A deep sense of melancholy and dissatisfaction haunts the world of Edward Thomas’s poetry

In her reminiscences of their life together, As It Was and World Without End, Helen Thomas gives a moving account of the deep moods of depression which haunted Edward Thomas throughout his life:

For there were to come dark days when his brooding melancholy shut me out in a lonely exile, and my heart waited too eagerly to be let into the light again. When those days came, with no apparent reason for their coming, bringing to him a deep spiritual unrest and discontent, he would be silent for hours, and perhaps stride out of the house, angry and bitter and cruel, and walk and walk far into the night, and come home, worn out with deadly fatigue….

 But this was to come, and it was only now and then that I had hints of this darkness in his soul, this fierce unrest which beyond all found peace in nature, but not in me. Alone, he had to be in his agony, but when he emerged from it, exhausted by God knows what bitter contest, he looked for me and needed me, and our love was always the firm ground on which we stood secure and that no storm ever swept away.

Whilst some of these moods seem to have been related to financial crises and the necessity for constant working at reviews and hack-work prose that would provide some security for his family there was also what John Moore was to describe as a melancholia that was not so much a mood as a malady:

It was something inherent in him, a habit of brooding which his poor circumstances and his constant anxieties increased tenfold until it became at times almost a sickness of his mind.

In the early poem ‘The Lofty Sky’, January 1915, the poet feels trapped, imprisoned, on an earth which resembles the bottom of a pond:

I sicken of the woods
And all the multitudes
Of hedge-trees. They are no more
Than weeds upon this floor
Of the river of air
Leagues deep, leagues wide, where
I am like a fish that lives
In weeds and mud and gives
What’s above him no thought.

The mood of dissatisfaction is caught with the syllabic business of ‘multitudes’ followed by a hyphenated compound noun as though the words themselves are part of the trap. The unending sense of the submerged prison is emphasised with the repetition of ‘leagues’, a word which in itself draws out a feeling of distance. The yearning to escape, to get out into the air, expresses Thomas’s desire for ‘the sky,/The tops of the high hills’: it is a desire for freedom from a world in which he muddies along like the slow-moving pond-fish, the tench.

Thomas was fully aware of how this melancholic mood could be self-absorbing and just over a week after writing ‘The Lofty Sky’ he composed ‘Beauty’:

What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph—
‘Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one.’

The mood itself echoes what Thomas had written to Gordon Bottomley back in 1908 where he spoke of ‘An east wind or a wind from underground’ that had swept over everything:

Friends, Nature, books are like London pavements when an east wind has made them dry and harsh & pitiless. There is no joy in them. They are more dead than if they were in a Museum correctly labelled. And this is true not only this morning, but every morning, every afternoon & every night.

Thomas’s awareness of his own mood and its accompanying self-pity is worth comparing with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 which opens

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heav’n with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate…

Thomas recognises that his mood of self-mocking is a ‘whim’ and trusts to the outside world, or his perception of it, to offer him some relief. Shakespeare’s feelings of worthlessness are placed into perspective when he writes

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

In a similar way Thomas says that his heart ‘happily’

Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unswerving to its home and love.

It is the outside world, the particular scene within the landscape, that provides the poet with a sense of clarity and perspective allowing him to realise finally that ‘Beauty is there.’ When Thomas wrote about his self-obsessed moods he recognised the narcissistic element to them and had written to Bottomley ‘How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave & to say It is over. With me I suppose it is vanity: I don’t want to do so difficult a thing as dying without any chance of applause after having done it.’ Stan Smith writes that ‘Nature for Thomas is both a desolate emptiness outside mind and a flood of vital creation from which the self is excluded’ and goes on to suggest that the image of rain frequently combines these two aspects. The clearest example of this is the poem Thomas wrote in his army hut at Hare Hill Camp in January 1916:

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.

William Cooke was the first critic to point out in detail how Thomas’s poetry arose out of his prose writing and he directs us to a passage in The Icknield Way where Thomas lies half-asleep at an inn after a day’s journey:

There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything. I stay because I am too weak to go. I crawl on because it is easier than to stop. I put my face to the window. There is nothing out there but the blackness and the sound of rain…I am not a part of nature. I am alone. There is nothing else in my world but my dead heart and brain within me and the rain without.

The mood of the prose is condensed in the poem so that every word counts. The opening line’s repetition of ‘rain’ draws out the monotony of the sound as it beats down on the army hut. The use of enjambment as the second line moves over into the third allows the concentration upon the word ‘me’ to become merged with the realisation of impending death. This death, however, is seen as cleansing and a nostalgic desire to return to a time before he was even born, a type of Edenised landscape of purity. It is at this point in the poem that the mood shifts as the poet recognises the importance of a world outside himself:

Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
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,

Whether or not this is a reference to his wife and family or to his parents does not really matter that much; what is more important is that, like in ‘The Owl’, the poet’s mood is altered by thinking of what lies outside himself. The image that then follows is one that suggests the bleakness of trench-warfare and life at the Front to which Thomas was going before the year was out:

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

This image is one that Thomas takes up six months later in ‘Bright Clouds’: ‘Tall reeds/Like criss-cross bayonets’. ‘Rain’ ends with the poet’s mind turning to death and a love of death

If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

In an earlier short story, ‘The Attempt’, Thomas had written a fictionalised account of his suicidal thoughts and concluded that ‘death was an idea tinged with poetry in his mind’ and the poem’s concluding lines suggest surely that if death can be ‘perfect’ then the lover of death is an aesthete. In spite of the awareness of others in earlier lines Thomas’s focus of attention is firmly upon himself and this, again, is an example of the self-consuming nature of his melancholy.

Ian Brinton