The Annotated Collected Poems

by Edna Longley

  Thomas notes: ‘men have written little poetry upon love for their friends’ (FIP, 50). In fact, This England contains an extract from the supreme English example of this genre: Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Frost and Ledington may have disposed Thomas to choose a section (LXXXIX) that evokes literary and political ‘talk’ during a summer picnic (it also refers to ‘The gust that round the garden flew, /And tumbled half the mellowing pears’). The sun used to shine echoes Tennyson’s four-beat line, elegiac cadences and final rhyme-words:

  …we glanced from theme to theme,

  Discuss’d the books to love or hate,

  Or touch’d the changes of the state,

  Or threaded some Socratic dream…

  We talk’d: the stream beneath us ran…

  And last, returning from afar,

  Before the crimson-circled star

  Had fall’n into her father’s grave,

  And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,

  We heard behind the woodbine veil

  The milk that bubbled in the pail,

  And buzzings of the honied hours.

  The sun used to shine commemorates a literary or “Parnassian” friendship as intense as that of Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. For Michael Hofmann, the letters between Thomas and Frost exemplify the ‘romance of friendship’ (see ‘Foreword’, RFET, xxxi-xxxix). Thus Thomas says: ‘The next best thing to having you here is having the space (not a void) that nobody else can fill’ (RFET, 98). Frost could be difficult, but everything he writes to or about Thomas is wholly loving: ‘Whats mine is yours. I say that from the heart, dear man…My whole nature simply leaps at times to cross the ocean to see you for one good talk’ (RFET, 142); ‘Edward Thomas was the only brother I ever had…I hadn’t a plan for the future that didn’t include him’; ‘He more than anyone else was accessory to what I had done and was doing. We were together to the exclusion of every other person and interest all through 1914 – 1914 was our year. I never had, I never shall have another such year of friendship’ (SLRF, 217, 220). He told Helen Thomas: ‘He was the bravest and best and dearest man you and I have ever known. I knew from the moment when I first met him at his unhappiest that he would someday clear his mind and save his life. I have had four wonderful years with him. I know he has done this all for you: he’s all yours. But you must let me cry my cry for him as if he were almost all mine too’ (RFET, 189). Yet there was mutual jealousy between Frost and Helen. He says of her memoir As It Was (1926): ‘I wonder if she wasnt in danger of making E.T. look ridiculous in the innocence she credited him with. Mightnt men laugh a manly laugh? E.T. was distinguished at his college in Oxford for the ribald folk songs he could entertain with – not to say smutty’ (SLRF, 351). Frost wrote three elegies for Thomas: ‘To E.T.’, ‘A Soldier’, and ‘Iris by Night’ where ‘we two’ again walk together in western England: ‘One misty evening, one another’s guide,/We two were groping down a Malvern side’. The poem symbolises the poets’ friendship as a rainbow ring: ‘And we stood in it softly circled round / From all division time or foe can bring / In a relation of elected friends’.

  Thomas’s and Frost’s poems for one another also ratify a shared aesthetic (see Introduction, 14). The sun used to shine is a virtuoso performance of what Frost calls ‘sentence tones…thrown and drawn and displayed across spaces of the footed line’ (SLRF, 191-2). Run-on lines and stanzas exemplify, as well as dramatise, the poets’ reciprocity. Similarly, the rhyming of ‘walked’ and ‘talked’, and the kinetic rhythm that fuses these activities, embody “body language”: ‘The movement of [Cobbett’s] prose is a bodily thing. His sentences do not precisely suggest the swing of an arm or a leg, but they have something in common with it. His style is perhaps the nearest to speech that has really survived’ (RR, xi). David Constantine writes: ‘Walking for a poet like Thomas or Wordsworth or Clare or Frost is a condition of being in, of progressing through the actual substance of poetry. And the feel of walking, its rhythms, the response of the feet to the changing demands and textures of the path, the continual stimulation of all the senses, the sustained interplaying of the mind and the imagination with the realities under foot and before the eyes – all this is so analogous to the composition of a certain kind of poetry as actually to become the condition and process of composition itself’ (ETFN 40 [January 1999], 12).

  1. we two walked: cf. the first line of When we two walked and ‘two walking’ (It rains, l.8). Thomas associates love as well as talk with walking. ‘A Walk’, an early love poem to Helen, has the lovers walking ‘hand in hand thro’ the blossomed whin’ and ‘By the swift brook trickling bright’. The poem ends with them crossing the ‘last meadow-stile’ while ‘the pale moon smiles down’ (NLW, MS 22914C).

  13. a sentry of dark betonies. ‘The nicest flower all the way was the wood betony at the edges of the woods. It looks so wise – a purple flower like basil, but darker, with dark leaves, rather stiff’ (letter to Helen, 16 August 1912, SL, 75). See ‘This England’, quoted above.

  15-17. crocuses…sunless Hades fields: ‘the tenderest green and palest purple of a thick cluster of autumn crocuses that have broken out of the dark earth and stand surprised, amidst their own weak light as of the underworld from which they have come’ (SC, 271). The image is an autumnal version of the Persephone myth.

  28. like memory’s sand. As ‘like’ changes in usage (now prefacing a simile), the poem reflexively aligns poetry with memory. In effect, The sun used to shine ‘remembers’ August 1914 twice. Second time round, the faster rhythm and shorthand noun-clauses suggest poetry holding on as memory ‘fades’.

  31-2. under the same moon / Go talking. The poem’s diurnal scheme, reinforced by ‘yellow’ apples, ‘Pale purple’ crocuses and ‘dark’ betonies, encompasses longer time-spans: life and death, including the self-elegiac tone; history (‘the Crusades /Or Caesar’s battles’); literary history (‘sometimes mused’). Similarly, the landscape is a microcosm – at one level, of the poets’ work. As in Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking’, the ‘fallen apples’ may have something to do with poems, while the crocuses hint at Thomas’s oddly belated poetic ‘birth’. The climactic intensity of ‘the same moon’ suggests that it partly figures the imagination, turning the poem into one of Thomas’s valedictory testaments. His poetic birth and death merge as he hands on a rich legacy to ‘other’ poets.

  Ms: M2, B. Published text: P.

  No one cares less than I (123)

  25, 26 May 1916

  In this dissident, dissonant poem, war and poetry clash. The long refrain lines, with their flat rhythm, suggest that the speaker’s perplexities will never reach any resolution, formal or otherwise. The ironical rhyme ‘God’/‘clod’ parodies more conclusive poems, including two of Rupert Brooke’s 1914 sonnets: ‘III. The Dead’ (‘Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead’) and ‘V. The Soldier’ (‘If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England’). For Thomas and Brooke, see Introduction (17). Pressed by Frost for his ‘final opinion’ of Brooke’s poetry, Thomas replied: ‘I think he succeeded in being youthful & yet intelligible & interesting…more than most poets since Shelley. But thought gave him (and me) indigestion. He couldn’t mix his thought or the result of it with his feeling. He could only think about his feeling. Radically, I think he lacked power of expression. He was a rhetorician, dressing things up better than they needed’ (RFET, 151, 153-4). Brooke’s war-sonnets assume a providence (and an audience) that ‘knows’ and ‘cares’. Through the conceit of fitting an unpatriotic poem to a bugle call Thomas posits that an indifferent universe writes its own scripts.

  2. Nobody knows but God. Cf. the ‘God’ of February Afternoon, and see note (274).

  Ms: M2, B. Published text: LP. Note: CP1978 omits the commas after ‘God’ (l.2) and ‘clod’ (l.4) present in LP. Note on title: CP1978 brackets an editorially chosen title: Bugle Call. In CP2004 the poem has no title. This edition retains the LP title. See Note on Text. />
  As the team’s head-brass (123)

  27 May 1916

  On 28 May Thomas wrote to Helen: ‘I set out [from Hare Hall camp] with a meal in my haversack for a long walk, but didn’t go more than 6 miles all day. I sat down a good deal, both in the fields and at an inn, and passed or was passed by the same pair of lovers 3 or 4 times. It was very pleasant too, warm and cloudy. I wrote some lines too and rewrote them’ (NLW; ETFN 27 [August 1992], 4). This celebrated poem marks a further stage in Thomas’s second phase of decision-making about the war. On 9 June he wrote: ‘I have been trying for an artillery commission but without military influence it looks as if I might have a long wait’ (EF, 198). In July he was accepted for training, and turned down a permanent position at Hare Hall. By September he was an officer cadet at the Royal Artillery School in London. The Royal Artillery did not compel Thomas to seek service overseas nor, once in France, to leave HQ to rejoin his battery. But from mid-1916 he was evidently impatient for ‘change’. On 15 August he told Frost: ‘This waiting troubles me. I really want to be out’ (RFET, 144). On 29 October he told de la Mare: ‘I hope I shall be preserved from Coastal Defence. I want a far greater change than I have had so far’ (LWD). In a letter to Frost (2 March 1917) Helen Thomas says: ‘Edward wants the real thing and won’t be happy till he gets it’ (ETFN 46 [January 2002], 10). Thus ‘Have you been out?’ in l.18 of As the team’s head-brass, a question that identifies the poem’s speaker as a soldier, attaches his conversation with the ploughman to Thomas’s inner dialectics. Perhaps, as the previous poem suggests, the Rupert Brooke model of the “soldier poet” still bothered him.

  A summation of Thomas’s “Home Front” poetry, As the team’s head-brass symbolises war’s intrusion into rural England, and into English (and European) pastoral. Before the war he had written: ‘How nobly the ploughman and the plough and three horses, two chestnuts and a white leader, glide over the broad swelling field in the early morning! Under the dewy, dark-green woodside they wheel, pause, and go out into the strong light again, and they seem one and glorious, as if the all-breeding earth had just sent them up out of her womb – mighty, splendid, and something grim, with darkness and primitive forces clinging about them, and the night in the horses’ manes’ (HE, 21). Ploughing might seem to represent the opposite of war: agriculture, oneness with ‘the all-breeding earth’. Yet this opposition proves as unstable in As the team’s head-brass – Thomas’s last “eclogue” – as in February Afternoon. Moving on from Haymaking, and placing speech rather than a silent image at the poem’s centre, Thomas now fully historicises an iconic rural scene. In so doing, he challenges Hardy’s ‘In Time of “the Breaking of Nations”’ (1915) as a vision of history:

  I

  Only a man harrowing clods

  In a slow silent walk

  With an old horse that stumbles and nods

  Half asleep as they stalk.

  II

  Only thin smoke without flame

  From the heaps of couch-grass;

  Yet this will go onward the same

  Though Dynasties pass.

  III

  Yonder a maid and her wight

  Come whispering by:

  War’s annals will cloud into night

  Ere their story die.

  Whereas Hardy segregates archetypal narratives from ‘War’s annals’, Thomas exposes them to historical contingency and situates his persona in its midst. He also lets rural labour speak for itself. The dialogue that interrupts the ploughman’s circuits establishes a template for all the poem’s structures: for the collapse of cyclical paradigms; for war-talk (including talk of dismemberment) breaking up blank verse; for the imagery and back-story linked with the ‘fallen elm’; for gaps, discontinuities and absences.

  1. As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn: ‘there was a pretty show of horse ornaments of brass among the saddlery. I almost counted these ornaments, crescents, stars, and bosses, as flowers of Spring, so clearly did I recall their May-day flashing in former years’ (IPS, 230). In the placing of ‘turn’, as later in l.6, Thomas exploits a formal corollary to the symbolism whereby sword is taking over from ploughshare. ‘Verse’, as a line of poetry, derives from the ploughman’s ‘turn’ (versus): an origin that enters the poem’s structures. As war penetrates pastoral, line-turns become more jagged.

  5. Watched: cf. The Watchers, and see note (290). This verb, repeated in l.35, may obliquely criticise the speaker for being a spectator of rural England, and of the war.

  7-11. Instead of treading me down…Scraping…screwed. This oddly violent language implies that farming and war are not wholly discrete products of human culture.

  20-1. I could spare an arm…leg…lose my head. On 21 November 1915 Thomas had written to his aunt: ‘I really hope my turn will come and that I shall see what it really is and come out with my head and most of my limbs’ (LA, 18). This England includes the speech in which Williams says to the disguised Henry V: ‘But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, We died at such a place…’ (Henry V, IV, i).

  25. One of my mates is dead. This absent ‘mate’ (cf. A Private) is an alter ego who haunts both the ploughman and the implied soldier poet.

  26. they killed him: an interestingly impersonal or impartial, as well as colloquial, usage. Cf. ‘they killed the badger’ in The Combe.

  31. Another world’. ‘Ann says there is another world. “Not a better,” she adds firmly. “It would be blasphemous to suppose that God ever made anything but the best of worlds. Not a better, but a different one, suitable for different people than we are now, you understand, not better, for that is impossible, say I”’ (HGLM, 299).

  33. The lovers came out of the wood again. The lovers’ simply stated return contrasts with Hardy’s rhetorical claim, and does not re-inscribe a cyclical view of history.

  34-6. for the last time…stumbling team. ‘For the last time’, which reverberates in several directions, is pivotal to the symbolism of the ‘last’ two lines. Thomas thought of calling the poem ‘The Last Team’ (EF, 144). Horses, like farm-labourers, were being recruited for war, while modernity threatened the plough along with other traditional staples of rural England: ‘teams of plough horses …had been taken for service in France…in the wake of the newly invented tank, tractors and steam ploughs belched and rumbled across English fields’ (Caroline Dakers, The Countryside at War 1914-1918 [London: Constable, 1987], 19). That ‘time’ rhymes with ‘team’ hints that the former may be running out for the latter. ‘For the last time’ also shadows the speaker’s possible future as one of those ‘gone/From here’. Thomas ends where Hardy begins. He reworks ‘clods’ and ‘stumble’ in a way that leaves his own poem open to the hinted trenches and to history.

  Ms: M2, B. Published text: P. Differences from CP1978: 1 [and in title] head-brass [P] head brass [B] 23 Yes: a [P] Yes, a [B]

  After you speak (124)

  3 June 1916

  See note on Thomas’s love poems (279). The irregularly rhymed one- or two-beat lines of this and the next poem mark a rhythmic shift, a kind of metrical sorbet, after three poems weighted with war (although war infiltrates Bright Clouds). As in Words, the movement creates space for single words, mainly monosyllables. After you speak has structural parallels with The clouds that are so light. But here the Romantic ‘lark’, also a metaphor for the poem itself (‘A mote / Of singing dust’), collapses the distance between desire and the transcendental beloved. The oxymorons ‘black star’ and ‘singing dust’ set up the identification of ‘lust’ with, or as, ‘love’. In this most erotic of Thomas’s love poems, ‘eyes’ uniquely ‘meet’.

  Ms: M2, B. Published text: P.

  Bright Clouds (125)

  4, 5 June 1916

  See general note to previous poem. The Zen-like focus on the pond, ‘bright’ images set against ‘shade’, a m
oment suspended between ‘calls’, and ‘criss-cross bayonets’ suggest that Bright Clouds alludes to Thomas waiting for action: ‘Naught’s to be done’. ‘Frets’ and ‘scum’ make ‘may-blossom’ a less positive image than usual, and hint at discontent beneath the poem’s surfaces. Perhaps the pond also mirrors “waiting for the end” on a broader symbolic front. This suspense is not the idyllic suspension of July where ‘still’ has a different nuance.