[In the following essay, Draper considers Thomas as a writer of “lyric tragedy,” comparing him to Keats and Hardy, with special attention to Thomas's treatment of nature, war, and mortality.]

Edward Thomas is strongly reminiscent of both Keats and Hardy. Keats is recalled in ‘Blenheim Oranges’ by the ambivalent image of apples that ‘Fall grubby from the trees’, and in ‘The sun used to shine’ by the mixture of ripeness and rottenness in ‘the yellow flavorous coat / Of an apple wasps had undermined’.¹ Less immediately in terms of style, but with a similar sense of the organic process that makes death and life seem inherent in all seasons, Thomas also suggests Keats when in ‘The Thrush’, for example, the bird's song heard in November prompts reflections on its associations with April. The bird loses itself in the unconscious spontaneity of the present season, but the poet must recognise, and accept, the complexity of change:

But I know the months all,
And their sweet names, April,
May and June and October,
As you call and call
I must remember
What died into April
And consider what will be born
Of a fair November;
And April I love for what
It was born of, and November
For what it will die in,
What they are and what they are not.

The kinship with Hardy is obvious in the sonnet, ‘February Afternoon’, which broods on both the permanent rhythms of nature and the incorrigible human appetite for war, and ends with a very Hardyan divine indifference:

And God still sits aloft in the array
That we have wrought him, stone-deaf and stone-blind.

And in ‘The New House’ Hardy's sense of the interaction of past, present and future is echoed when the new occupier enters his dwelling and immediately hears the moaning of the wind, which foretells

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain: old griefs, and griefs
Not yet begun.

Yet Thomas has his own voice. Both sets of echoes combine in him to reinforce that distinctive self-consciousness which is both a torment to him and the source of his own peculiarly tentative awareness of the tragic. The melancholy which is so persistent a feature of his poetry has the lush quality of Keats', and the bleak disillusion of Hardy's, but it is constantly undermined by self-analysis and self-doubt which make him question its validity. He shares their vision, but distrusts the rhetorical means that are available to him to express it. In particular, he is aware of himself as an alien (and here he may owe something to the Hardy of ‘In Tenebris ii’) in a society that welcomes extrovert energy and success, but has little time for the ‘unreasonable’ despondency of a sensitivity such as his. He is unable, however, to respond to hostility with hostility. The openness of his mind makes him half-concede the criticism directed against him—indeed, it is criticism which originates as much from within as from without. At the same time his alternative vision is unremittingly present to his imagination, and insists on creating its own world. The only way to resolve his problem, therefore, is to include the terms of his dilemma within the poetry itself, reconciling denial and affirmation in a form that allows both.

This is what he does in ‘Aspens’. It is a poem about the nature of his own imagination. The aspens are himself, as he confirms in a letter to Eleanor Farjeon: ‘About “Aspens” you missed just the turn that I thought essential. I was the aspen. “We” meant the trees and I with my dejected shyness.’² The aspens at the crossroads ‘talk together / Of rain’, their soft, insistent whispering sound, suggestive of the insidious gossip of village women, in seemingly timorous contrast to the ringing, roaring noise of smithy and inn, which represents the boisterous, busy life of the community. But for all the loudness of this competition, ‘The whisper of the aspens is not drowned’. It has power to call up a ghostly alternative, ‘silent’ smithy and inn; and in certain conditions of darkness and mystery (that, again, have Keatsian overtones)—

In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,
In tempest or the night of nightingales—

it can turn even the crossroads ‘to a ghostly room’. As he makes this claim, which is an affirmation of the introspective poet's vision of a shadow side which social man prefers to ignore, his belief gathers strength, and leads, in the fifth stanza, to a seemingly confident assertion of creative power:

And it would be the same were no house near.
Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,
Aspens must shake their leaves.

Characteristically, however, Thomas seems to become diffident in mid-sentence, and withdraws authority from the aspens, concluding with

                                                                                                                        and men may hear
But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

The final stanza continues this undercutting:

Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves
We cannot other than an aspen be
That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,
Or so men think who like a different tree.

This seems to reduce the poet's vision to a compulsively irrational melancholy that can, after all, be dismissed by the more commonsense, daylight mind; but there is yet again a check in the closing line. ‘Or so men think who like a different tree’ reopens the possibility that the aspen vision may be valid, and even hints that rejection on the ground that its grief is unreasonable may itself be the product of fearful clinging to the social world of inn and smithy lest the ‘ghostly’ alternative take hold.

The fluctuating syntax of ‘Aspens’ thus has the effect of conceding the doubtful status of the poet's vision without yielding to the opposition it encounters. The melancholy menace of the aspens still persists in its disturbing challenge, but allowance is made for the possibility that it may be, as the remark to Eleanor Farjeon suggests, the consequence only of ‘dejected shyness’. Such hesitancy is inseparable from the honesty with which Thomas tries to face his experience. He does not, of course, always achieve it. He sometimes slips into a sentimental view of death, as in ‘The Child on the Cliff’; and sometimes he reverts, impressively, but archaically, to a more traditionally tragic-rhetorical posture, as in ‘The Gallows’. But these are exceptional in their lack of self-critical tentativeness. More often, even when his mood is bleakly pessimistic, he discounts his own attitude, or introduces some other view to balance it. In ‘Digging [I]’, for example, where the major theme is the deathliness of autumn scents, he also includes a bonfire which

                                                            burns
The dead, the waste, the dangerous,
And all to sweetness turns—

as well as a robin singing ‘Sad songs of Autumn mirth’. In ‘The Owl’ also, though the bird's ‘most melancholy cry’ echoes the poet's hunger and weariness after a day straining against a cold North wind, it heightens his enjoyment of food and rest, and deepens his feeling for those who suffer more than he—a double effect which is concentrated in the double meaning of ‘salted’:

And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

It is this more complex, mixed state of consciousness that gives Thomas' tragic lyrics their distinctive quality. It is present even in a poem like ‘Rain’, which, in its opening lines, seems to evoke complete despair:

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die.

By itself this is a powerful, but narrowly exclusive beginning, over-insistent on the dark, wild downpour of rain and the isolated self-consciousness of the poet. However, to separate this from what follows is to distort the poem—though in a way that the verse seems to dictate, since the third line has the air of completing a statement and a cadence that falls to rest on the final ‘die’ (intensified by its internal rhyme with ‘I’). But the sentence is not in fact complete. ‘I’ is also the subject in the next line of the verbs ‘hear’ and ‘give’, and the sentence gains a new momentum which carries it through to the end of the sixth line:

And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.

The brooding awareness of mortality continues with the negativing of these verbs; the poet is conscious that the time will inevitably come when he will not hear and not be able to give thanks. But simultaneously he suggests that in the present he does hear and does give thanks for a kind of purification that he receives from the rain. Moreover, the ultimate completion of the sentence by the word ‘solitude’ has the effect of qualifying the isolation which that word had conveyed in line 2. It seems a wiser, perhaps less lonely, form of solitude than it was before. At the very least, something has happened to mitigate its bleakness. This change makes the next line, which might otherwise seem a totally unjustified leap, more acceptable. Rain, the purifying agent, rather than the obliterating downpour, is, presumably, the force warranting the beatitude of ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon’; and the sense of ‘cleaner’ (in ‘washing me cleaner’) perhaps carries over to the dead also, suggesting that they are washed free of guilt. On the other hand, their condition of blessedness may be simply their unconsciousness, which allows the rain merely to rain upon them without the tragic overtones it has for the poet in the opening lines. The tragic state is essentially one of consciousness of suffering, with which the poet identifies himself as if it were his own, but which also transcends the personal to become a sense of the human condition. With Thomas, in this poem, it takes the form of a recognition of the cleanness and simplicity of the dead, balanced, however, by a prayer that none whom he once loved may experience the same lacerating solitude. His own anguish is the means by which he enters the tragic state; but it remains a private state in that it is achieved through identification with others who are linked to him by personal feeling:

But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead.

Again, the pause at ‘dead’ creates an illusion of completion, which, however, is only temporary, for the sentence continues with two comparisons which first generalise, and then once more personalise, the experience. The first of these reaches tragic impersonality by imaging the consciousness of destroyed lives in a chillingly immediate form which also makes it part of the natural landscape:

Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff.

The second seems to maintain the generalised momentum by using the same formula, ‘Like’, but swings back to the poet and his initial emphasis on the desolating rain:

Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Death unmitigated by any Christian or other religious consolation has a finality which in the absolute, tragic state of ‘the tempest’ is both end and consummation. It is the only ultimately illusion-free release, and Thomas seems to be accepting this with stoic resignation. There remains, however, the final addition to the sentence, in the clause beginning ‘If’. This also recognises the coldness of such perfection and its incompatibility with the personal anguish and sympathy evoked in the body of the poem. It thus keeps another kind of feeling alive; without explicitly contradicting the poet's claim that he has no love which the wild rain has not dissolved, the final clause qualifies its title to the word ‘love’, and so tacitly pleads the case for a warmer, more human, kind of love.

Such love is always focussed on the imperfect. It is aroused by suffering and the desolating feeling that the consciousness of mortality entails, but it cannot be satisfied with the exclusiveness of tragedy. Thus in ‘Liberty’ Thomas entertains the idea of a freedom from blighting self-consciousness, only to reject it in favour of a Keatsian preference for ‘pain’ (in the process somewhat altering the import of the phrase he borrows from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’); but then modifies ‘pain’ still further to include ‘both tears and mirth’:

And yet I still am half in love with pain,
With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth,
With things that have an end, with life and earth,
And this moon that leaves me dark within the door.

Above all, love rejects the superficiality that goes with mere liking. If it goes beyond tragedy, it is not because it refuses the dark, lacerating involvement, but because it follows the lead of a wider commitment. In ‘Roads’, for example, Thomas begins by saying ‘I love roads’, and he recognises that, in the tragic time of war in which he is writing, ‘all roads lead to France / And heavy is the tread / Of the living’. Yet the roads pre-exist, and outlast, the individual man's consciousness, and maintain a life for the dead which enables them to keep the poet company and populate his solitude. The men ‘who like a different tree’ in ‘Aspens’ may have reason on their side, but they would be incapable of such a vision.

In ‘Old Man’ this distinction between liking and loving is of crucial importance. Artemisia abrotanum, or southernwood, has various names including those with which the poem opens, ‘Old Man, or Lad's-love’, and these names the poet says, ‘I like’; and yet, paradoxically,

The herb itself I like not, but for certain
I love it, as some day the child will love it
Who plucks a feather from the door-side bush
Whenever she goes in or out of the house.

The whole poem is one which involves a process of meditative discrimination, rather than logical distinction, between what is loved and what is merely liked. The child's ‘snipping the tips and shrivelling / The shreds’ of the shrub—which she does in an absent-minded way that the drifting syntax admirably echoes—releases the ‘bitter scent’; and, as attention passes back from the child to the adult, it is this ‘bitter scent’ which provides a teasing continuity:

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,
Always in vain.

Although memory is defeated, the impulse given by the ‘bitter scent’ is so strong that the discrimination previously made between liking and loving swells up again in another shape:

                                                                      I cannot like the scent,
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,
With no meaning, than this bitter one.

Liking appears to be superseded by the deeper compulsion of love, which has already been declared in the second paragraph, and which the child is subconsciously in the process of acquiring; and it is this compulsion that takes over in the final paragraph, immersing the poet in an overwhelming sense of loss:

No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush
Of Lad's-love, or Old Man, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.

If what is lost were more precisely identified, the poem might well be less hauntingly resonant than it is. This is the shadow side of consciousness hinted at in ‘Aspens’, where liking and reasonableness are irrelevant. It is a submerged area where the sharpest anguish has its source, and approachable not by will, but only by the groping, half-baffled pursuit of the ‘bitter scent’, which is the compulsive effect of love.

The goal to which love finally draws the poet in ‘Old Man’ is a dark, negative, but inexplicably potent, world; and in many of Thomas' poems there is a similar dark world complementary to, and often quietly dominating, consciousness. His most frequent symbol for this is the forest. In ‘The Green Roads’ it is the forest in which the green roads end, and where one dead oak ‘in the middle deep’ seems to brood over the rest of the trees. In ‘The Dark Forest’ it is almost ‘a too obvious metaphor’, as Thomas himself realised,³ making the opposition between the flowers of the forest and those of ‘outside’ uncharacteristically rigid:

Nor can those that pluck either blossom greet
The others, day or night.

More typical is his use of the forest in ‘The Other’. It begins: ‘The forest ended.’ The speaker, emerging from the forest, is happy to reach the light and hear bees, and smell grass

                                                  because I had come
To an end of forest, and because
Here was both road and inn, the sum
Of what's not forest.

But he immediately encounters people who ask if he passed that way the day before, and the refreshing sense of release expressed in the opening lines gives way to huddled cross-questioning (‘“Not you? Queer.” / “Who then? and slept here?”’) which ends abruptly with: ‘I felt fear.’ From here on, as Andrew Motion comments, ‘Thomas reverses the roles usually allotted to self and image’, acting as ‘the pursuer rather than the pursued’,⁴ until his search for the man resembling himself leads to his entering an inn where the man loudly asks for him. For a moment their roles seem to revert to their traditional order, as the speaker is reproached by his quarry, but says nothing, and slips away. The previous pursuit is renewed in the final lines, but with the speaker now more cautious: ‘I steal out of the wood to light’; and the final state of the relationship is summed up in an abrupt, uneasy closing couplet:

He goes: I follow: no release
Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.

The speaker's initial emergence from the wood, when looked at retrospectively from the end of the poem, is recognised as misguidedly ‘glad’. The darkness cannot be escaped; it must either pursue, or be pursued, in a continuous process that can only end with death. This clearly gives scope for a Jungian interpretation in terms of the interdependence of self and shadow-self; but, as so often with Thomas, the poem resists any one meaning. Its wandering search and awkward, almost unsociable, social encounters enact the tormented uncertainty of the speaker with regard to his relationship with his other self, and that in turn is reflected in his feelings towards darkness and the wood. There is one particularly powerful section (lines 61-90), just before his encounter with his ‘man’ at the inn, which seems to offer reassurance and serenity:

                              I stood serene,
And with a solemn quiet mirth,
An old inhabitant of earth.

With an echo of Vaughan, he says that such times once seemed to him ‘Moments of everlastingness’, as if he had recovered a lost paradise of integrated consciousness. But they were essentially unstable, dependent on a spontaneity that had to be unaware of itself:

And fortunate my search was then
While what I sought, nevertheless,
That I was seeking, I did not guess.

The very awkwardness of the syntax brings them down to earth, and in the next paragraph the speaker is back to what is the norm for this poem—the baffling search, which, even when it leads to a meeting, ends in nothing but reversal of roles and inarticulacy:

                    what had I got to say?
I said nothing. I slipped away.

‘The Other’ is concerned with the inherent instability of consciousness. The only real release from it is death: ‘no release / Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.’ In the most tragic of Thomas' poems, ‘Lights Out’, that release becomes the central issue. He no longer vacillates. The forest is not an ambiguous alternative to daylight consciousness, but the final extinction of consciousness which is universal and inevitable:

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest, where all must lose
Their way, however straight
Or winding, soon or late;
They can not choose.

It is the end of deception and of love, and of the opposites of despair and ambition, pleasure and trouble, whether ‘sweet or bitter’. The speaker is willing to give up what is dearest to him for the sake of it; and, finally, he welcomes its obliteration of his self-consciousness.

‘Lights Out’ is thus one of the most direct of Thomas' poems, presenting the dark of the forest as a welcome relief from the uncertainties which torment him. It may easily be mistaken for the expression of a suicidal death-wish, but its date, November 1916, and its title remind us—though it must be admitted that there is nothing in the text that otherwise would tell us—that this is a war poem. The death he accepts is not to be self-inflicted. He does not mention fighting, much less his reasons for taking part in it (though that is done in one of the most thoughtful of poems to come out of the First World War, ‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’). The poem simply takes the necessity for it, and its inevitable consequence, as granted, fusing his private situation with the universal inevitability of death. In this way what is a usually evaded reality is faced, and not only accepted in the knowledge that there is no alternative, but also embraced for what it can, and will, give. The strength of the poem is that, without undervaluing in a contemptus mundi spirit the things it recognises as bound to be lost, it can contemplate their loss in a positive manner. In an age of faith his acceptance might well have taken the form of accepting death as God's will; but for Thomas this becomes the secularised, though still religiously charged, image of the ‘tall forest’, of whose ominous dominion he can say:

Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.

This echoes the first stanza, but with a difference. There losing one's way was part of a stoical acceptance of death; here obedience to the forest's commanding silence is accepted as a means to the end of losing both ‘my way’ and ‘myself’. Loss is envisaged as potential gain. There is a sense of direction rather than mere capitulation. But, equally, there is no triumph, or even consolation as such. Death remains a form of losing.

In the best known of Thomas' war poems, ‘As the team's head brass’, there is more willingness to balance loss and gain; and the symbol of the wood is still further varied in meaning. At the beginning a pair of lovers disappear into the wood, and they reappear four lines from the end. In between the plough moves rhythmically back and forth from the wood, thus associated with love and creativity, to the lonely and more ominous figure of the soldier-poet sitting on a fallen elm, ‘by a woodpecker's round hole’. Each time the ploughman reaches the poet's end of the field he pauses for conversation—starting with the elm which was blown down in a blizzard and is not likely to be moved till the war is over; next touching on the poet's own chances of being killed or wounded, and mentioning the death of the ploughman's mate in France, ‘back in March, / The very night of the blizzard’; and finally commenting that all would have been different were it not for the war.

The scene and the dialogue are ordinary and familiar, almost to the point of banality, and yet they slowly build up a counterpoint of creation and destruction. For example, though the poet sits in its ‘crest’, the tree is dead, and the ‘blizzard’ which felled it is also equated with the war that killed the ploughman's mate. It thus contrasts with the wood of the lovers; but also, because of the woodpecker's hole, it has a kind of link with them. The very movement of the plough further echoes this suggestion of sexual procreation; while its ‘narrowing a yellow square / Of charlock’, together with the flashing of the brass, have both positive and negative implications.

Thomas himself is more detached in this poem that in ‘Lights Out’—more able to balance the continuity of life against the discontinuity of war, and even ready to joke about his own chances of survival:

I could spare an arm. I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more.

And there is even the muted optimism of the ploughman's ‘If we could see all all might seem good’ (though it is only thrown in as a concession to conventional wisdom, which itself seems to be under threat). To this extent, ‘As the team's head brass’ is not a tragic poem, but a poem which sets tragedy in the wider context of nature's continual destruction and renewal. What it does not do, however, is to offer the prospect of renewal as an ultimate answer to destruction. The two processes seem to go on side by side, as they do in the final lines of the poem, where the lovers come out of the wood, and the horses begin their last stumbling movement along the furrows. They are held together in the poet's consciousness, but are not seen as parts of a meaningful overall design that reconciles him to his condition. If anything, the continuity of nature heightens his sense of isolation; the fact that the lovers move in and out of the wood so easily becomes merely an ironic comment on his own vulnerability as he sits ‘among the boughs of the fallen elm’. His only resource is the creation of the poem itself, with its honest recognition of both the tragic and non-tragic elements in his situation. In this way he achieves a view that is free from the narrowness of self-consciousness, but also does justice to the pain which self-consciousness unavoidably generates.

Notes

1. All quotations from Thomas' poems are from The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford, 1978).

2. Quoted ibid., p. 402.

3. Ibid., p. 417.

4. Andrew Motion, The Poetry of Edward Thomas (London, 1980) p. 39.