Top 6 - Edward Thomas

With apologies for missing Remembrance Sunday with this feature, it is long overdue that Edward Thomas had more than a passing mention in these pages. He has long been a part of my firmament of poets and writers and should have been here long before in more than a passing reference.

Locally, it is a short train ride to Petersfield to walk around some sites associated with him at Steep, where he lived, not least the memorial stone on the Shoulder of Mutton, a climb so vertiginously steep that these days it has become somewhat forbidding, but it's a nice view on a clear day and I must do it again one day.

The Edward Thomas Fellowship keep up regular meetings in his memory http://www.edward-thomas-fellowship.org.uk/ and I might hope to coincide with them eventually.

I was also interested to find a letter in Eleanor Farjeon's book, Edward Thomas the Last Four Years, that he wrote from Hucclecote when staying with his friend, Jack Haines. Hillview, where Haines lived, was very close by where we lived in Gloucester in the late 1960's and 70's, and after that he was going to Coventry, apparently by bicycle.

I was first tempted to select six books by or about Thomas, which would be Edna Longley's excellently informative Annotated Collected Poems, the Farjeon book above, Stan Smith's fine study published by Faber, and three of his prose books, The Icknield Way, The South Country and In Pursuit of Spring. And perhaps that's the better idea because, re-reading him last night, I found it more difficult than expected to find six poems that I admired as much as I'd hoped.

Thomas is certainly all one wants of the thoughtful, solitary, close to nature writer, and more than would be necessary at his age, preoccupied with mortality although from 1914 to 1917, one can understand why he might be. But some of the poems began to seem a bit more precious than might be ideal. Less sentimental than Housman and more innovative stylistically than he might be credited for alongside Hardy, he is an essential part of the 'English' tradition and, I might suggest, closer to Larkin in style than Hardy, he is also aware of his own sensitivity and method,

I should use, as the trees and birds did,

A language not to be betrayed;

And what was hid should still be hid

Excepting from those like me made

Who answer when such whispers bid.

I never saw that land before is a fine poem and one I thought a banker for a pick of six of his poems but those final lines now make me think he should just do it and not tell us he's doing it.

But there are enough poems to furnish a fine half dozen without reservation and show that Thomas is not only an essential part of C20th Eng Lit, not really a 'war poet' as such and exactly the quiet, reflective sort of poet that should be valued and preserved.

We were well catered for at school in Eng Lit and it's something I've remained eternally grateful for, learning much from being given Adlestrop to learn for homework. It's about as perfect a piece as one would want and familiar enough in all its nuances not to need me to add summary or comment except to say that Adlestrop station is no longer there but the poem and the station sign are now in the bus stop in a very pleasant spot indeed.

At the Team's Head Brass is a war poem and, as Longley notes, both different to but a companion piece to Hardy's In time of 'the Breaking of Nations' . Thomas is closer to the land than he is to history, it might appear.

Having already selected a train poem, it's easy to add another set piece of English poetry, a rain poem, in the poem Rain which is given more depth in the passage it comes from in The Icknield Way, a meditation on mortality and solitude that had strange resonances in the prose book for me when thinking I'd read it somewhere before.

Celandine and Tall Nettles are perhaps the best realized of the many observations of countryside and nature, where Thomas allows us our fantasy of English pastoral escape whether or not it was ever really there. But rural life isn't idealized except in a way comparable to Marvell's very dissimilar poetry that also appreciates 'a green thought in a green shade'. Thomas knows the human place in rural life, having been born in London, and the very early poem Up in the Wind does it as well for me as other, later, more noted pieces.

The stray shell that robbed us rather unnecessarily of whatever would have been Thomas' later work, after only three years of writing poetry, is one of those culpable objects in history that defies understanding, especially as he had seemed to live a charmed life with several near misses before the ending of the war. But we need to treasure the man and his example as unsentimentally as possible in the circumstances. It was an example that English poetry could return to after the subsequent decades of misadventure into some distorted versions of modernism and one we must be grateful for.