Edward Thomas Annual Walk, a Road Not Taken

We didn't actually make it to the Edward Thomas Fellowship walk and talk today. Not to worry. Worse things happen at sea. I'd done some homework, though, and don't want that to go to waste. It's been a while since I spent any amount of time with these poems. As well as Edna Longley's Annotated Collected Poems, there's the studies by Stan Smith and Andrew Motion on the shelves, half a dozen of his prose books, the biography by Matthew Hollis and the memoir by Eleanor Farjeon attesting to a time when he almost certainly was a Top 6 Poet of mine. He might have slipped out of that top echelon, through no fault of his own, but would remain a candidate for top dozen or maybe twenty.

Collected Poems was rarely a more fitting title than when applied to those of Edward Thomas. 'Calm and Collected', it could go as far as to say. There, that's the line I'm so keen to put my name to, hoping against hope that nobody's used it about anybody else before although I do now find Cool, Calm and Collected Poems by Carolyn Kizer but I'd never heard of it. Thomas's affinity with, and celebration of, the natural world and uncomplicated, plain way of explaining it doesn't sit easily with the difficulties of his tormented personality that among other things had him going out for a walk from the family home with the intention of killing himself. It's easy to do a bit of amateur psychology and diagnose a preference for solitude over society that was at the bottom of his attachment to the elements, plant life, the open countryside and 'travelling' men. If I remember one thing from Stan Smith's book it was his idea of being a 'superfluous' man.

On the walk round some of the sites associated with him in the Steep area of Petersfield, the Red House where he lived for a time is along the road from the sarcen stone at the top of the steep Shoulder of Mutton hill which isn't easy to walk down never mind go up. But Wind and Mist, one of a number of poems that return to the elements of wind and precipitation, belies any unilateral devotion to the weather. One might have thought the view from the top up there across such a view of land that he 'never saw before' would be idyllic but it was too exposed to storms or,

   the eye watching from those windows saw,

Many a day, day after day, mist - mist

Like chaos surging back - and felt itself

Alone in all the world, marooned alone.

 

It is kindly weather that Thomas wants companionship from, more like 'the sweetness of a shower' as witnessed in Tall Nettles.

One is glad it's still possible to 'learn something new every day' and find that the website First Known When Lost takes its name from an exquisite little Thomas poem in which he's counter-intuitively only sensitive to his rural surroundings when a feature of them, a copse, is suddenly not there any more but it's a familar feeling, not missing something until it's gone.

This afternoon's talk was by Suzanne Conway, The Longing of Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, looking at Like the touch of rain and Hardy’s At Castle Boterel, which my homework suggests equally depend on appreciating things more once they weren't there which Hardy especially made a career out of. Suzanne also appeared at last year's Larkin Society conference and so she's ticking a lot of good boxes. After Thomas, Hardy and Larkin, I wondered which fourth poet she might add. I was hoping it might be more towards Auden than Housman and, finding Louis MacNeice mentioned among her articles, that's close enough.

The problem, not that I have much of one, with Edward Thomas is that 'he tells it as it is', which is a good thing, but that's about all. Certainly there's cadence and a gentle music, we are invited to share his uplifting moments and do, he's relaxed but deceptively precise in his syntax (you'll not hear me say 'voice') and one can hardly help but be sympathetic, like he is.

But there's not much distance or irony between what he says and what he means. Whitman or maybe Wordsworth would surely be the worst for that who must be the least ironic poets I can think of. There's not much in the way of symbolism or 'objective correlative' that I can find. The poems don't try to work on 'other levels' ( ! ) or achieve two things at once. Poetry doesn't have to do those things, of course, all it has to be is 'any good' on its own terms and Thomas is all of that. But he might in today's terms be erring towards 'virtue signalling', isn't he nice, isn't he 'good', we must admire his delicate soul.

I can live with all of that, because it's him, because a kindly teacher showed us Adlestrop in the fourth form and impressed those of us who were capable of being impressed by it and even Ted Hughes, I think, called him 'the father of us all', probably for the way forward he showed that C20th poetry in the English language could go. Larkin, Motion, maybe O'Brien and many others have learnt from his example either at first hand or by the way his lines assimilated into the way we did such things as poetry struggled to not be like early C19th poetry on the one hand and like Picasso's Desmoiselles d'Avignon on the other.

And I was glad to be reminded what a great work of scholarship Edna Longley's Annotated Collected Poems is. Any poet lucky enough, and good enough, to have an editor of her calibre to do such a job on them would be eternally grateful.