Today marks 107 years since the death of the British poet and writer Edward Thomas, one of the most simply, honestly lyrical voices of his age. He died on the battlefield in Arras in 1917, on Easter Monday, even before seeing his poetry published under his name. He was 39 years old.
It therefore seems fitting to start my tribute to Thomas with this beautiful (and sad) poem of his:
In Memoriam (Easter 1915)
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.
The medieval Japanese writer Kenkō once observed, in a long and beautiful passage from Tsurezuregusa, that true love appreciates each season (and more broadly each phenomenon) for its peculiar beauties (e.g. a cherry-tree beautiful even bare of blossoms) and relishes the aesthetics of absence. Thomas's love for the world was of this calibre of attentiveness. Memory- of the humblest- was a key theme in his slow, contemplative work. ' The simple lack/Of her is more to me/Than others' presence,' he writes in Unknown. In another poem, gazing upon a deserted chalk-pit, two voices converse:
[..] Has anything unusual happened here?'
'Not that I know of. It is called the Dell.
They have not dug chalk here for a century.
That was the ash trees' age. But I will ask.'
'No. Do not. I prefer to make a tale,
Or better leave it like the end of a play,
Actors and audience and lights all gone;
For so it looks now. In my memory
Again and again I see it, strangely dark,
And vacant of a life but just withdrawn.'
(from The Chalk-Pit)
As well as the absent, he appreciated the conventionally ugly. 'As well as any bloom upon the flower' he likes '[the dust on the nettles, never lost/Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.' (from Tall Nettles). Here he explains the complexity of the seasons:
But These Things Also
'But these things also are Spring's-
On banks by the roadside the grass
Long-dead that is greyer now
Than all the Winter it was;
The shell of a little snail bleached In the grass; chip of flint, and mite
Of chalk; and the small birds' dung
In splashes of purest white'
[...]
He had the gift given to all the great nature-poets, of finding the eternal and sublime in the smallest encounters. Here, for example, unfurls a meditation on seeing a butterfly alight:
'From aloft
He took the heat of the sun, and from below.
On the hot stone he perched contented so,
As if never a cart would pass again
That way; as if I were the last of men
And he the first of insects to have earth
And sun together and to know their worth. I was divided between him and the gleam,
The motion, and the voices, of the stream,
The waters running frizzled over gravel,
That never vanish and for ever travel'
(from The Brook)
He was deeply respectful of the life-forms around him. He was much opposed to animal cruelty. In Snow a child cries for a murdered white bird. '[F]ar more ancient and dark/The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,' he observes in The Combe. In The Gallows he rails against a keeper who murdered weasels, crows, magpies and many others.
He understood that the natural world was not to be lorded over. Observing a pile of faggots he writes, with characteristic simplicity:
'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.'
(from Fifty Faggots)
Not for him was the chaos of the mechanised city.
'Thrushes and blackbirds sing in the gardens of the town
In vain: the noise of man, beast, and machine prevails.'
(from Good Night)
The opening lines of The Lane can be read as much as a hope for rural repopulation as for the homecoming of soldiers:
'Some day, I think, there will be people enough
In Froxfield to pick all the blackberries
Out of the hedges of Green Lane, the straight
Broad lane where now September hides herself
In bracken and blackberry, harebell and dwarf gorse.'
I shall conclude with two fine pieces of poetry. Firstly, this single, virtuosic, breath from one of Thomas's masterpieces, Beauty, which well captures his austere gifts. I always remember the vivid idea of the homecoming dove.
'But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening when it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, hapily
Floats through a window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale;
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unanswering to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.'
Secondly, a poem I have previously quoted on this blog, but worth reading again today. It was written by WH Auden in memory of Thomas.
'To E. T.
Those thick walls never shake beneath the rumbling wheel
No scratch of mole nor lisping worm you feel
So surely do those windows seal.
But here and there your music and your words are read
And someone learns what elm and badger said
To you who loved them and are dead.
So when the blackbird tries his cadences anew
There kindles still in eyes you never knew
The light that would have shone in you.'
In pleasing concentric circles, when I walk through the English countryside, I not only recall the lines of Edward Thomas, but this tribute of Auden's, too.
In memory of Edward Thomas.
3rd March 1878- 9th April 1917