Edward Thomas' Haunting imagination

...No one left and no one came On the bare platform...

...Elected Friends: Robert Frost & Edward Thomas to One Another (Handsel, 214 pp., $24.00) is a collection of letters with an Introduction by Matthew Spencer, a Foreword by Michael Hoffmann and an Afterword by Christopher Ricks...

...His aspiration had always been to become a poet, but his depressive nature combined with circumstances to deprive him of the confidence to try...

...What if Thomas had chosen to join the Frosts on their farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, and not to serve as cannon fodder on the Western Front...

...In 1913 Thomas met an adventurous American recently arrived in England, also on the verge of middle age yet just launching his career as a poet...

...One is constantly aware of Thomas' presence in his verse...

...And salted was my food, and my repose Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice Speaking for all who lay under the stars...

...Both men hoped they would settle close to each other again...

...In "The Other," the narrator encounters a doppelganger...

...Hoffmann cautions that these remarks should not lead us to suspect "there was any homoerotic component in the relationship, but rather to propose that something of what one thinks of as merely or exclusively sexual—the gallantry or flirtatiousness of seduction—inheres in many, if not most, great friendships...

...Shakespeare called this sound "a merry note," but Thomas finds it No merry note, nor cause of merriment, But one telling me plain what I escaped And others could not, thatnight, asinlwent...

...Thomas' correspondence with Frost reveals sides of both men they rarely showed to anyone else...

...His condolences to the widow plead, "He's all yours...

...But Thomas never lapsed into the pontification and bombast of "The Gift Outright...

...The oftanthologized "Adlestrop" concerns a train unexpectedly stopping at a station bearing that name: The steam hissed...

...Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof Against the North wind...

...and all the old days swept back over me...

...Starting at age 18, however, he produced 30 books of prose: biographies, collections of essays, and the occasional novel...

...Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice...

...Is peace going to awaken me as it will so many from a drugged sleep...

...He went on, worrying: "Does one really get rid of things at all by inhibiting them for a long time on end...

...It seems as if I couldn't bear it not to follow my inclination...

...Frost wanted Thomas to move to New Hampshire so they could found a school, but before the United States entered the War anti-British feeling ran high in New England...

...In addition, Thomas' loyalty to his own country was compounded by a fear that he would not be able to support his family in a new land...

...Their language is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of secondary poets...

...Thomas perceives the world's suffering but does not seek to dramatize his sensibility, nor to flaunt before readers his sensitivity to misery...

...The Poems of Edward Thomas (Handsel, 180 pp., $17.00) has an Introduction by Peter Sacks...

...Sometimes the confidences carried humor, as when Frost described his outrage at a critic for having called him "perhaps the equal of Ella Wheeler Wilcox and James Whitcomb Riley"—two popular poetasters of the day...

...Yet few editors paid attention to this late flowering until after his death...

...The letters often employ expressions suggestive of billetsdoux, and in his Foreword to Elected Friends Hoffmann acknowledges their romantic tone...

...But I am not...

...he strained to provide adequately for his wife and three young children...

...Later Frost observed, "It was plain that he had wanted to be a poet all the years he had been writing about poets not worth his little finger...

...Cautious to the last, he had been afraid to ruin his reputation as a critic with possibly inferior verse...

...Dark and untenanted, With grass growing instead Of the footsteps of life, The friendliness, the strife...

...I am something like that...

...And for that minute a blackbird sang Closeby, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire...

...he could never fully adopt the persona of a character the way Frost did in poems like "Home Burial" or "The Fear...

...One of his most touching poems, "The Owl," describes arriving at an inn after a winter's walk: Downhill I came, hungry and not yet starved...

...A poem to his wife, "No One So Much as You," is a heartbreaking meditation on the inability to express deep feeling or to be certain of one's emotions...

...Acerbic and withdrawn with most people, Frost confided in Thomas during the brief time they lived near each other...

...I say that from the heart, dear man___My whole nature simply leaps at times to cross the ocean to see you for one good talk...

...In the poem, "To E.T.," Frost spoke of sleeping with your poems on my breast To see, if in a dream they brought of you...

...Someone cleared his throat...

...Instead of emigrating he opted for officers' training, writing Frost, "I wonder if you would recognize me with hair cropped close and carrying a thin little swagger cane: many don't who meet me unexpectedly, and they say I never looked so well in health...

...After Thomas enlisted in the Army (at his age he could easily have opted for home service), Frost wrote plaintively of his friend submitting to military discipline: "You won't be able [to] hit it off with the like of me by the time the War is over...

...Their success was enhanced by Thomas' acute public appreciation: "These poems are revolutionary," he wrote in one review, "because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric...

...I might not have the chance I missed in life I meant, you meant that nothing should remain Unsaid between us, brother...

...Would his further achievements have matched his mentor's...

...At his least, Thomas was a miniaturist, skillfully depicting glimpses of a particular rural scene or plant or bird, however slight...

...This new friend, Robert Frost, had been a schoolmaster and farmer but was now determined to accomplish his dream...

...DOES Edward Thomas' work merit new attention on this side of the Atlantic, or is his principal appeal simply that of a chum of one of our greatest Modernists...

...The destruction of youth causes him to feel suddenly middleaged, and he wonders whether his own era has died: Look at the old house, Outmoded, dignified...

...Such concerns take on added poignancy, since we know he did not live to see the armistice...

...Auden...

...What I saw Was Adlestrop—only the name...

...Though occasionally he slipped into archaic speech forms— "'twas" and "I know not"—he never posed or sounded arch...

...Nature was his domain...

...Inspired by Frost's example and encouragement, the Englishman composed his first poem in December of 1914...

...The flowerless hours Of winter cannot prevail To blight these other flowers...

...Snow" spookily describes how In the gloom of whiteness...

...Fortunately, two new books provide a fresh opportunity to reassess it...

...In the great silence of snow, A child was sighing And bitterly saying: "Oh, They have killed a white bird up there on her nest...

...In 1915, when the Frosts returned to the United States (taking the Thomases' teenage son with them), the friendship was poured out in letters...

...In an Introduction to the 1936 edition of Thomas' Collected Poems, Walter de la Mare spoke of "hands that had cradled so many wild bird eggs, and were familiar with every flower in the Southern counties...

...He had written over 140 poems by then, but only a few had found their way into print, under the pen name "Edward Eastaway...

...I want to see him to tell him .. .what I think he liked to hear from me, that he was a poet...

...Thomas wrote about his troubled relationship with his father in an account that offers considerable insight into his depression and lack of selfassurance...

...At this point, the poet's complacency is shaken by an owl's cry...

...I had a thought of you...

...The ability to evoke a place vividly for his readers by summoning a few simple, fleeting natural elements was this poet's basic gift...

...Gone, Gone Again" opens with reminiscences of the poet's youth and a time before "the War began / To turn young men to dung...

...From his military training base, Thomas wrote to his correspondent, "It must somehow fall out that we don't have to live on letters very long...

...tired, yet so that rest Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof...

...The down is fluttering from her breast!' And still it fell through the dusky brightness On the child crying for the bird of the snow...

...Now you will think me getting over to the other extreme of complacency...

...On other occasions they bared their anxieties to one another...

...Along with wildlife, Thomas found English place names mysteriously evocative...

...What kind of predicament do you call that...

...Those acquainted with the cold egotist of Lawrence Thompson's notorious biography will encounter in the letters a strikingly different man—self-deprecating, warm, somewhat sentimental, and quick to encourage and praise...

...Sometimes he strives for a gothic frisson...

...On Easter morning of 1917 (April 9), Thomas fell in battle at Arras, France...

...Frost responded to such plaints saying, "What's mine is yours...

...Only I am not dead, Still breathing and interested In the house that is not dark:— I am something like that: Not one pane to reflect the sun, For the schoolboys to throw at— They have broken every one...

...Lyric nature poetry has never enjoyed great popularity among American readers, but it has an impressive English tradition dating back to Robert Herrick in the 17th century and including such Romantics as John Clare...

...On the battlefield, a few days before he was killed, he wrote a poem entitled "Lights Out" that seems, almost eagerly, to invite annihilation: There is not any book Or face of dearest look That I would not turn from now To go into the unknown I must enter and leave, alone, That I may lose my way And myself...

...In this endeavor he was influenced by his close friend Eleanor Farjeon, whose verse remains a staple of children's anthologies...

...Thomas' posthumous reputation soared in his own country, and he retains a significant place in British anthologies...

...Thomas tried his hand at light verse, too, achieving the timeless and engaging singsong of nursery rhyme and folk song...

...At his best, Thomas unpacked small details and incidents to disclose a larger world of more profound and troubling sympathy...

...The pair quickly formed a deep bond...

...The cumulative effect of reading his collected works is haunting...

...Like a reporter, he recognizes and records pain when he sees it...

...Blue china fragments scattered, that tell the tale...

...Some of the letters seduced Frost into believing that Thomas might well have wanted to find out, yet the poems tell a different story...

...More often he crafted faintly eerie lyrics like "A Tale," where closely observed details are arranged to hint at a narrative: Here once flint walls, Pump, orchard and wood pile stood...

...Shortly after he moved to the British Isles his first two collections, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), made his name in literary circles there...

...In its beds have lain Youth, love, age and pain...

...You'll be wondering how you ever found pleasure in groveling with me in such self-abasement—walking about the fields of Leddington—in the days that were...

...Obsessed with his own bleak vision of life, Thomas appears to have found in the horrors of war fulfillment of something he had always felt...

...Read in tandem, these volumes provide a vivid portrait of a complex personality...

...The influence of North of Boston is clear in Thomas' early efforts—especially in the dialogue poems that recall such Frost masterpieces as "Mending Wall" and "The Death of the Hired Man...

...But you must let me cry my cry for him as if he were almost all mine, too...

...In response, the morose Englishman trusted his companion with his most private thoughts...

...I can never live here any more without longing for there, nor there without longing for here...

...In fact, the medium is common speech...

...I want to tell him that I love those he loved and hate those he hated...

...Like many who make their living by writing, Thomas was under the perpetual pressure of deadlines and chronically short of money...

...The title Elected Friends comes from "Iris at Night," another elegy the American poet addressed to his lost companion...

...There is a startling honesty to his voice...

...his lyrics are set in localities called Lapwater or Wingle Tye, where missel-thrushes sing over goose-grass, dog's mercury or plants with similarly exotic designations...

...Couldn't we run ourselves down then without fear of losing too much favor with each other...

...His soft voice has struck many of our critics as too "English...

...He edited 16 anthologies, too, and did innumerable reviews...

...Would he have found the life of an expatriate as creatively stimulating as W.H...

...Certainly he lacks Frost's breadth of subject, not to mention the American's almost folksy relationship with his audience...

...Other poems, rather than suggesting the supernatural, vibrate with melancholy...

...The meter avoids not only the old-fashioned pomp and sweetness, but the later fashion also of discord and fuss...

...The rapport between the two men was based partly on shared anxieties...

...Thomas' death left Frost inconsolable...

...To date efforts to attract American readers have largely floundered...

...Blue periwinkle crawls From the last garden down into the wood...

...Am I indulging in the pleasure of being someone else...