urn” (Thomas thought this the “calmest” and “stillest” of Keats’s odes), the lovers are “still” and “silent,” they “cannot fade” and never “can those leaves be bare.” In Keats’s “To Autumn,” the sleeping reaper’s hook “Spares the next swath.” Thomas ends “Haymaking” on such a note: “All of us gone out of the reach of change.”
But change was still to come. He volunteered to serve overseas, and on January 30, 1917, at 4 A.M., disembarked in France with an artillery unit. For three months, at Arras near the Belgian border, Thomas kept a diary: cold raw days, sleepless nights and shelling, letters to and from home, strafing, reading Shakespeare 10 minutes per night, weather, landscape, owls, moles, hares, foxes, and throughout, the birds–partridge, blackbird, thrush, magpie, sparrow, “Black-headed buntings talk, rooks caw,” “Linnets and chaffinches sing in waste trenched ground,” “Larks singing over No Man’s Land.”
Of course, nature persists in time of war, and above all birdsong. Thomas adopted that bittersweet persistence.
No poems at all were possible during the months in France. In March 1917, though, an anthology appeared in London with his poems from 1915-16. When the Times Literary Supplement called his naturalism absurd vis-à-vis “the tremendous life of the last three years,” Thomas wrote a friend: “Must I only use [my eyes] as field-glasses and must I see only Huns in these beautiful hills eastward . . . ?” Anyway, he did register that fraught life. Poems such as “The Owl” are
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
In “Rain,” a wild midnight downfall puts him in mind of others lying alone
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff.
Amid shells going out and coming in, he writes to Robert Frost: “I should like to be a poet, just as I should like to live, but I know as much about my chances in either case, and I don’t really trouble about either. Only I want to come back more or less complete.”
April 1917 saw Thomas, now a second lieutenant, preparing for the major British offensive at Arras, peering out through a hedge where “larks hover above the dry grass just in front.” Twenty years earlier he’d sent his young wife vivid letters delineating weather, hills, rivers, hedgerows, birds and flowers. Now, from an observation post, he writes: “I simply watched the shells changing the landscape.” A nearby village “is now just ruins among violated stark tree trunks. But the sun shone and larks and partridge and magpies and hedge sparrows made love and the trench was being made passable for the wounded that will be harvested in a day or two.” April–too early a harvest!
The next day, Easter Sunday, April 8, a German shell fell two yards from him, a dud. Not long before, Thomas’s wife Helen had written Frost describing his battlefield behavior: “In a pause in the shooting he turns his wonderful field glasses on to a hovering kestrel & sees him descend & pounce & bring up a mouse.” Weeks later the letter came back–a censor wanted her to remove some photos–and she faintly scrawled a postscript: “He was killed on Easter Monday by a shell.” A last diary note by Thomas says, “And no more singing for the bird . . .” A copy of Frost’s 1916 Mountain Interval was found in his kit-bag.
His American friend, who’d written “The Road Not Taken” about him, and called Thomas “the only brother I ever had,” never got over it. “I don’t suppose there is anything for us to do to show our admiration but to love him forever,” Frost wrote to Thomas’s widow. And to another English friend: “His concern to the last was what it had always been, to touch earthly things and come as near them in words as words would come.”
John Felstiner, professor of English at Stanford, is the author of the forthcoming So Much Depends: Poetry and Environmental Urgency.
