‘What poets say is not chosen to represent what they feel or think, but is itself the very substance of what had lain dark and unapparent, is itself all that survives of feeling and thought.’ Feminine Influence on the Poets.

Edward Thomas’s love of words is completely interwoven with his abilities as a poet.

In June 1914 Robert Frost’s North of Boston, was published in England containing poems such as ‘Mending Wall’, ‘After Apple-Picking’ and ‘The Death of the Hired Man’. Thomas reviewed the book for the Daily News and Eleanor Farjeon referred to how the review ‘reveals Edward’s mind through Frost’s’ and how ‘many things he says might be said of his own poems.’ The influence of the American Frost on the English Thomas was immense and Thomas’s review recognised the new voice of direct speech in Frost’s work recognising how different this was from the highly stylised rhetoric of much Georgian poetry:

These poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric, and even at first sight appear to lack the poetic intensity of which rhetoric is an imitation.

In January 1915 after writing his first twenty poems Thomas wrote to Eleanor Farjeon that ‘If I am consciously doing anything I am trying to get rid of the last rags of rhetoric and formality which left my prose so often with a dead rhythm’. Two months before this letter he had written his first poem, ‘Up in the Wind’, which he had adapted from a prose description of The White Horse pub on the Froxfield plateau above Steep:

‘I could wring the old thing’s neck that put it here!
A public-house! It may be public for birds,
Squirrels and such-like, ghosts of charcoal-burners
And highwaymen.’ The wild girl laughed. ‘But I
Hate it since I came back from Kennington.
I gave up a good place.’ Her cockney accent
Made her and the house seem wilder by calling up—
Only to be subdued at once by wildness—
The idea of London, there in that forest parlour,
Low and small among the towering beeches
And the one bulging butt that’s like a font.

Edna Longley suggests that this poem is Thomas’s closest approximation to Frost’s ‘eclogue’ in which rural speakers tell or act out their story. The woman who opens the narrative is permitted to let her voice dominate the story as she reveals the interlacing of social worlds (London/Froxfield) and aspirations, history and disappointments. The opening line is dramatic and conjures up immediately the feelings of isolation and anger that dominate the life of the landlady of The White Horse. However, the mood is tempered almost directly afterwards with the statement ‘The wild girl laughed’: this anger is wry and communicative rather than sullen and in-turned. Within the space of a few more lines we are presented with an atmosphere that has a cosiness to it as the pub sits ‘Low and small’ overshadowed by the beech trees. In fact it is almost an integral part of the landscape as the words ‘forest’ and ‘parlour’ are joined, Nature and domesticity combined. This first poem of Thomas’s presents the reader with a landscape against which the human drama unfolds in its meditative way:

Her eyes flashed up; she shook her hair away
From eyes and mouth, as if to shriek again;
Then sighed back to her scrubbing. While I drank
I might have mused of coaches and highwaymen,
Charcoal- burners and life that loves the wild.
For who now used these roads except myself,
A market waggon every other Wednesday,
A solitary tramp, some very fresh one
Ignorant of these eleven houseless miles,
A motorist from a distance slowing down
To taste whatever luxury he can
In having North Downs clear behind, South clear before,
And being midway between two railway lines
Far out of sight or sound of them?

Some of these characters will act out their roles elsewhere in Thomas’s poetry and ‘A solitary tramp’ will find another persona in ‘Man and Dog’, ‘The Gypsy’ and Jack Noman who appears in ‘May 23’

tanned like a harvester
Like his short clay pipe, like the leaf and bur
That clung to his coat from last night’s bed

The relaxed and ruminative conversational style of these poems allows the drama of a story to unfold as it does with Frost’s ‘The Death of the Hired Man’ where the casual labourer Silas returns for winter hibernation at Warren’s farm.

Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table,
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tiptoe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. “Silas is back.”
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her. “Be kind,” she said.

Writing to Jesse Berridge in 1902 Thomas had expressed his concerns for the slavish uniformity of style and formality of composition of much late-Victorian poetry seeing it as a type of straightjacket that could limit the poet’s imagination:

Personally, I have a dread of the sonnet. It must contain 14 lines, & a man must be a tremendous poet or a cold mathematician if he can accommodate his thoughts to such a condition.

By way of contrast to this his friendship and lengthy conversations with Robert Frost, often taking place whilst they walked the countryside of Gloucestershire together, taught him the importance of the cadences of the human voice and his review of North of Boston praised the American poet’s language which ‘is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of secondary poets’.

Thomas wrote two poems with very similar titles, ‘Words’ and ‘The Word’ the second of which was written in July 1915 at the time when he was making a decision whether or not to go to America with Frost and his family. Towards the end of June 1915 he had told Walter de la Mare about these American plans but by the time this second poem, ‘The Word’, was written he had told Frost that he had altered his mind and was going to enlist instead. In ‘Words’ Thomas expresses his wish to be used as a conduit by the simplicity of English words themselves:

Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes—
As the winds use
A crack in a wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through—
Choose me,
You English words?

Although the image lying behind this picture is that of the Romantics Aeolian Harp, strings of which are moved haphazardly by the wind to make Nature’s music, it is typical of Thomas’s earthy realism that he cites the crack in a wall or drain for the wind to whistle through. Whereas Shelley had invoked the West Wind to make him ‘thy lyre, even as the forest is’, Thomas brings the Romantic gesture down to a more ordinary level and to the common speech rhythms of rural life. This idea of the poet being literally the mouthpiece for language is what is important about the words quoted at the opening of this section: poets give tongue to ‘the very substance of what had lain dark and unapparent’. In addition to this Thomas was also very aware of how ‘Anything, however small, may make a poem’ (Maurice Maeterlinck) whilst also noting that ‘nothing, however great, is certain to’. The intense concentration upon the moment is ‘the one necessary condition in the poet and in the poem’ and he continues in his biography of the French writer Maeterlinck to recognise this central truth:

By this concentration something is detached from the confused immensity of life and receives individuality, and this creativeness brings into my mind the inhuman solitariness of the world at the moment when Deucalion stooped to make the first men out of stones; and the waste of waters when the dove bore an olive-leaf into the ark out of the monotonous waste.

Thomas sees his ‘Words’ as ‘light as dreams’ and as ‘tough as oak’, as homely as ‘an old cloak’ and at the same time as

Strange as the races
Of dead and unborn

In that second poem, ‘The Word’, he also recognises the limitations of language. The poem opens lines with the feeling that there is a world beyond what can be either recalled or given definition in language:

There are so many things I have forgot,
That once were much to me, or that were not,
All lost, as is a childless woman’s child
And its child’s children, in the undefiled
Abyss of what can never be again.

It is almost as if the words themselves are too definite to be able to capture what lies on the borders of both consciousness and memory and when the poet knows what it is he is trying to communicate about ‘an empty thingless name’ he is left with the frustration of recording a sound which is cried out to him

From somewhere in the bushes by a bird
Over and over again, a pure thrush word.

Ian Brinton