by Edna Longley
In ‘History and the Parish’, an important chapter in The South Country (1909), Thomas writes:
The eye that sees the things of today, and the ear that hears, the mind that contemplates or dreams, is itself an instrument of an antiquity equal to whatever it is called upon to apprehend. We are not merely twentieth-century Londoners or Kentish men or Welshmen…And of these many folds in our nature the face of the earth reminds us, and perhaps, even where there are no more marks visible upon the land than there were in Eden, we are aware of the passing of time in ways too difficult and strange for the explanation of historian and zoologist and philosopher.47
Few poets can match Thomas’s historical imagination. In fact, his post-Darwinian approach to ‘the mystery of the past’ is ultimately “eco-historical”: to introduce a term that will recur in the Notes. Of all the ways in which Thomas’s poetry anticipates ideas that help us to read it, his ecological vision may be the most inclusive. Taken together, his poetry and prose pioneer “ecocriticism”. His earliest influence was the Wiltshire writer Richard Jefferies (1848-87), of whom he wrote a fine biography (1909). Reading Jefferies sent Thomas out into the fields, inspired him to make field notes, and gave him a credo: ‘Let us get out of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind.’ 48 Jefferies also set Thomas on the track of English rural writing from Gilbert White to W.H. Hudson – another tradition that his poetry condenses. With his equally deep absorption of the Romantic poets, no poet was better equipped to take what Jonathan Bate calls ‘Romantic ecology’ into new dimensions and into the new century.
Thomas’s ideal Nature study would reveal ‘in animals, in plants…what life is, how our own is related to theirs’, and show us ‘our position, responsibilities and debts among the other inhabitants of the earth’.49 His self-perception as ‘an inhabitant of the earth’ is fundamental to the ecocentric, rather than anthropocentric, structures of his poetry. Thus he exposes the lyric “I” to the uncertainties of ‘our position’, as well as to inner divisions, and (in ‘The Combe’ and ‘The Gallows’) correlates the Great War with human violence towards other species. Asked in 1908 to define Nature, he attacked man’s ‘belief that Nature is only a house, furniture etc round about him. It is not my belief, and I don’t oppose Nature to Man. Quite the contrary. Man seems to me a very little part of Nature and the part I enjoy least. But civilisation has estranged us superficially from Nature, and towns make it possible for a man to live as if a millionaire could really produce all the necessities of life – food, drink, clothes, vehicles etc and then a tombstone.’50 Thomas’s prophetic environmentalism was conditioned by his London upbringing and by rural England ‘dying’ as London grew.51 Since the 1870s, when the government refused to protect English wheat against American imports, the agricultural economy (particularly of south-east England) had been in decline. Thomas sardonically observes that the countryman is ‘sinking before the Daily Mail like a savage before pox or whisky’, and that ‘brewers, bankers, and journalists… are taking the place of hops in Kent’.52 From all this, he intuited a deeper crisis. In some ways, the war only intensified the elegiac tilt of Thomas’s eco-history. While he may not always enjoy ‘man’, and recognises ‘nature’s independence of humanity’,53 his poetry invites us to remember what man in Nature, and Nature in man, have created.
‘Old Man’, in which humanity and Nature puzzlingly entangle, is among Thomas’s best-known poems. Here he spells out the concern with memory – personal, cultural, ecological – that constitutes, as much as occupies, his poetry:
I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering…
Other poems, too, represent themselves as acts of memory or as failure to remember. The words ‘memory’ and ‘remember’ recur. We also find ‘recall’, ‘call back’, ‘call to mind’, ‘came back again’, ‘hung in my mind’, ‘forget’. The importance of memory, as it comes or calls or hangs or hangs back suggests why Thomas so fully exploits poetry’s licence to play with syntactical order. The relation of syntax to line (and both to rhyme) is notable for inversion, reversion and other quirks of sequence. ‘The past hovering as it revisits the light’ (‘It rains’) shapes the metaphysics of Thomas’s forms and language. For Thomas, ‘word’ and ‘thing’ are neither identical nor distinct but marked by their association through time. Further, in attending to the folk-ghost, as to tradition in all its guises, he reaches for poetry’s mnemonic roots. A memorable poem lets the past hover longer. Perhaps his own poems should be called ‘Roads from France’.
It seems, then, that Mnemosyne (Memory) was the mother of Thomas’s late-starter Muse in a special sense. Certainly, he trawled all the resources of his own past. The Notes to this edition quote passages from his published writings, and from his notebooks, letters and diaries. Others might have been quoted or await discovery. These passages, in one way or another, contain seeds of poems. They also cast light on any poem’s origins in a synaptic spark between long-term and short-term term memory: between materials that a poet has consciously or unconsciously accumulated and some new factor that switches on a process of selection and transformation. I believe that Thomas’s intensive odyssey from poem to poem, with its formal and thematic twists, tells us a lot about poetry itself as well as about his own work. We may learn, for instance, that poetry’s sources remain mysterious; that we now expect too little from poetry; or that the academy has distorted readings of modern poetry by favouring surface difficulty. Admittedly, Thomas’s poems have superseded the textual mountain on which they perch, as the butterfly supersedes the caterpillar. So perhaps (to quote ‘I never saw that land before’) ‘what was hid should still be hid’. Yet all that Edward Thomas compressed into his poems can be too well hidden.
1. Review of new verse, Daily Chronicle, 27 August 1901. See note, 169.
2. Philip Larkin, Required Writing (London: Faber, 1983), 49.
3. LGB, 57 [for all abbreviations, see 325].
4. LGB, 9.
5. LGB, 78, 103, 226.
6. EF [1997 ed.], xv.
7. LWD, 19 November 1911.
8. LGB, 85.
9. Diary, 22 July 1902, NLW.
10. LWD, soon after 6 October 1913: the ‘Saviour’, ‘a certain purchase’, may have been a drug; for Thomas and suicide see note on Rain (268).
11. EF, 13.
12. LGB, 163.
13. LGB, 129.
14. Daily News, 22 July 1914: Thomas wrote two other reviews of North of Boston.
15. LGB, 250-1.
16. Letter from Frost to Harold Roy Brennan, 1926, quoted WC, 184.
17. RFET, 39.
18. Letter to John Freeman, 8 March 1915, JM, 326.
19. Foreword to RFET, xxxviii.
20. Letter to John Freeman, 14 August 1914, ETFN 38 (January 1998), 7.
21. EF, 48, 51.
22. LGB, 107.
23. WP, 215, 210, 219.
24. LGB, 91.
25. LWD, 30 August 1914.
26. LEG, 31.
27. See Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life (New York: Owl Books, 1999), 155; and note, 168.
28. RFET, 61.
29. He applied for a commission in June 1916 after receiving a £300 government grant.
30. Letter to Helen Thomas, 27 April 1917, SLRF, 216.
31. (Ed.) John Bell, Wilfred Owen: Selected Letters (Oxford: OUP, 1998), 130.
32. Letter to Edward Garnett, 29 April 1917, SLRF, 217.
33. JK, xiv.
34. Review of W.B. Yeats, Plays for an Irish Theatre, Week’s Survey, 18 June 1904.
35. ACS, 171.
36. MM, 27.
37. Review of W.B. Yeats, Collected Works, Morning Post, 17 December 1908.
38. Review of W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight, new ed., Daily Chronicle, 12 July 1902.
39. TC, 2.
40. Rev
iew of Ezra Pound, Personae, Daily Chronicle, 7 June 1909; review of Pound, Exultations, Daily Chronicle, 23 November 1909.
41. Review of Des Imagistes: An Anthology, New Weekly, 9 May 1914.
42. SLRF, 113.
43. SLRF, 217.
44. (Ed.) Longley, Edward Thomas: Poems and Last Poems (London: Collins, 1973).
45. Review of The Dublin Book of Irish Verse, Morning Post, 6 January 1910.
46. SC, 7.
47. SC, 151-2.
48. From the last paragraph of Jefferies’s The Amateur Poacher (1879), see CET, 134.
49. SC, 144.
50. SL, 51.
51. See Alun Howkins, The Death of Rural England (London: Routledge, 2003).
52. TC, 21-2; review of new verse, Daily Chronicle, 30 August 1905.
53. RJ, 144.
NOTE ON TEXT OF THIS EDITION
Anyone who edits Edward Thomas’s poems is greatly indebted to the late R. George Thomas. Among his other contributions to Thomas studies, he edited The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) [henceforth CP1978], which has a virtually comprehensive textual apparatus. If I have arrived at some different textual decisions – all differences are indicated in the Notes – it is largely R. George Thomas who marshalled the materials on which such decisions must be based. He also created the invaluable Edward Thomas Collection (Cardiff University Library), where many relevant documents are assembled. In the present edition, the textual note on each poem records its main manuscript source(s) and its initial publication(s) in book-form (including pamphlets and anthologies). Other sources and printings are cited where necessary. Details of manuscripts, typescripts and publications of poems are given in Abbreviations (325).
In 1917, shortly before Thomas’s death, he published eighteen poems in An Annual of New Poetry [AANP] under his pseudonym ‘Edward Eastaway’ (Eastaway was a family name). Poems by Edward Eastaway [P] appeared posthumously in the same year. P contains sixty-four poems, none repeated from AANP. Last Poems by Edward Thomas [LP] was published in 1918. LP contains all but seven of Thomas’s remaining poems. The first Collected Poems by Edward Thomas [CP1920] added ‘Up in the Wind’. The second Collected Poems [CP1928] added four more poems. Transferred to Faber and Faber in 1936, the Collected Poems later appeared in a new edition [CP1944], which remained the significant text for many years. Its fifth impression [CP1949] added one more poem, as did CP1978. The current Faber Collected Poems [CP2004] takes its text from CP1978, but treats the titles of poems differently (see below). CP2004 does not reprint any textual apparatus, although, rather confusingly, it retains the textual aspect of R. George Thomas’s Introduction to CP1978.
Thomas oversaw the publication of his poems in AANP and P. This edition thus regards these texts as authoritative, except for a few instances discussed in the Notes. CP1978 departs more frequently from P, mainly owing to ‘doubts’ about how its text was assembled (see CP1978, 38). Such doubts would have been dispelled by the printer’s typescript of P [PTP], which clearly passed through Thomas’s hands. But PTP did not become known to R. George Thomas until the paperback edition of CP1978 (without its apparatus) had gone to press in 1981. Among other textual consequences, since no changes were subsequently made, this affects the titles of certain poems in CP1978, and still in CP2004.
Often when Thomas wrote a poem, he did not immediately give it a title. That can be gauged from the manuscript notebooks, now in the British Library [BL] and the Bodleian [B], in which he made fair (more or less) copies of nearly all his poems. In PTP twenty-three titles in Thomas’s handwriting are added to typescript poems (Eleanor Farjeon was his principal typist). Apart from ‘The Trumpet’ and ‘The Gallows’, these are first-line titles, e.g., ‘Bright Clouds’, ‘Women he liked’, ‘How at once’, and ‘Gone, gone again’. Thus R. George Thomas should not have named those poems and ‘Like the touch of rain’ (where the title is typed) from references in Thomas’s letters. His new titles are: ‘The Pond’, ‘Bob’s Lane’, ‘The Swifts’, ‘Blenheim Oranges’, and ‘“Go now”’. Such references are, surely, a form of shorthand. Similarly, he turns Thomas’s mention of ‘the household poems’ into an overarching title for the sequence beginning ‘If I should ever by chance’. In PTP Thomas gives these four poems first-line titles. R. George Thomas also attaches the generic title ‘Song’ to the poems named by Thomas in PTP as ‘The clouds that are so light’ and ‘Early one morning’. Finally, in addition to the evidence of PTP, a letter from Thomas to his wife (20 October 1916) shows him to be up to speed with ‘the set [of verses] Ingpen has’ (SL, 133). Roger Ingpen, then at Selwyn & Blount, saw P through the press.
As regards LP (apart from the poems already printed in AANP) and six of the poems later added to Collected Poems, titles and other textual issues become more difficult. It appears that the LP editors, presumably literary friends of Thomas’s, adopted two procedures with formerly un-named poems. First, they gave them first-line titles (‘She dotes’, ‘I built myself a house of glass’, ‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’, ‘Those things that poets said’, ‘I never saw that land before’, ‘No one cares less than I’, ‘There was a time’, ‘That girl’s clear eyes’, ‘What will they do?’, ‘Out in the dark’). Second, they named poems for a central image or motif (‘Over the Hills’, ‘Man and Dog’, ‘The Gypsy’, ‘Ambition’, ‘The Wasp Trap’, ‘Digging’ [‘Today I think’], ‘Health’, ‘A Cat’, ‘The Dark Forest’, ‘The Child in the Orchard’). At the same time, as with other aspects of the LP text, it should be remembered that the editors may have consulted papers, or had information, no longer extant. In CP1978 R. George Thomas brackets all the above titles as questionable. I have indicated where he does so, and also where CP2004 (on no clear basis) has either dropped the titles completely or, in five instances, dropped the brackets instead. This edition retains the LP titles, together with the titles first given as ‘The Lane’ and ‘The Watchers’ in Two Poems (1927) [TP], and as ‘No one so much as you’ and ‘The Wind’s Song’ in CP1928. The poem for Thomas’s father, included in CP1949 as ‘P.H.T.’, has here been named for its first line (‘I may come near loving you’); as has his last poem, ‘The sorrow of true love’, first printed in CP1978.
There are several arguments for retaining titles that cannot confidently be traced to Thomas. First: nearly half (eleven) are first-line titles. The ms. titles added to PTP, like some titles already in place, show that the first-line title was his default-setting. (Hence ‘I may come near loving you’ and ‘The sorrow of true love’ in this edition.) Second: P, AANP, and the few poems printed elsewhere during his lifetime prove that Thomas came up with titles when publication loomed. Thus, even if ‘To name a thing beloved man sometimes fails’ (‘Women he liked’), he was no purist who feared that a title might limit a poem’s suggestiveness. Third: both established usage and convenience of reference should count for something. Certain poems by Thomas have been long known and discussed under particular titles. Such familiarity was controversially upset by CP1978; more so by CP2004, where poems are identified by their first lines in the Contents list, but only have a number on the page. This is awkward both for reading and for reference. The most problematic cases, then, are established titles which are not first-line titles, and whose provenance is uncertain (see previous paragraph). If editors bestowed those titles, perhaps they felt either that a first-line title would not work (as in the case of ‘Man and Dog’), or that an obvious title beckoned. Some of their apparent choices may be slightly more open to question than others. But, with the possible exception of ‘Over the Hills’, none obtrudes as inappropriate.
Like other poets killed in the First World War, Edward Thomas bequeathed a degree of textual uncertainty to his editors. Editors of the Collected Poems before CP1978 occasionally make changes from P and LP (changes that usually reflect BL or B), but without indicating their authority for doing so. Here and there they also standardise punctuation, adding exclamation-marks, for ins
tance. This edition follows CP1978 in altering ‘to-day’ to ‘today’ etc. A difficulty for all editors is that at times Thomas revised poems, and then (as in the case of ‘Sedge-Warblers’) seemingly rejected the revision. In the absence of clear evidence as to his final preferences, the ear must play a part in weighing the balance of probability. Since some issues will always remain undecidable, the Notes provide a basis for readers to make up their own minds. A conspicuous way in which this edition (like CP1978, CP2004, and my own earlier edition of P and LP [1973]) departs from Thomas’s own schemes is by ordering his poems chronologically. Evidently, he could never have conceived such a Collected Poems, any more than a collection called Last Poems. One drawback is that chronological editions must sacrifice the sequencing of poems in P, although Thomas had to omit the AANP poems from P itself. But, given the tight time-frame of Thomas’s poetry – as if he set out to write his collected poems in one go – it may be well served by a chronological arrangement.
COLLECTED POEMS
Up in the Wind
‘I could wring the old thing’s neck that put it here!
A public-house! It may be public for birds,
Squirrels and such-like, ghosts of charcoal-burners
And highwaymen.’ The wild girl laughed. ‘But I
5
Hate it since I came back from Kennington.
I gave up a good place.’ Her Cockney accent
Made her and the house seem wilder by calling up –
Only to be subdued at once by wildness –
The idea of London, there in that forest parlour,
