Xo\-ember i, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
Eife anil betters 
By J. C. Squire 
17 
Edward Thomas 
EDWARD THOMAS, who was killed in "France last 
spring at the age of thirty-nine, wrote a large number 
of jirose books. Even when forced to produce 
books for money he wrote with distinction andthought 
tor himself ; and the best of liis Englisli traxt-l books are better 
than anything of the sort 'si nee Jefferies. l-"or nearly twentv 
N'ears he wrote no verse, but in iqij, he began writing poetry 
profusely. Only a few of his friends knew that "Edward 
JCastaway." who appeared in an anthology thiVyear. was he. 
He was very shy about his verse and had prepared for publica- 
tion a volume over the same pseudonym. The' book has now 
appeared (Selwyn and Blount, js. 6d. net.) with'liijireal name 
iin it. It is bevond comparison his best book ;'^'nd a second 
volumeis to follow it. } ''. ' 
* « « * * "■' ■ 
Thomas was a tall, quiet, reser\-ed man with—melancholy 
eyes and strong hands, l^rowner than those of professional 
Writers usually are. His poems are like In'm, they are personal 
in spirit and substance ; they have his quietness, his sadness 
and his strength. When tliere is profound, emotion behind 
ihem it is characteristically expressed in few words and a 
-light troubled mo\ement of the verse. The language is simple 
ind direct, with few made phrases, inversions or tine ad- 
jectives; it moves slowly and reflectively, attuned to his 
prevailing mood, which might be called a mood of resignation 
if that word did not seem to preclude the inexhaustible 
freshness of his response to the beauty of earth "lovelier than 
ny mysteries." He felt always the pain of death, and 
' hange, but that never clouded his faculty, for enjoying 
things ; in his ecstasy over the endless miracles of the earth 
he was sobered by his knowledge of their transience, but he was 
not one of those, dismal pe(>ple to whom every ephemeral 
t hing is,first and foremost an illustration of the power of the 
listractions death and change. He loved things for them- 
.^clves andthought of their beauty more than of their brevity. 
♦ . * • * ♦ 
His poems are poemSof the earth and of one man who looked 
it 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 
people they are memories or else faintly and remotely in the 
background. His human rr<ations here are, we"feel, subsidiary 
to, less intense and passionate than, his relations with nature. 
He is primarily a nature pwet, and a peculiar and, interesting 
"ne. The " landscape " of no English poet has. been more 
normally English than his, and few have covered such a range. 
Most landscajie poetry deals with certain spiecial kinds of 
ines and places, dawn, twilight or sunset, mountains, bleak 
moorlands, ripe cornfields, seas very rough or very blue, 
summer more than winter, willows more than oaks, strong sun- 
light or strong moonlight more than the diftused light of an 
ordinary overclouded day. This is easily expUcable. Scenes 
\(ry dehnitely coloiffed, forms obviously decorative, seasons 
which make a violent appeal to our senses, shapes and shades 
by their nature and by tradition indissoluljly associated 
witli our universal elementary thoughts and states of feeling 
will inevitably be those most commonly recalled and described. 
Moreover many writers have their own dominant and habitual 
preferences from amongst these ; the exhilarating dawns of 
Wordsworth, the bright still simshine of Keats, the largo 
nioons and lamenting beaches of Tennyson come automatically 
into tlie mind with the mention of their names. Edward 
Thomas was unusual in avoiding J:he usual. Not only did he not 
go to nature mostly for decoration or for a material setting for 
his moods, but he did not .vW(«-/, unconsciously or deliberately, 
liis subjects. Except that he avoided large towns and the 
' onventionaJly romantic, one may fairly say that he was liable 
to write a pofjm about anything one might see at anytime of day 
in a walk across the South of England. He was not haunted 
b\- the rare unusual things, the one glorious night, of a year, 
the perf(!ct twiliglit on a lake, the remembered sunset over the 
marshes, wl)irli will haunt most of us. He Avas moved by and 
wTote about the things we pass daily and could look at pro- 
perly if we cared to ; he was like one of thO'iv, simple and 
charming water-colour painters who will sit down in front of 
anything, any ditch, ha\ >ta(k or five barred gate, aiid get the 
essential into a sketeli. White winter sunlight ; rain on wild 
parsley ; hawthorn hanging o\er a reedy pond with a moor- 
hen swimming across it ; spring snow aiid rooks in the bare 
trees ; a gamekeejx-r's gibbet ; the head-brass of a plough- 
man's team ; peewits at nightfall ; hounds streaming over a 
hedge ; a February day, thin sunlight on frozen mud and three 
carthorses looking over a gate ; old labourers going home-— 
these are the things ne wrote about, and many such trifles 
many tifiies rejieated are the English countrywide as it is and 
as it has been. His earth is not merely something brown that 
goes with the blue at one particular moment or is dark against 
the sunset at anothei ; it is earth, now dusty, now Vet and 
clogged, which is ploughed and takes its seed and brings forth- 
corn in due season. He 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 hnd all the beauty and mystery of colour 
in the curling white and gold and purple fronds of a pile of 
swedes. 
« * * * * 
Any of these poems might be quoted: I will take as an 
example one of the least conspicuous, a poem less niusical 
than many of' them and only indirectly revealing his tempera- 
ment, one that illustrates scarcely any of his qualities save the 
closeness of his observation and the use he made of the ordinary. 
It K The Path: 
Running along a bank, a parapet 
That saves from the precipitous wood below 
The level road, there is a path. It serves 
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. 
The children wear it. They have flattened the bank 
On top, and silvered it between the moss 
With the current of their feet, year after year. 
But the road is houseless, and leads not to school- 
To see a child is rare there, and the eye 
Has but the road, the wood that overhangs 
And undergrows it, and the path tliat 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 there 
Unwontedly. I^^-as 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. 
No whit less still and lonely fair 
Than the. high cloudlets in the sky. 
And for that minute a blackbird sang 
Close by, and round him, mistier, 
Farther and farther, all the birds 
' Of O.xfordshire and Gloucestershire. 
'.\nd almost more typical still is Tall Nettles : the corner in 3 
farmyard, with a rusty hanow and 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 
The Bridge ; there are others not in this book, such as Aspens, 
where, standing at cross-roads outside a smithy, an inn and 
a shop he listens to the trees talking of rain, and gives the lasl 
word on his prevalent mood : 
AVhatever wind blows,' while they and 1 have leaves 
We cannot other than an aspen be. : 
That ceaselessly.' unreastjnably 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 helds. The references are brief ; 
his own destiny has made them doubly poignant. But one 
fancies that dying lie 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. 
