[In the following book review of Eleanor Farjeon's biography of Thomas, the author explores Thomas's “unconventional patriotism” in poems such as “Old Man,” “The Glory,” and “Home.”]

When Edward Thomas was killed in Flanders, a mirror of England was shattered of so pure and true a crystal that a clearer and tenderer reflection of it can be found no other where than in these poems.’ So wrote Walter de la Mare, referring to the late harvest of verse which formed the culmination and crown of Edward Thomas's lifelong service to English literature—service which, alas, was all too often indistinguishable from servitude. He died untimely; nevertheless, time was granted him to pay his tribute of delight to the England which lay at the very core of his being. It can, indeed, be asserted without exaggeration that no greater lover of England has existed than this London-born Welshman who was killed at the Battle of Arras in April 1917 at the age of thirty-nine.

But no man could have been less addicted to conventional patriotism than he:

                    I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
Beside my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true …

He was no chauvinist. He cared nothing for ‘The Flag’, for the Empire, for politics of any colour whatsoever. In a vividly significant passage in the first volume of her Memoirs,¹ Miss Eleanor Farjeon relates: ‘It might have been next year when we were walking in the country that I asked him the question his friends had asked him when he joined up, but I put it differently. “Do you know what you are fighting for?” He stopped, and picked up a pinch of earth. “Literally, for this.” He crumbled it between finger and thumb, and let it fall.’

He spoke truly: it was England herself whom he loved, with a passion as ardent as it was reticent, particularly southern England—the England of the chalk counties, of which Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and Wiltshire claimed his most constant affection. He loved the people of this sweet and circumscribed England, the more so when they were individual, eccentric even, with a touch of wildness about them—tramps, poachers, gipsies, and the like—a breed of folk epitomized in David Uzzell, an old countryman living in Wiltshire whom Thomas regarded with almost filial devotion. He loved small market towns and secluded villages, the woods, thickets, fields, hills, and streams of his chosen countryside; he loved its songs, its speech, its customs, its traditions. His was the England of Defoe, Cobbett, Gilbert White, of W. H. Hudson and Thomas Hardy; the England of such painters as Constable, Morland, and Crome: simple, hearty, bawdy England untouched by ‘Progress’, with her immemorial history and her heartbreaking beauty. Minutiæ fascinated him: such tiny matters as raindrops pendant from a hedgerow twig—the sound of rain is a perpetual leit motif in his writings; he was a man who lived by the weather—diminutive wild flowers, weeds—apt in a lover of ‘the lovely that is not beloved’—small birds, such as the willow warbler and the wren; mud, dust, pebbles, flints—the very substance of his English earth. These things never failed to beguile him. They bore no metaphysical implications for him; their mere existence sufficed: ‘To say “God bless it” was all that I could do.’ Thus in “Tall Nettles”:

This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bloom upon a flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

He loved all these things ardently—as he loved any manifestation of the England of his choice—but he was no sentimentalist; not even a romantic. Though writing beautifully, he wrote with a dispassionate accuracy of observation which lent exactness and validity to his work. In the best sense of the word he was a professional writer: this accomplishment, begotten of necessity, served him in inestimable stead when he turned poet—together with the fact that he was the best critic of poetry of his generation. His ardour shone rather than glowed; however much the subject of a poem attracted him, his pen was always under control, as was his directing brain. It was highly characteristic of him that he chose ‘like’ rather than ‘love’ in describing his reaction to the farmyard nettles. When he did use ‘love’, he did so temperately, frugally, thereby enhancing its emotional value. Words had long been the tools of his trade; he respected them like the good workman he was, giving a word no heavier a responsibility than it could appropriately bear. This precision and verbal sobriety go far towards giving Edward Thomas's verse its individual flavour; so, too, does an underlying melancholy—wistful and occasionally poignant—which, an integral part of the man, impregnated his work: he was not a Celt for nothing. In his verse this melancholy may be pervasive or concentrated: a musing, prophetic melancholy, as in the final stanza of “Old Man”:

I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember:
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.

Edward Thomas was not a philosopher; he was not, in any technical sense, a mystic. His poetry is nevertheless stepped in a kind of mysticism which is as easy to recognize as it is impossible to define. It is closely interlinked with his melancholy, veiled in darkness, instinct with an apprehension of the unknown:

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 cannot choose. …
There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter, and leave, alone,
I know not how.
The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf upon shelf;
In silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.

Here his particular brand of mysticism is explicit; more often it but lightly overshadows a single stanza or a mere phrase. It may have been atavistic in its origin, but it was undoubtedly intensified by an intimation of mortality. Such was its effect upon those who loved and understood him best. Miss Farjeon (who acted as his amanuensis) recalls elsewhere than in her Memoir the chill that struck her heart when the poem just quoted first confronted her in typescript.

There is, however, another side to the picture. Helen Thomas in her writings and conversation has insisted upon the joyful element in her husband's character. He was fully capable of happiness. How, indeed, could happiness be absent from one who found such perpetual refreshment and delight in the English countryside? Happiness constantly illuminated his poetry—happiness amounting to ecstasy—as the poem fitly entitled “The Glory” clearly shows:

The glory of the beauty of the morning—
The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;
The blackbird that has found it, and the dove
That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;
White clouds ranged even and fair as newmown hay;
The heat, the stir, the sublime vacancy
Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart …

His mood changes; but in these lines and some that follow there is ecstasy indisputable. In “Home” the same note is struck:

Fair was the morning, fair our tempers, and
We had seen nothing fairer than that land,
Though strange, and the untrodden snow that made
Wild of the tame, casting out all that was
Not wild and rustic and old; and we were glad.

How Edward Thomas turned from being a poet manqué—one who, in W. H. Hudson's view, had lost his way—into one who became articulate and progressively acknowledged and admired by his peers and the poetry-reading public is an oft-told tale. Miss Farjeon, in telling it afresh, revitalizes it. The first mention of Robert Frost, who was to play so crucial a part in the transformation, comes in a letter from Edward dated 5 October 1913: ‘Will you forgive me if I do not turn up to-morrow? I have an appointment of uncertain time with an American just before & may not be able to come.’ So the seed was sown; yet a few days later Miss Farjeon asked him whether he had ever written poetry. ‘“Me?” He uttered a short, self-scornful laugh. “I couldn't write a poem to save my life.”’

A year later all was changed. Robert Frost, now America's most distinguished poet but then virtually unknown, had written one volume of verse and had another entitled North of Boston in preparation. In this Edward made what Miss Farjeon calls ‘the find of a lifetime’. Robert Frost quickly made the acquaintance of many English poets and men of letters, including Edward Thomas, and from being acquaintances they swiftly became friends—such intimate friends, in fact, that when the Frosts returned to America in February 1915 Edward thought seriously of accompanying them. He remained in England, however, perplexed in the extreme. On account of war having broken out, his career as a professional writer was at a standstill. He longed to serve his country, but was undecided how best to do so. All that he could do was to fulfil a few outstanding commissions and write poetry, having followed Robert Frost's precept and example. He had made this exciting new departure in November 1914, keeping it a secret shared only with a few intimates. Not until well into the following year did he venture to show his poems to critics outside this restricted circle and send them to editors under the pseudonym of ‘Edward Eastaway’—a disastrous enterprise, since every poem he submitted was rejected. Nevertheless, he continued to write on with increasing confidence and facility—‘I can hardly wait to light my fire’, he wrote to Miss Farjeon in the ardour of new creation.

Not only did Robert Frost provide the initial impetus for him to turn to verse as a medium for self-expression; he also supplied him with a ready-wrought technique, as an examination of two characteristic poems by Robert Frost—Mending Wall and The Death of the Hired Man—readily proves. When North of Boston was published, Edward wrote of his friend as a poet in terms closely applicable to himself:

He will be accused of keeping monotonously at a low level, because his characters are quiet people, and he has chosen the unresisting medium of blank verse. I will only remark that he would lose far less than most modern writers by being printed as prose. If his work were so printed, it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse: in fact, it would turn out to be closer knit and more intimate than the finest prose is except in its finest passages. It is poetry because it is better than prose.

As well as ‘the unresisting medium of blank verse’, Edward Thomas used rhyme freely, but the resemblance between his work and that of Robert Frost within the context of the foregoing notice still stands. The lightly stressed iambic lines of “The Glory” and “Home” are entirely characteristic of his verse as a whole, giving as they do an impression of self-communing reverie or quiet colloquy. As Walter de la Mare remarked, there is nothing precious, elaborate, brilliant, esoteric, or obscure in his poetry. His vocabulary was completely adequate to his needs, but is of the utmost simplicity. Not that his work lacks magic; not the magic of the miraculous phrase, but the magic ensuing on his power to re-create a country scene and a country atmosphere in a few words:

There they stand, on their ends, the fifty faggots
That once were underwood of hazel and ash
In Jenny Pinks's Copse. Now, by the hedge
Close packed, they make a thicket fancy alone
Can creep through with the mouse and wren …

It requires time and patience to appreciate these poems as they deserve to be appreciated. Once this occurs, however, they take unobtrusive but tenacious hold on the hearts and minds of their readers and never grow stale. Edward Thomas was not an ‘occasional’ poet, but one who—once he had discovered that he could write verse—was supplied with a steady flow of inspiration. When it is remembered that all his poetry was achieved within a period of just over two years, during which he was training hard to become an efficient soldier, his output was considerable. His poetry was a necessity of his nature; it was nothing less than his spiritual daily bread. The stored impressions of a singularly observant eye and retentive memory found full and rich harvesting in his work; between the covers of his volume of Collected Poems there is nothing false or forced in a single line.

Thomas, unlike some of his contemporaries, was not a ‘week-end’ countryman, but a countryman to the bone; a countryman by adoption, it is true, but nevertheless an authentic one. He had several homes; but one always thinks of him as living at Steep, a hamlet near Petersfield on the Sussex-Hampshire border. From this or another retreat he would come to London in quest of work; yet although no stranger to ‘the Great Wen’, he was always an alien there. ‘Gulliver himself’, wrote Walter de la Mare, ‘could hardly have looked a stranger phenomenon in Lilliput than he appeared in Real-Turtle-Soup-Land—his clothes, his gait, his face, his bearing.’ Of her first impression of him, Miss Farjeon recalls his tall easy figure, his tawny colour, the grave pleasant tones of his voice, and a swift sidelong glance from keen eyes on being introduced. To add to this impression, mention must be made of his powerful, bony hands, which had cradled so many wild birds' eggs and were familiar with every flower in the southern counties, and of his countryman's walk, described by Miss Farjeon as ‘a negligent lope, half-stride, half-lounge, which carried him faster, while he seemed to walk more leisurely than anybody else’. So he travelled by field-path and hill-track and winding country lane, avoiding main roads whenever possible, carrying map and walking-stick (invariably cut by himself; he declared that he would rather be seen dead than walking with a stick he hadn't cut himself) until the hour came for England to claim him no more.

From the appearance of his first book of verse in 1917—a slim wartime production by the firm of Selwyn & Blount, embellished by a fine photograph of himself in profile—Edward Thomas's poems have never lacked admirers, and they can now be assured of a modest immortality. With his prose, the position is completely different. Of his thirty-odd books, the writing of which occupied the greater part of his adult life, none remains in print nor does there appear to be any likelihood of their being reissued. The toil involved in this task was the price of his freedom. Rebelling against the advice of his father—with whom he was never in sympathy—to play for safety on coming down from Oxford, preferably by obtaining a post in the Civil Service, he resolved to become a literary freelance. This entailed his writing articles for such journals as would accept them, as well as the writing of books for a succession of publishers. (When asked for his address, ‘Every publisher in London has it’ came a friend's swift reply.) Had he been content to write quickly and carelessly, he would doubtless have been able to earn a reasonable living without difficulty. Unfortunately for his financial comfort, he was a scrupulous literary artist, taking infinite pains over his work, fretting lest he should be writing below his best. The situation was exacerbated by his having frequently to write against time and for derisory rates of pay. In consequence, his brain grew tired and his nerves strained beyond endurance. Even when dealing with such congenial places as Oxford or Wales, or with such congenial people as George Borrow or Richard Jefferies, he not infrequently sickened of his subject, so that his letters to certain friends were dark with melancholy and sometimes black with despair. On passing the proofs of one of his painfully achieved books, he wrote: ‘O if I were not poor, I would burn it all and laugh at the publisher. It is neither good hackwork nor good Edward Thomas. It will hurt me very much to see it in print. Day after day I had to excite myself and write what I could; and of course I shall be judged as if I had chosen the subject freely and had done my best at it. It has left me dried up, and I feel that I shall never do good, slow, leisurely work again.’ Worse still, commissions for books were not easily forthcoming, and he had a wife and family to support. To a literary agent he wrote on one occasion: ‘Is a book on Dryden possible? Or on Evelyn the diarist? Or on England (I mean particularly the rural parts, but also the country as a whole) as seen in literature, both native and foreign? Or on Lord Jeffrey? … I should like Cowper better than any …’

What is remarkable about Edward Thomas's prose, when one bears in mind the conditions under which so much of it was written, is its uniformly high quality. No uninitiated reader would imagine for a moment that it was anything but ‘good, slow, leisurely work’. His study of Oxford, for instance, one of his earliest books and over which he agonized, is written in a style which recalls that of Walter Pater, who was the dominant literary influence when Edward was reading History at Exeter College—rhythmical, lapidary, of a classical calm. In a description of a gentle scholar of the University there occurs the following passage:

He was, despite features which the dull might call plain, remarkably, and I had almost said physically, beautiful, because of the clear shining of his character. The tender motives that often moulded his lips, the purity and grace that found expression in his eyes, and the fluctuation of the lines of the face in thought which is almost light and shade, wrought an immortal beauty out of Nature's poor endowment. … His smile, on opening Plutarch, was as if he blessed and was blessed, and restored the beholder to the age of the first revival of learning.

With an increasing mastery of his craft, his style became less and less elaborate, and his last book—an evocation of his childhood—is of a moving simplicity, art very effectively concealing art. Engrossed though he necessarily was in producing books and journalism for profit, his writing life was not entirely empty of consolations. On account of his having won the reputation of being the best contemporary critic of verse, he was able to draw the public's attention to the merits of certain poets—W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, and Robert Frost were three—who were struggling for recognition. Nor was the writing of books invariably an intolerably exacting task. At intervals he forgot publishers and public and wrote slender volumes of essays for his own satisfaction to which he gave such titles as Rose Acre Papers, Rest and Unrest, and Light and Twilight. These essays foreshadow his poems, as can be seen from the following quotation from ‘The Stile’, one of the essays in Light and Twilight (a book which has a further extrinsic interest, in that it was the first of Edward Thomas's writings that Miss Farjeon read and which prompted her to ask whether he had written poetry):

Three roads meet in the midst of a little green without a house or the sign of one, and at one edge there is an oak copse of untrimmed hedges. One road goes east, another west, and the other north; southward goes a path known chiefly to lovers, and the stile which transfers them to it from the rushy turf is at a corner of the copse.

The country is low, rich in grass and small streams, mazily subdivided by crooked hedgerows, with here and there tall oaks in broken line, or round the farmhouse, in musing protective clusters. It is walled in by hills on every side, the higher ones bare, the lower furred with trees, and so nearly level is it that, from any part of it, all these walls of hills and their attendant clouds can be seen.

The discriminating observation of this passage, its pre-Raphaelite colour and precision, and the author's instinct for pictorial effect are all typical of Edward Thomas's prose work at its best—innumerable examples of which can be found not only in the volumes of essays referred to above, but in such longer books as The Heart of England, The Icknield Way, and The South Country. He also excelled in another form of prose writing—critical biography. His studies of Richard Jefferies and George Borrow and his Introduction to Cobbett's Rural Rides are marked by their justice, insight, and wisdom, for all that they were written hastily and for bread. Even his book on so uncongenial a subject as Maurice Maeterlinck, whose crepuscular effects were diametrically opposed to those achieved by his biographer, is an admirably balanced and illuminating piece of work. It seems more than regrettable that his prose should have dwindled into neglect; yet it is not so tragic a matter as it would have been had he not written his poems, since the essence of his talent can be found in these; in writing his poems he was wholly and completely himself.

What was this self? What of his character and personality? How did he strike a contemporary? While their friendship was still new, he and Miss Farjeon were discussing Shakespeare. ‘I suppose’, he remarked, ‘every man thinks that Hamlet was written for him, but I know he was written for me.’ He was certainly Hamlet-like in his moods of introspection, and, as Miss Farjeon writes: ‘His world of brooding thoughts and tormented sensibilities—and the fineness of the thought and the sensibility—must have brought his self-communings very near Hamlet's.’ To his sessions of melancholy reference has already been made—to what Miss Farjeon calls his ‘grey moods’: melancholy amounting at times to melancholia, to cure which he had recourse to physicians, but without success. ‘My wife would be the happiest woman on earth, if I would let her’, he said on one occasion. Miss Farjeon adds the affectionate comment: ‘The truth is, Helen was oftener and more fully happy than any wife I knew. Her happiness was an inexhaustible well; its zest enhanced the good days, and was her source of power against the dark ones. If Edward knew that Hamlet was written for him, he knew too that Helen was no Ophelia, and whatever he was and did she would not drown.’ Had things been different—had his wife been a second Jane Welsh Carlyle, for instance—one scarcely dares speculate what Edward's fate might have been. He was extraordinarily fortunate in having such a wife and such a friend. He realized as much, and this knowledge not infrequently intensified his distress. Apart from his inherent nervous disability, the incessant strain attendant on his work—self-chosen though it was—and the constant disappointments and the no less constant humiliations he endured at the hands of editors and publishers would have gone far to break the heart of any but a completely insensitive man—and no insensitive man could have written as Edward Thomas wrote. How remorseless was the tyranny to which he was subjected can be gauged by the fact that soldiering seemed to him closely to resemble freedom. Disillusionment, bitterness, even cynicism were some of the bitter fruits of his experience of life; so, too, was a paralysing self-consciousness, which, again, was relieved, if not entirely cured, by his army life.

To dwell exclusively on this side of Edward Thomas's character, however, is to give a distorted account of him. Not only was he capable of frequent happiness; he was capable also of sheer high-spirited fun. Many of the letters he wrote to Miss Farjeon (and by inference to other of his friends) are full of this redeeming quality; moreover, his wife has insisted on his delight in his children and in herself, and on the gaiety he brought into his home. He was an adept at making quaint, ingenious toys for his children, and loved both singing and playing games with them. With his friends, as a rule, he was less exuberant; he was, in fact, a man who was more than commonly reticent in expressing the very real affection he bore them. It was characteristic of him that even with so intimate a friend as Miss Farjeon—although he addressed her as ‘My dear Eleanor’—he never signed his letters with his Christian name merely. Only once did he convey to her what she meant to him—and then only obliquely. This was when, in a letter he sent her a few days before his death, he referred to the impending battle. ‘What is coming is to be worse than anything I know so far’, he wrote. ‘It is worse for you and Helen and Mother, I know.’ That was all; but it was enough, meaning far more than if more had been said.

He had only a few intimate friends; only a few to whom he could unburden himself completely. There were many, nevertheless, whom he greatly liked, and by whom he was beloved. ‘Even to think of him makes him as present as if he were entering the room’, wrote Walter de la Mare in 1953; adding, says Miss Farjeon, ‘like a sigh, “How I wish he were”.’

Note

1. Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years. By Eleanor Farjeon (Oxford), 1958.