Xovember i, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
17 
life anil itelters 
By J. C. Squire 
Edward Thomas 
ED\^•ARD THOMAS, who'vyas killed in' France last 
spring at thu age of thirty-nine, wrote a large number 
of prose books. Even when forced to produce 
books for mone_\- he wrote with dist inct ion and t bought 
Iwr himself ; and t lie best of iiis English tra\ el books are better 
than anything of the:sort since Jefteries. For nearly twenty 
\ears he wrote no verse, but in igrj;, he begatj writiiig poetry 
])rofuscly. Only a few of his friends knew that " Kdwarcl 
Eastaway," who appeared in an anthology thikypar, was he. 
He was very shy about his verse and had prepared for publica- 
tion a volume over the same pseudonym. Th>' book has now 
appeared (Sehvyn and Blount, .;s. Cnl.net.) with his real name 
on it. It is beyond compaf^on his best book ; and a second 
volume is to follow it. ""' ■ 
***** 
Thoiuas was a tall, c|uiet. reserxcd man vvit.h- iiulaneholy 
eyes and strong hands, browner than those of professional 
writers usually are. His poems are like him, they are jiersonal 
in spirit and substance ; they have his quietness, his sadness 
and his strength. When there is profound emotion behind 
them it is characteristically expressed in few words and a 
slight troubled movement of the verse. The language is simple 
and direct, with few made phrases, inversions or hne ad- 
jectives; it moves slowh- and reflectively, atttmed to his 
prevailing inood. which might be called a mood of resignation 
if that word did not seem to preclude fhe inexhaustible 
freshness of his response to the beautv of earth "lovelier than 
any mysteries." He felt always the pain of death, and 
change, but that never clouded his faculty for enjoying 
things ; in his ecstasy over the* endless miracles of the earth 
he w^ sobered by his knowledge of their transience, but he was 
not one of those dismal .people to whom every ephemeral 
thing is first and foremost an illustration of the power of the 
abstractions death and change. He loved things for them- 
-I Ives and thought of their beauty more than of their brevity. 
* * • * * 
His poems are poems of the earth and of one man who looked 
at it, not knowing how long he would be able to. It is a lonely 
man who wanders through the book ; when he speaks of other 
lieople they are memories or else faintK- and remotely in the 
background. His human relations here are, we feel, subsidiary 
to, less intense and passionate than, his relations with nature. 
He is primarily a nature \x>et, and a peculiar arjd interesting 
one. The " landscape " of no English poet has been more 
normally English than his. and few have covered such a range. 
Most landscape poetry deals with certain special kinds of 
times and places, dawn.' twilight or sunset, mountains, bleak 
moorlands, ripe cornfields, seas very rough or very blue, 
summermore than winter, willows more than oaks, strong sun- 
light or strong moonlight more than the diffused light of an 
ordinary overclouded day. This is easily e.xpUcable. Scenes 
xery definitely coloured, forms obviously decorative, seasons 
whiih make a violent appeal to our senses, shapes and shades 
by their nature and by tradition indissolubly associated 
with our universal elementary thoughts and states of feeling 
\nll inevitably be those most commonly recalled and described. 
Moreover many witers have their own dominant and habitual 
preferences from amongst these ; the exhilarating dawns of ' 
Wordsworth, the bright stUl sunshine of Keats, the large 
moons and lamenting beaches of Tennyson come automatically 
into the mind with the mohtion of their names. Edward 
Thomas was unusual in avoiding the usual. Not only did he not 
go to nature mostly for decoration or for a material setting for 
ins moods, but he did not -sf/^c/, uncon'sciou.sly or deliberately, 
his subjects. Except that he avoided large towns and tli<- 
conventionally romantic, one may fairly say that he was liable 
to write a poem about anything one might see at any time of dav 
in a walk across the South o£ England. He was not haunted 
by the rare unusual' things, the one glorious night of a year 
the perfect twilight on a lake, the remembered sunset over the 
marshes, which will haunt most of us. He w^s moved by and 
wrote about the things we pass daily and co'ald look at' pro- 
perly if we cared to ; he was like one of tho-!5e simple and 
charming water-colour paiHters who will sit down in front of 
anything, any ditch, havstack or five barred gate, ahd get the 
essential into a sketch. White winter sunlight ; rain on wild 
parsley ; hawthorn hanging over a reedy pond with a moor- 
hen swimming across it ; spring snow and rooks in the bare ■ 
trees; a gamekeeper's gibbet; the head-brass of . a plough- 
man s team ; peewits at nightfall ; hounds streaming over a 
hedge ; a Icbruary day thin sunlisrht on frozen mud and three 
carthorses looking over a gate ; old labourers gomg home— 
these are the things lie wrote about, and many such trifles 
many times repeated are the English countrywide as it is and 
as it has been. His earth is not merely something bro\m_that 
goes with the blue at one particular moment or is dark against 
the sunset at anothei ; it is earth, now dusty, now wet and 
clogged, which is ploughed and takes its seed and brings forth 
corn in due season, fie is as close to it at one time as at 
another ; the depths of his. heart can be sounded by the dint 
of a hobnail .on. a path's mud ; and he wants no flamboyant 
• sunsets who can find all the beauty and mystery of colour 
in ;the curling white and gold and purple fronds of a pile of 
swedes. 
***** 
Any of these jxiems might be quoted : I will take as an 
example one of the least conspicuous, a poem less. musical 
thaii many of them and only iudirectly revealing his tempera- 
ment, one that illustrat."s scarcely any of his qualities save the 
closeness of his observation and the use he made of the ordinary, 
lii-. The Path: - ■ 
Running along a bank, a parapet , ' 
That .saves from the precipitous wood below 
The lave! road, there is a path. It ser\-es 
Children for looking down the long smooth steep, 
Between the legs of beech and yew. to where 
A fallen tree checks the sight ; while men and women 
Content themselves with the road and what they s»-* 
Over the bank , and what the children tell. 
The path, winding like silver, trickles on. 
Bordered and even invaded by thinnest moss 
That tries to cover roots and crumbling chalk 
With gold, olive and emerald, but in vain. 
1"he children wear it. They have flattened the bank • • 
On top. and silvered it between the moss 
AV'ith the current of their feet, year after year. < 
But the road is houseless, and leads not to school- 
'Jo see a child is rare there . and the eye 
Has but the road, the wood that overhangs 
And undergrows it. and the path that looks 
As if it led on to some legendary- 
Or fancied place where men have wished to go 
And stay ; till sudden, it ends where the wood ends. 
This wood is anywhere and everywhere ; we see it continually 
and take no notice of it ; but I think that this poem would- 
mean more than most to an exile in Rhodesia or the Soudan. 
You get another completely commonplace scene — the country 
station — in Adlestrop : 
Yes. I remember Adlestrop — 
The name, because one afternoon 
Of heat the express-train drew up therj 
Unwontedly. It was late June. 
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat, 
Xo one left and no one came 
On the bare platform. What I saw 
Was Adlestrop— only the name. 
And willows, willow-herb and grass. 
And meadows sweet and haycocks dry, 
Xo whit less still and lonely fair 
Than the high cloudlets in the sky. 
And for that minute a blackbird sang 
C.lpse by, and round him. mistier, 
Faitther and farther, all the birds 
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. 
.'\nd almost mote typical still is-Tali.Neitks : the corner in 3 
farmyard, with a rusty harrow arid a stone roller overgrown 
by nettles covered with dust, except after a shower. 
Where, here and there, the poet is more intimate and gives 
direct expression to his feelings, he uniformly reaches his 
highest level of poetry. The best poem in this book is 
1'he Bridge ; there are others not in this book,;Such as Aspens, 
where, standing at cross-roads outside a smith}', an inn and 
a shop he listens to the trees talking of rain, and gives the lasl 
word on his prevalent mood : 
Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves 
We cannot other than an a«pen be. 
That ceascle.ssly, unreasonably grieves. 
Or so men think who like a different tree. 
There are one or two poems which touch on the war ; the 
war as a distant and invisible horror subtly troubling the 
most secluded luiglish fields: The references are brief ; 
ihis own destiny has made them doubly poignant. But one 
faficies • that dying he may have known that he had left 
behind him, in the fruits of his recovered youth, work that will 
make him, a known and living man to at least a few in all ., 
succeeding generations of Englishmen. 
