by Edna Longley
EDWARD THOMAS
THE ANNOTATED COLLECTED POEMS
Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime’s poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914, at the age of 36. In April 1917 he was killed at Arras. Often viewed as a “war poet”, he wrote nothing directly about the trenches; also seen as a “nature poet”, his symbolic reach and generic range expose the limits of that category too. A central figure in modern poetry, he is among the half-dozen poets who remade English poetry in the early 20th century.
Edna Longley published an earlier edition of Thomas’s poetry in 1973. Her work advanced his reputation as a major modern poet. Now she has produced a revised version with a new, definitive text of all of his poems which draws on freshly available archive material. The extensive Notes contain substantial quotations from Thomas’s prose, letters and notebooks, as well as a new commentary on the poems.
The prose hinterland behind Thomas’s poems helps us to understand their depth and complexity, together with their contexts in his troubled personal life, in wartime England, and in English poetry. Edna Longley also shows how Thomas’s criticism feeds into his poetry, and how he prefigured critical approaches, such as “ecocriticism”, that are now applied to his poems.
‘Edna Longley’s definitive new edition of Edward Thomas’s Collected Poems makes a case for the enduring, essential relevance to the 21st century of this English poet who died in World War I. The book is a crowning achievement by Thomas’s best advocate, approachable by the beginner and invaluable to the specialist, with a critical apparatus which is at once a biography tracing the growth of the poet’s mind and an engrossing anthology of his vivid, melancholy prose’ – SEAMUS HEANEY
Edna Longley is a Professor Emerita in the School of English, Queen’s University Belfast. Her publications include an edition of Edward Thomas’s prose writings, A Language Not To Be Betrayed (1981) from Carcanet, and four critical books: Louis MacNeice: A Study (1988) from Faber, and Poetry in the Wars (1986), The Living Stream: Literature & Revisionism in Ireland (1994) and Poetry & Posterity (2000) from Bloodaxe. She also edited The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry (2000).
COVER PAINTING
Paul Nash (1889-1946): Spring in the Trenches, Ridge Wood, 1917 (1918) IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM, LONDON
EDWARD THOMAS
THE ANNOTATED
Collected Poems
edited by
EDNA LONGLEY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editor and Bloodaxe Books are extremely grateful to the Executors of the Estate of Myfanwy Thomas for permission to quote from manuscripts and typescripts of Edward Thomas’s poems; from his letters, diaries and notebooks; and from The Childhood of Edward Thomas. They are also indebted to Henry Holt & Co. for permission to quote from Complete Poems of Robert Frost (1949) and from (ed.) Lawrance Thompson, Selected Letters of Robert Frost (1964); and to Handsel Books, publishers of (ed.) Matthew Spencer, Elected Friends: Robert Frost & Edward Thomas to one another (2003).
Further thanks are owed to the following libraries: the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library; the British Library; Cardiff University Library; Dartmouth College Library; the Lockwood Memorial Library; and the National Library of Wales. The editor’s personal thanks go to Richard Emeny and the Edward Thomas Fellowship; to Peter Keelan, Head of Special Collections and Archives, Cardiff University Library; to Guy Cuthbertson, Anne Margaret Daniel, Declan Kiely, Andrew Motion, Lucy Newlyn and John Pikoulis; and, above all, to Myfanwy Thomas, to whose memory this edition is dedicated.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Note on Text of this Edition
Up in the Wind
November
March
Old Man
The Signpost
After Rain
Interval
The Other
Birds’ Nests
The Mountain Chapel
The Manor Farm
An Old Song I
An Old Song II
The Combe
The Hollow Wood
The New Year
The Source
The Penny Whistle
A Private
Snow
Adlestrop
Tears
Over the Hills
The Lofty Sky
The Cuckoo
Swedes
The Unknown Bird
The Mill-Pond
Man and Dog
Beauty
The Gypsy
Ambition
House and Man
Parting
First known when lost
May 23
The Barn
Home (‘Not the end’)
The Owl
The Child on the Cliffs
The Bridge
Good-night
But these things also
The New House
The Barn and the Down
Sowing
March the Third
Two Pewits
Will you come?
The Path
The Wasp Trap
A Tale
Wind and Mist
A Gentleman
Lob
Digging (‘Today I think’)
Lovers
In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)
Head and Bottle
Home (‘Often I had gone’)
Health
The Huxter
She dotes
Song
A Cat
Melancholy
Tonight
April
The Glory
July
The Chalk-Pit
Fifty Faggots
Sedge-Warblers
I built myself a house of glass
Words
The Word
Under the Woods
Haymaking
A Dream
The Brook
Aspens
The Mill-Water
For These
Digging (‘What matter makes my spade’)
Two Houses
Cock-Crow
October
There’s nothing like the sun
The Thrush
Liberty
This is no case of petty right or wrong
Rain
The clouds that are so light
Roads
The Ash Grove
February Afternoon
I may come near loving you
Those things that poets said
No one so much as you
The Unknown
Celandine
‘Home’ (‘Fair was the morning’)
Thaw
If I should ever by chance
If I were to own
What shall I give?
And you, Helen
The Wind’s Song
Like the touch of rain
When we two walked
Tall Nettles
The Watchers
I never saw that land before
The Cherry Trees
It rains
Some eyes condemn
The sun used to shine
No one cares less than I
As the team’s head-brass
After you speak
Bright Clouds
Early one morning
It was upon
Women he liked
There was a time
The Green Roads
The Gallows
The Dark Forest
When he should laugh
How at once
That girl’s clear eyes
What will they do?
The Trumpet
When first
The Child in the Orchard
Lights Out
The long small room
The Sheiling
The Lane
Out in the dark
The sorrow of true love
Notes
Biographical Outline
Abbreviations
Further Bibliography
Index of Titles
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
In 1901 Edward Thomas (b. 1878) predicted a great future for the lyric poem: ‘Increasing complexity of thought and emotion will find no such outlet as the myriad-minded lyric, with its intricacies of form’.1 Thomas himself would do much to bring that future into being. He is among the half-dozen poets who, in the early twentieth century, remade English poetry. His closest aesthetic ally was Robert Frost, but he shared significant literary, cultural and political contexts with W.B. Yeats and Wilfred Owen. He was also in critical dialogue with emergent “modernism” as represented by Imagism and the first collections of Ezra Pound. While the academy has not always recognised Thomas’s centrality to modern poetry, this neglect has been offset by readers’ enthusiasm, and by the generations of poets, from W.H. Auden onwards, who have named Thomas as a key influence. Anne Harvey’s anthology Elected Friends: Poems for and about Edward Thomas (1991) contains seventy-six items. Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry (2007) assembles more recent tributes from poets. The phenomenon of the “Edward Thomas poem” suggests that Thomas’s poetry secretes core values, traditions and tricks of the trade.
This annotated Collected Poems is another kind of tribute. The Notes include a commentary on the poems. But their main purpose is to indicate, largely in Thomas’s own words, the rich hinterland that sustained a uniquely intense poetic journey. In two years, facing towards war, Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime’s poetry. Aside from some juvenilia, he did not write his first poem ‘Up in the Wind’ until December 1914. He was then 36. Thomas enlisted in July 1915, and wrote the last of 142 poems on 13 January 1917. Two weeks later, a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, he embarked for France. On 9 April, he was killed by shell-blast as the Arras ‘Easter Offensive’ began. Poems (1917) and Last Poems (1918) were published after his death. Partly owing to his late poetic start, critics still find Thomas hard to place. His poetry appears in most Great War anthologies, and the war had a crucial role in its genesis. Yet, since he wrote no trench poems, he eludes or disturbs the category “war poet”. If he looks rather more like a “Nature poet”, his generic range and symbolic reach expose the limits of that category too. Thomas’s art also eludes the critical grasp when it is seen as ‘quiet’, ‘understated’ or ‘diffident’. This is to mistake means for ends.
When Thomas died, he was chiefly known as the author of two kinds of prose: country books, from his precocious The Woodland Life (1897) to In Pursuit of Spring (1914), and literary criticism. Yet he also wrote meditative essays – the title Horae Solitariae (1902) speaks for itself – and impressionistic fictions, such as those collected in Rest and Unrest (1910) and Light and Twilight (1911). He experimented with myth, fantasy and fable. And he could never write about the countryside purely as a naturalist or topographer or folklorist or social historian. All Thomas’s mixed-up genres feature in his uncoordinated but atmospheric novel, The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (1913), based on his London-Welsh childhood. In retrospect, his imaginative prose is always a poet’s prose – soul autobiography that bears out Philip Larkin’s dictum: ‘novels are about other people and poems are about yourself’.2 Its dispersed modes, images and perceptions aspire to the integration of symbol. As Thomas’s prose became more directly autobiographical, with The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans and the memoir published as The Childhood of Edward Thomas (1938), he drew closer to poetry.
In 1904 Thomas told his confidant, the poet Gordon Bottomley: ‘There is no form that suits me, & I doubt if I can make a new form.’3 It would be simplistic to say that he kept on missing the obvious. In starting with an unusual form of writer’s block, masked by his copious prose, he proved the mysterious chemistry, rather than deliberate decision, from which poems come. When Thomas’s poems came, they were poems of 1914, not 1900, although they encoded the years between. Meanwhile his prose was hampered in its original flights by the need to earn money. He had married in 1899, while still studying History at Oxford, because his lover Helen Noble was pregnant. Owing to a venereal infection contracted during celebrations of the Relief of Mafeking, he failed to get the degree that might have made him an academic. Mainly from choice, partly from necessity, and against the wishes of his civil-servant father, Thomas became a freelance writer and literary journalist. His diverse book-commissions included Oxford (1903), Beautiful Wales (1905), Maurice Maeterlinck (1911) and The Life of the Duke of Marlborough (1915).
The Thomases rented successive country cottages, principally in or around Steep, Hampshire. By 1910, they had three children. Their most regular source of income was Thomas’s reviewing for the Daily Chronicle and other newspapers. R. George Thomas calculates that from 1900 to 1914 Thomas wrote ‘just over a million words about 1,200 books’.4 He reviewed new verse, editions of old verse, every kind of rural book, criticism. As living to write became desperately entangled with writing to live, Thomas’s sanity and marriage were tested. In February 1905 he told Bottomley: ‘My great enemy is physical exhaustion which makes my brain so wild that I am almost capable of anything & fear I shall one day prove it.’ In January 1906 he lamented: ‘Oh, I have lost my very last chances of happiness, gusto & leisure now. I am swallowed up. I live for an income of £250 & work all day & often from 9 a.m. until 1 a.m. It takes me so long because I fret & fret…My self criticism or rather my studied self contempt is now nearly a disease.’ If such complaints have a theatrical tinge – in December 1912 Thomas described himself as ‘advertising my sorrows & decimating my friends’ – that, too, was part of the ‘disease’.5 Eleanor Farjeon (who loved him) warned a biographer: ‘remember that when his moods weren’t on him like a sickness, when his nerves weren’t harassed by overwork and anxiety…he was among other things the best talker, the best thinker, the most humorous…His power of friendship was as great as his need of it’.6
Yet on the face of it, and despite Helen Thomas’s devotion, early marriage was disastrous for a writer who needed creative space. There may have been an underlying mental problem: Thomas refers to ‘something wrong at the very centre which nothing deliberate can put right’.7 But the neurotic symptoms that his letters ‘advertise’ are bound up with financial worry, domestic claustrophobia, overwork, fear of not getting work, dislike of hustling for work, all compounded by his sense of betraying ‘my silly little deformed unpromising bantling of originality’.8 At certain periods he used opium for relief that may have made things worse: ‘I have sent up strange melodies of agony to many a moon’.9 In January 1908 Thomas found another problematic form of relief in his obsession with a briefly-met young girl who haunts his love poetry. He often brooded on suicide: in November 1908 he took a revolver for a walk; in October 1913 Walter de la Mare had to talk him out of a suicidal ‘design’. Thomas told de la Mare afterwards: ‘I think I have now changed my mind though I have the Saviour in my pocket.’ 10 He also suffered a series of nervous breakdowns. Several doctors tried to treat what he calls ‘melancholy’ or ‘depression’. In 1912 the most effective doctor, Godwin Baynes, introduced him to psychoanalysis. This helped Thomas to understand his symptoms: ‘the central evil is self-consciousness carried as far beyond selfishness as selfishness is beyond self denial…and all I have got to fight it with is the knowledge that in truth I am not the isolated selfconsidering brain which I have come to seem – the knowledge that I am something more, but not the belief that I can reopen the connection between the brain and the rest’.11
Although Baynes
’s own impact dwindled, psychoanalytic principles would influence Thomas’s poetic structures. It was poetry that ‘re-opened the connection’ or opened, at least, a series of channels. As therapy, it lacked the downside that Thomas feared when he wondered ‘whether for a person like myself whose most intense moments were those of depression a cure that destroys the depression may not destroy the intensity – a desperate remedy?’ 12 Some of his early poems imply their own emergence from incoherence. ‘The Other’ begins: ‘The forest ended’. Thomas adapts the ‘myriad-minded’ lyric to dialogue between different voices, different selves, the roles of patient and analyst. His poetry revisits conflicts manifested in his letters and diaries (conflicts that did not, indeed, vanish overnight), but with a new power to objectify them as psychodrama. Like another troubled poet Sylvia Plath, if by different means, he recasts his subjectivity from poem to poem. Yet Thomas’s poems are not ‘about himself’ in a reductive sense. Nor are they ‘himself’ in the sense that they put a fragmented psyche together again. Autobiography or case-history is only where his poetry starts. When ‘The Other’ enters the unconscious and dramatises splits within the psyche, it marks the start of a poetic movement that will internalise the perplexities of modern selfhood.
But why did poetry come, or come to the rescue, in December 1914? Eight years before, Thomas had told Bottomley: ‘I feel sure that my salvation depends on a person’.13 The American poet Robert Frost, whom Thomas first met in October 1913, turned out to be a true ‘saviour’. Psychological, intellectual and aesthetic affinities explain the rapid advance of their friendship. Frost periodically suffered from depression. He was a sceptical post-Darwinian thinker, with residual mystical inclinations, who had deeply absorbed the Romantic poets and Thomas Hardy. His American precursors, Emerson and Thoreau, had been formative writers for Thomas too. Frost’s imagined New Hampshire, like Thomas’s old Hampshire, was a tree-landscape with dark vistas and enigmatic inhabitants. And Frost’s ideas about speech and poetry, which centred on the ‘sentence-sound’, were akin to those that Thomas had started to develop in Walter Pater: A Critical Study (1914). Aged 39, four years older than Thomas, Frost had yet received little acclaim at home. Thomas, by then an influential poetry critic, largely made Frost’s reputation in England and hence in the US. He wrote of Frost’s second collection, North of Boston:
