But these things also are Spring’s—
On banks by the roadside the grass
Long-dead that is greyer now
Than all the Winter it was;
The shell of a little snail bleached
In the grass; chip of flint, and mite
Of chalk; and the small birds’ dung
In splashes of purest white:
This item is from the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.ucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit) ©Edward Thomas, 1979, reproduced under licence from Faber and Faber Ltd.
Analysis
In his biography of Maurice Maeterlinck, (Methuen 1911), Edward Thomas suggested that ‘Anything, however small, may make a poem; nothing, however great, is certain to’. Written in March 1915 ‘But these things also’ offers the reader an accumulation of tiny details which are all associated with the coming of Spring:
The shell of a little snail bleached
In the grass; chip of flint, and mite
Of chalk; and the small birds’ dung
In splashes of purest white:
These minutiae (‘little’, ‘chip’, ‘mite’, ‘small’) are held together not only by their size but also by the fact that they are associated with the inanimate; they belong to Winter and the whiteness seems like a draining of colour. However, the poet’s eye has sought them out because they are ‘All the white things a man mistakes/For earliest violets’ and we become aware that the moment Thomas is trying to recreate is the very cusp of the old world and the new: Winter as it becomes Spring. Eleanor Farjeon recorded that the poet’s elder daughter, Bronwen, ‘was Edward’s most eager sharer of wild-flower lore; she knew as many as he did, had an eye almost as quick’ and she refers to Thomas’s poem dedicated to Bronwen (‘if I should ever by chance’):
In his happiest poem…Edward offers to bestow on his elder daughter half a dozen sweet-named places…provided she finds the first white violet of the year before he does. Every spring it was a race between them.
Thomas’s sharp eye for what the landscape looks like as one season moves into another is caught in the opening stanza of ‘But these things also’ as he notes that the grass ‘Long-dead’ is ‘greyer now’ than it was through the whole of the winter. There is a feeling here of what Thomas Hardy referred to as ‘Winter’s dregs’ which ‘made desolate the weakening eye of day’ in his poem celebrating the shift of one millennium to another in ‘The Darkling Thrush’. This sense of how there is no clear differentiation between one moment and the next and that winter does not simply become spring on a certain calendar day is held in the last stanza with a typically ambiguous statement, ‘And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone’. Rather like the southernwood herb ‘Old Man’ being also called ‘Lad’s- love’ Thomas captures that tauntingly delicate feeling of something being not quite definable: it is on the edge of consciousness.
Ian Brinton