Poet by Nature

...When asked what he was fighting for, "He stooped, and picked up a pinch of earth...

...April—too early a harvest...

...When his Spring cry breaks every now and then, as it does to-day, through the songs of the larks, when the rooks caw in low flight or perched on their elm tops, and the lambs bleat, and the sun shines, and the couch [grassy weed] fires burn well, and the wind blows their smoke about, the plain is genial...

...In "Rain," a wild midnight downfall puts him in mind of others lying alone Like a cold water among broken reeds, Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff...

...Then one encounter released a new voice...

...Robert Frost, feeling stymied in America, had taken his family to England...

...A last diary note by Thomas says, "And no more singing for the bird . . ." A copy of Frost's 1916 Mountain Interval was found in his kit-bag...

...His early memories are of "wild unconscious play" in the fields, then "the time of collecting eggs, flowers and insects," and later "when we read poetry out of doors...

...The sun used to shine," a poem from May 1916, recalls August 1914, his daily forest walks with Frost prospecting for flowers and talking of everything...

...But like the birds' nest berries, nuts, and seeds, they're given a keen eye and animating touch...

...A nearby village "is now just ruins among violated stark tree trunks...

...As it happens, he had in mind the astonishing poet of rural England a century earlier, John Clare, who loved best "tracking wild searches through the meadow grass...

...Edward's poems do not directly discuss the war," said his wife Helen, "but they do mention it and the war gave point to what he was describing...

...But let the rain fall and the wind whirl it, or let the sun shine too mightily, writes Thomas, and the Plain becomes "a sublime, inhospitable wilderness...

...For three months, at Arras near the Belgian border, Thomas kept a diary: cold raw days, sleepless nights and shelling, letters to and from home, strafing, reading Shakespeare 10 minutes per night, weather, landscape, owls, moles, hares, foxes, and throughout, the birds—partridge, blackbird, thrush, magpie, sparrow, "Black-headed buntings talk, rooks caw," "Linnets and chaffinches sing in waste trenched ground," "Larks singing over No Man's Land...

...Once a dormouse dined there on hazel nuts...

...still half-wild and imperfectly domesticated...

...In "On the Grecian Urn" (Thomas thought this the "calmest" and "stillest" of Keats's odes), the lovers are "still" and "silent," they "cannot fade" and never "can those leaves be bare...

...Edward Thomas (1878-1917) could have been speaking for himself and "the curious life of words in the hands of those who love all life so well that they do not kill even the slender words but let them play on...

...Haymaking" settles into a scene, as from Brueghel or Constable, of laborers at rest after mowing: The tosser lay forsook Out in the sun...

...Amid shells going out and coming in, he writes to Robert Frost: "I should like to be a poet, just as I should like to live, but I know as much about my chances in either case, and I don't really trouble about either...

...But what could wartime poems do if "Literature," as Thomas said, "sends us to Nature principally for Joy...

...With the European war only miles away, Thomas, aged 36 with three children, debated whether to enlist or accept Frost's invitation to come farm and write in New England...

...I don't suppose there is anything for us to do to show our admiration but to love him forever," Frost wrote to Thomas's widow...

...In Keats's "To Autumn," the sleeping reaper's hook "Spares the next swath...

...His American friend, who'd written "The Road Not Taken" about him, and called Thomas "the only brother I ever had," never got over it...

...John Felstiner, professor of English at Stanford, is the author of the forthcoming So Much Depends: Poetry and Environmental Urgency Innocent-seeming, like so much in Edward Thomas, this verges on chance and mortality while holding out chances of life...

...Of course, nature persists in time of war, and above all birdsong...

...Only I want to come back more or less complete...

...With a rough-cut candor not unlike Frost's, he says for them both, The war Came back to mind with the moonrise Which soldiers in the east afar Beheld then...

...No wonder he was deeply struck by the closing lines of Frost's "The WoodPile," its cordwood left "To warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay...

...And to another English friend: "His concern to the last was what it had always been, to touch earthly things and come as near them in words as words would come...

...One of his signature poems, "Tall Nettles," shows the deeper, darker touch that would mark Thomas as a war poet: Tall nettles cover up, as they have done These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough Long worn out, and the roller made of stone: Only the elm butt tops the nettles now...

...A school friend recalls "Talking, and looking at the earth and the sky, we just walked about until it was dark," attending to "the general life of the common birds and animals, and to the appearances of trees and clouds and everything upon the surface that showed itself to the naked eye...

...He went on to write Beautiful Wales, The Heart of England, The South Country, The Country, and In Pursuit of Spring...

...Something, I felt, had to be done before I could look again composedly at English landscape, at the elms and poplars about the houses, at the purple-headed wood-betony with two pairs of leaves on a stiff stem, who stood sentinel among the grasses or bracken by hedge-side or wood's-edge...

...One night in rural Gloucestershire they hunted rare ferns by matchlight...

...But change was still to come...

...Clearly his love fed his literacy when it came to nature...

...Disinclined to talk of war, they savored the present moment, yet did speak of war, and spotted that fallen apple, perished, with somber undertones from Frost's "After Apple-Picking...

...No escapism here, or in "Haymaking," written when Thomas enlisted...

...I am in it now & no mistake," he wrote Frost, and in December sent him his first poems, including "Birds' Nests...

...Thomas enlisted in July 1915, training and teaching map-reading in the south of England until January 1917...

...Frost heard what he liked, a lyric voice in natural speech...

...April 1917 saw Thomas, now a second lieutenant, preparing for the major British offensive at Arras, peering out through a hedge where "larks hover above the dry grass just in front...

...Not long before, Thomas's wife Helen had written Frost describing his battlefield behavior: "In a pause in the shooting he turns his wonderful field glasses on to a hovering kestrel & sees him descend & pounce & bring up a mouse...

...and the long waggon stood Without its team...

...This corner of the farmyard I like most: As well as any bloom upon a flower I like the dust on the nettles, never lost Except to prove the sweetness of a shower...

...Still the pewits move uneasily in the open, always facing the wind and the thin wall of snow bearing down upon them...

...Ease and harmony seldom come simply for Thomas, but rather through paradox or a strong poise...

...it seemed it never would Move from the shadow of that single yew...

...And grass and goose-grass seeds found soil and grew...

...For Thomas, the wintry plain proves "the earth does not belong to man, but man to the earth...

...Birds' Nests," echoing Clare's poem of the same name, ends on one of those meadow searches: And most I like the winter nest deep-hid That leaves and berries fell into...

...It makes us feel the age of the earth...

...Twenty years earlier he'd sent his young wife vivid letters delineating weather, hills, rivers, hedgerows, birds and flowers...

...Thomas adopted that bittersweet persistence...

...a young rook's cry whilst gobbling a worm: it was perfectly true to nature...

...But the sun shone and larks and partridge and magpies and hedgesparrows made love and the trench was being made passable for the wounded that will be harvested in a day or two...

...We turned from men or poetry" To rumours of the war remote Only till both stood disinclined For aught but the yellow flavorous coat Of an apple wasps had undermined...

...He volunteered to serve overseas, and on January 30, 1917, at 4 a.m., disembarked in France with an artillery unit...

...In March 1917, though, an anthology appeared in London with his poems from 191516...

...The point is, Thomas will not suppress either his outdoors gusto or his inward concern: They interact...

...Casting back and forth from landscape to literature, Thomas by 1913 had produced 25 books, plus essays and reviews, but no poetry...

...Reading Thomas's prose account of a biking journey, Frost decided his new friend had poems to write, drawn from passages such as this, about pewits on Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge: His Winter and twilight cry expresses for most men both the sadness and the wildness of these solitudes...

...It speaks, and it is poetry...

...Thomas was born in London in 1878, of Welsh parents...

...Starting with "night's thunder far away," we only then enter a cold clear morning of "perfect blue...

...Now, from an observation post, he writes: "I simply watched the shells changing the landscape...

...Weeks later the letter came back—a censor wanted her to remove some photos—and she faintly scrawled a postscript: "He was killed on Easter Monday by a shell...

...This is one of the most revolutionary books of modern times...

...Just days before war broke out in August 1914, the friends returning from one of their long rambles witnessed "A wonder...

...Like Clare, Thomas owned close knowledge of animals and plants, which showed him "what life is, how our own is related to theirs," our "responsibilities and debts among the other inhabitants of the earth...

...In October 1913 the two met and took to each other, Frost empathizing with Thomas's marital and literary anxieties, while Thomas deepened Frost's botanical savvy...

...Compact verse yields phrasings and line breaks that wedge the war into a summer saunter...

...Seeing a moonrise and wondering about "those who could see it" in France if they were "not blinded by smoke, pain, or excitement," he is pierced by a willingness to die for England...

...Thomas ends "Haymaking" on such a note: "All of us gone out of the reach of change...

...that reappeared in Frost's "Iris by Night": a watery moon-made rainbow whose "two mote-swimming many-colored ends" gathered into a ring, "And we stood in it softly circled round...

...They both show his zeal, long before this was in vogue, to respect wildness for its own sake, and ours as well...

...Thoreau had called English poetry "tame and civilized...

...Peaceable, yes, a "morning time" poised against change like the breaks in those run-on lines...

...Poems such as "The Owl" are Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice Speaking for all who lay under the stars, Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice...

...Literally, for this.' He crumbled it between finger and thumb, and let it fall...

...Thomas had an older friend called "Dad," a sunburnt sinewy gamekeeper and poacher who climbed trees for nests and dug into thorn bushes, who could imitate "the hollow note of the bullfinch . . . the chiding of a sparrow hawk at its prey...

...Dad knew the curative power of every herb, a knowledge "fast decaying," Thomas wrote in 1895...

...By then he'd written the 143 poems upon which his reputation rests...

...No poems at all were possible during the months in France...

...Now he began finding verse rhythms in his own countryside prose...

...The next day, Easter Sunday, April 8, a German shell fell two yards from him, a dud...

...And all were silent...

...The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin, But still...

...So when Frost's North of Boston came out in 1914, their kinship led Thomas to review it not twice but three times...

...Again the wear of time: rusty harrow, worn-out plow, overgrown nettles, dust...

...When the Times Literary Supplement called his naturalism absurd vis-a-vis "the tremendous life of the last three years," Thomas wrote a friend: "Must I only use [my eyes] as field-glasses and must I see only Huns in these beautiful hills eastward . . . ?" Anyway, he did register that fraught life...

...Already at 19, learning from "my favorite—Thoreau," he published The Woodland Life, vibrant sketches of the southern English countryside...