Killed in Action
(EDWARD THOMAS)
Happy the man whose home is still
In Nature’s green and peaceful ways;
To wake and hear the birds so loud,
That scream for joy to see the sun
Is shouldering past a sullen cloud.
And we have known those days, when we
Would wait to hear the cuckoo first;
When you and I, with thoughtful mind,
Would help a bird to hide her nest,
For fear of other hands less kind.
But thou, my friend, art lying dead:
War, with its hell-born childishness,
Has claimed thy life, with many more:
The man that loved this England well,
And never left it once before.
W. H. DAVIES
Of Welsh parentage, Edward Thomas was born in London, educated at St Paul’s School and Lincoln College, Oxford, and spent his most creative years in Steep, near Petersfield. ‘Almost as soon as I could babble, I babbled of green fields,’ he wrote, and by the time he went to St Paul’s, he was reading poetry for pleasure. His first book, The Woodland Life (1897), was dedicated to James Ashcroft Noble, to whose daughter Helen he was secretly engaged (she describes the courtship in As It Was). They married secretly because of her father’s disapproval, and she bore him two children. Having left Oxford with a second-class degree, he eked out a living in London, where they lived in lodgings in Earlsfield. Longing for the countryside, they moved to Kent in 1901, but Thomas grew increasingly melancholy – a mood he inherited from his mother. Helen wrote: ‘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.’ Although not impoverished, he was reviewing up to fifteen books a week, and writing his own at an obsessive rate: thirty volumes were published between 1897 and 1917, including The Heart of England (1906), The South Country (1909), The Icknield Way (1913) and In Pursuit of Spring (1914), in which he embarked on a quest for the spirit of England. He suffered a breakdown in 1911 and following conversations with Robert Frost tried his hand at poetry. During an astonishing creative burst he wrote all his poems within two years, from December 1914 to December 1916. He experienced great difficulty in finding a publisher, and twenty-seven poems appeared under the pseudonym of Edward Eastaway in An Anthology of New Verse (1917). The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, edited by R. George Thomas, were published in 1978. Thomas also produced editions of Herbert and Marlowe, wrote books on Swinburne and Walter Pater, and enjoyed the friendship of a number of writers, including W. H. Davies, Conrad, Ransome, Frost and de la Mare, who wrote a wonderfully perceptive Foreword to the Faber edition of Thomas’s Collected Poems:
There is nothing precious, elaborate, brilliant, esoteric, obscure in his work. The feeling is never ‘fine’, the thought never curious, or the word far-fetched. Loose-woven, monotonous, unrelieved, the verse, as verse, may appear to a
careless reader accustomed to the customary. It must be read slowly, as naturally as if it were talk, without much emphasis; it will then surrender himself, his beautiful world, his compassionate and suffering heart, his fine, lucid, grave and sensitive mind. This is not a poetry that will drug or intoxicate, civicize or edify – in the usual meaning of the word, though it rebuilds reality. It ennobles by simplification. Above all, it will reveal what a friend this man was to the friendless and to them of small report, though not always his own serenest friend – to the greening stoat on the gamekeeper’s shed, the weed by the wayside, the wanderer, ‘soldiers and poor unable to rejoice’.
Although Robert Frost had offered to find him work in America, he enlisted in July 1915 from a feeling of patriotism: when asked by a friend what he would be fighting for, he allegedly bent down, scooped up a clod of earth, crumbled it between his fingers and replied: ‘Literally, for this.’ Two months after ‘Lights out’ was written, he set out for France and reached Arras on 9 February 1917, prior to the Easter offensive. While there, he learned that three of his poems had been accepted by Poetry, and on 4 April he read a positive review of his work in The Times Literary Supplement. He was killed on Easter Monday 1917, the first day of the Battle of Arras, at his forward observation post – ‘shot clean through the chest by a pip-squeak (a 77mm shell) the very moment the battle began’, as Major Franklin Lushington told John Moore, one of Thomas’s first biographers.
There are two fascinating memoirs by his wife, Helen Thomas: As It Was (1926) and World Without End (1931). Ivor Gurney had a special affinity with Thomas’s poetry, and set him nineteen times, from ‘Sowing’ (1918) to ‘Out in the dark’ (1925), composed during his asylum years. Michael Pilkington considers that the song cycle Lights Out ‘may well rank as Gurney’s finest work’. He composed it in a mental asylum and was unable to proof-read the songs – hence the inconsistencies with some of Thomas’s words.
The new moon hangs like an ivory bugle
In the naked frosty blue;
And the ghylls3 of the forest, already blackened
By Winter, are blackened anew.
The brooks that cut up and increase the forest,
As if they had never known
The sun, are roaring with black hollow voices
Betwixt rage and a moan.
But still the caravan-hut by the hollies
Like a kingfisher gleams between:
Round the mossed old hearths of the charcoal-burners4
First primroses ask to be seen.
The charcoal-burners are black, but their linen
Blows white on the line;
And white the letter the girl is reading
Under that crescent fine;
And her brother who hides apart in a thicket,
Slowly and surely playing
On a whistle an old nursery melody,
Says far more than I am saying.
Today I think
Only with scents, – scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot’s seed,
And the square mustard field;
Odours that rise
When the spade wounds the root of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed2,
Rhubarb or celery;
The smoke’s smell, too,
Flowing from where a bonfire burns
The dead, the waste, the dangerous,
And all to sweetness turns.
It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth.
Bright clouds of may
Shade half the pond.
Beyond,
All but one bay
Of emerald
Tall reeds
Like criss-cross bayonets2
Where a bird once called,
Lies bright as the sun.
No one heeds.
The light wind frets
And drifts the scum
Of may-blossom.
Till the moorhen calls
Again
Naught’s to be done
By birds or men.
Still the may falls.
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.
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.]
(Holloway)
Will you come?
Will you come
If the night
Has a moon,
Full and bright?
O, will you come?
Would you come?
Would you come
If the noon
Gave light,
Not the moon?
Beautiful, would you come?
Would you have come?
Would you have come
Without scorning,
Had it been
Still morning?
Beloved, would you have come?
If you come
Haste and come.
Owls have cried;
It grows dark
To ride.
Beloved, beautiful, come.
(Holloway)
Rise up, rise up,
And, as the trumpet blowing
Chases the dreams of men,
As the dawn glowing
The stars that left unlit
The land and water,
Rise up and scatter
The dew that covers
The print of last night’s lovers –
Scatter it, scatter it!
While you are listening
To the clear horn,
Forget, men, everything
On this earth new-born,
Except that it is lovelier
Than any mysteries.
Open your eyes to the air
That has washed the eyes of the stars
Through all the dewy night:
Up with the light,
To the old wars;
Arise, arise!
In the gloom of whiteness,
In the great silence of snow,
A child was sighing
And bitterly saying: ‘Oh,
They have killed a white bird up there on her nest,
The down is fluttering from her breast!’
And still it fell through that dusky brightness
On the child crying for the bird of the snow.
Out in the dark over the snow
The fallow2 fawns invisible go
With the fallow doe;
And the winds blow
Fast as the stars are slow.
Stealthily the dark haunts round
And, when the lamp goes3, without sound
At a swifter bound
Than the swiftest hound,
Arrives, and all else is drowned;
And star and I and wind and deer,
Are in the dark together, – near,
Yet far, – and fear
Drums on my ear
In that sage company drear.
How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.
(Gurney, Holloway)