Philip Thomas was born at Lambeth on 3 March 1878 and spent most of his childhood in London where his father was a staff clerk at the Board of Trade. A stern man, who had worked his way up in the world, he had temperamentally little in common with Edward, the eldest of his six sons. ‘Almost as soon as I could babble,’ the poet was later to write, ‘I “babbled of green fields”’, and he was never happier than in his school holidays spent with his aunt or grandmother in Swindon. There he discovered his lifelong passion for the countryside and its creatures, for country people and country pursuits.
His father introduced him to literature, first of all to the prose writers who celebrated the country and its ways, Isaac Walton and Richard Jefferies, and when he was fifteen he began to read poetry for pleasure. By then he was at St Paul’s School, Hammersmith, where his natural shyness was increased by the greater confidence of the other boys, who for the most part came from more prosperous middle-class homes. He had recently begun writing seriously – in the manner of Richard Jefferies – and found an ally and encourager in James Ashcroft Noble, a fifty-year-old journalist and author. Thomas left St Paul’s in 1895 and went up to Oxford, after two years ostensibly reading for the Civil Service examination, but in fact extending his knowledge of literature and writing a book of his own, The Woodland Life (1897). This was dedicated to Noble, who had died the previous year, and to whose daughter Helen he was secretly engaged. In 1899, following a courtship movingly described in her book As it Was, they were married – secretly because of the disapproval of their parents. A year later, with a second-class degree, a baby son, and high literary ambitions, Edward Thomas left Oxford for slum lodgings in Earlsfield, south London.
Reviewing work and literary journalism were hard to come by and, when found, exhausting and poorly paid. ‘I now live – if living it may be called – by my writing,’ he told a friend,‘ “literature” we call it in Fleet Street (derived from ‘litter’) . . . . It’s a painful business, and living in this labyrinth of red brick makes it worse.’ Unable to resist the lure of the country, the Thomases moved to Kent in 1901. Their spirits rose only to be dashed by the discovery that Helen was again pregnant. She wrote: ‘it means more anxiety for Edward and more work for him. Home will become unendurable to him. Even now poverty, anxiety, physical weakness, disappointments and discouragements are making him bitter, hard and impatient, quick to violent anger, and subject to long fits of depression.’
A melancholy inherited from his much-loved mother became more marked over the difficult years that followed. He was reviewing up to fifteen books a week and, though he hated the drudgery, reviewing them conscientiously and with discernment. The meagre income that brought him he supplemented by selling his review copies and writing one book after another. Thirty volumes were published between 1897 and 1917, and during those twenty years he also edited sixteen anthologies and editions of poetry and prose. Everything was done hurriedly, but nothing was slovenly, and he was able to find delight – and communicate it with freshness and charm – in even the most unpromising ‘hack’ assignment.
Thomas’s great gift as a literary critic appeared to best advantage in his reviewing of poetry, and he was the first to salute such new stars in the literary firmament as W. H. Davies, the ‘Super-Tramp’, and the American poets Ezra Pound and Robert Frost. Frost and Thomas met in October 1913 and began a friendship that became of central importance to them both. It was Frost who first urged Thomas to try his hand at writing poems, on the grounds that some of his prose was essentially poetry. Thomas was full of self-doubt, though, and made no serious attempt to turn from the prose that was earning him the money he so desperately needed until November or December 1914. Then, under the stress of deciding whether or not to enlist, poems suddenly began to pour out of him: five between 3 and 7 December, and at least five more before the end of the month. After he had written a number, he wrote to a friend:
By the way, what I have done so far have been like quintessences of the best parts of my prose books – not much sharper or more intense, but I hope a little: since the first take off they haven’t been Frosty very much, or so I imagine, and I have tried as often as possible to avoid the facilities offered by blank verse, and I try not to be too long – I have an ambition to keep under 12 lines (but rarely succeed).
On New Year’s Day 1915 he sprained his ankle so badly that he was lame for nearly three months, during which time the stream of poetry flowed more swiftly and more richly than ever. From 7 to 9 January, for example, he wrote ‘A Private’, ‘Snow’, ‘Adlestrop’, ‘Tears’, and ‘Over the Hills’.
While his ankle was recovering he considered emigrating to America, where Robert Frost had offered to find him work, but decided against it and in July 1915 enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles. A responsible family man of thirty-seven, he was much older than most of his fellow recruits, and his greater maturity was soon recognized by the award of a lance-corporal’s stripe. In the intervals between drilling, weapon training, cleaning his equipment, and instructing a squad in map-reading, he was still writing poems. One of the best of them, ‘Rain’, illustrates a common and curious feature of his work:
Thomas, his daughter Myfanwy and a neighbour
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
Helen Thomas and cat
Three years before, in his prose book The Icknield Way, he had written a four-page meditation on the rain falling round him as he lay, half asleep, at an inn:
I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: the all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more. I have been glad of the sound of rain, and wildly sad of it in the past; but that is all over as if it had never been; my eye is dull and my heart beating evenly and quietly; I stir neither foot nor hand; I shall not be quieter when I lie under the wet grass and the rain falls, and I of less account than the grass [. . ..] Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.’
The most important difference between these texts is that four pages of prose has been distilled into eighteen lines of poetry; or, to be more precise, the essence of those four pages has been distilled into less than eighteen lines, for there is much in the poem that is not in the prose. The inn and the ghostly double have gone. The poet is now in a hut – presumably an army hut – and speaks in his own voice. He moves quickly from a perception of his own death to the quotation with which the prose extract had ended: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on’. That conclusion to the earlier self-absorbed meditation becomes the beginning of a prayer, not for himself, but for others. But – the poem turns on that hinge conjunction –
The manuscript of ‘Rain’ dated 7.1.16
[. . .] I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me [. . ..]
Love may have gone, but sympathy has taken its place; sympathy for the sufferings of the living and the dead in France, their bodies imagined as ‘Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,/Like me’. With this the poem changes direction again, circling back to the speaker’s perception of, and longing for, his own death. Now he has
[. . .] no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
John Donne said that ‘particulars do ever touch more than generals’ (particularities more than generalities), and Thomas focuses on the dead more sharply in another poem,‘A Private’:
Letter to Thomas from Robert Frost, September 1916
This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors
Many a frosty night, and merrily
Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:
‘At Mrs. Greenland’s Hawthorn Bush,’ said he,
‘I slept.’ None knew which bush. Above the town,
Beyond ‘The Drover’, a hundred spot the down
In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps
More sound in France – that, too, he secret keeps.
By juxtaposing the Private with the love of privacy, and ironically implying a natural resemblance between peace and war, Thomas forces us to perceive the unnatural disjunction, the break in the natural order. This is the theme, too, of his beautiful little quatrain, ‘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.
Behind those tolling rhymes lurks an echo of Gertrude’s words in Hamlet, spoken over Ophelia’s grave:
Edward Thomas (middle row, second from left) in a group of NCOs
I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d,
sweet maid,
And not have strewed thy grave.
It was because he was a married man, no doubt, that Thomas saw sooner than most other poets that the victims of the war would be women as well as men.
He saw other things clearly too, in particular a distinction between different kinds of patriotism, beginning a poem
This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
In an essay called ‘England’, Thomas wrote that Isaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler was for him the most patriotic of books:
Since the war began I have not met so English a book, a book that filled me so with a sense of England, as this, though I have handled scores of deliberately patriotic works. There, in that sort of work, you get, as it were, the shouting without the crowd, which is ghastly. In Walton’s book I touched the antiquity and sweetness of England – English fields, English people, English poetry, all together.
It was this pastoral patriotism that, in July 1915, led him to enlist rather than emigrate to America where Frost had offered to find him work. When, later, another friend asked him if he knew what he would be fighting for, he bent down, picked up a pinch of earth, and crumbling it between his fingers, said: ‘Literally, for this.’
Thomas’s best poems are (again literally) grounded in this, and I would like to look at one of them in the light of John H. Johnston’s criticism that Thomas ‘refused to let the conflict interfere with his nostalgic rural vision’; and Bernard Bergonzi’s, that ‘in his loving concentration on the unchanging order of nature and rural society, the war exists only as a brooding but deliberately excluded presence.’ The poem (see p. 144 for its manuscript) takes its title from its opening words:
As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.
The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker’s round hole,
The ploughman said. ‘When will they take it away?’
‘When the war’s over.’ So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
‘Have you been out?’ ‘No.’ ‘And don’t want to, perhaps?’
‘If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more . . .. Have many gone
From here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Many lost?’ ‘Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.’
‘And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.’ ‘Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.’ Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.
Corporal Thomas in 1916
The poem opens with images of light and darkness – flashing brass and wood; love and death. The ominous note is dominant. It is a fallen elm (fallen, as in Laurence Binyon’s elegy, ‘For the Fallen’, was then a current euphemism for dead soldiers). Thomas’s speaker seems to feel threatened:
[. . .] Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Natural weather, unnatural war: the antithesis is reinforced by a repetition of the images of light and darkness, life and death:
[. . .] he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.
Their talk about the tree –
[. . .] ‘When will they take it away?’
‘When the war’s over.’ –
leads naturally to the casual revelation of a fact crucial to the structure of the poem. The ploughman says:
‘One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too.’
Fallen man and fallen tree are linked by something more than coincidence. The reader is invited to believe in the truth of the pathetic fallacy. And if the fallen tree stands/lies as a symbol of the fallen man, the reader fears for the speaker who now stands/sits in his place. Such connections, however, are made obliquely as the conversation runs its unruffled course:
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.’
‘And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.’ ‘Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.’ Then
The lovers came out of the wood again [. . ..]
As if in confirmation of the ploughman’s optimism, the lovers ‘came out of the wood’ (and notice the rhyming link of ‘good’ and ‘wood’). Life goes on, but so does death, surely foreshadowed in the speaker’s closing lines:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.
Why does he say ‘for the last time’? Death is in the air. To quote the words of the burial service: ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. Our intimations of the poem’s impending closure – reinforced by the internal rhyme (‘crumble’/’stumbling’) and the final pararhyme (‘time’/‘team’) – suggest an impending closure of another kind.
That Thomas himself felt this is made clear in poem after poem. None more so than one of the very last he wrote – ‘Lights Out’, the military command with its ghostly echo of Othello’s command: ‘Put out the light, and then put out the light’. The contention of light and darkness, with which ‘As the Team’s Head-brass’ had opened, takes much the same form as before:
Men of the Machine Gun Corps firing at a German plane, April 1917
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.
As in the poem ‘Rain’, all but one of his loves have dissolved:
There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now . . .
He turns from them towards his last and truest love – ‘the love of death’:
Infantry moving up in the Battle of Arras, 9 April 1917 (the day that Thomas was killed)
The tall forest towers:
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf:
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.
This, like all Thomas’s poems – except the one found in his diary at his death – was written in England before he was exposed to the violence and destruction of the trenches. His love of England and its seasons, celebrated so long in prose, rise again, distilled to a purer form in these poems. His awareness of the natural world, its richness and beauty, is now intensified by a sense of impending loss and the certainty of death – his own and others. His ‘war poems’ are those of a countryman perceiving the violence done by a distant conflict to the natural order of things.
Two months after ‘Lights Out’ was written, Thomas crossed to France and on 9 February 1917 reached Arras, where a massive build-up for the Easter offensive was in progress. There he heard that three of his poems had been accepted by the magazine Poetry and, on 4 April, was heartened to read an enthusiastic review in The Times Literary Supplement of his contribution to An Annual of New Poetry. Five days later, on Easter Monday, the Battle of Arras began with a deafening artillery barrage, and in the opening minutes, in a forward observation post, Edward Thomas was killed by the blast of a shell.
The grave of Edward Thomas
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.
1915
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.
1915
This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
Beside my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true: -
A kind of god he is, banging a gong.
But I have not to choose between the two,
Or between justice and injustice. Dinned
With war and argument I read no more
Than in the storm smoking along the wind
Athwart the wood. Two witches’ cauldrons roar.
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
Out of the other an England beautiful
And like her mother that died yesterday.
Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
The phoenix broods serene above their ken.
But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from the dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.
1915
‘No one cares less than I,
Nobody knows but God
Whether I am destined to lie
Under a foreign clod’
Were the words I made to the bugle call in the morning.
But laughing, storming, scorning,
Only the bugles know
What the bugles say in the morning,
And they do not care, when they blow
The call that I heard and made words to early this morning.
1916
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest, where all must lose
Their way, however straight
Or winding, soon or late;
They can not choose.
Many a road and track
That since the dawn’s first crack,
Up to the forest brink
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.
Here love ends –
Despair, ambition ends;
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends, in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.
There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter, and leave, alone
I know not how.
The tall forest towers:
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf:
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.
1916
