I've just finished a genuinely wonderful new biography by Matthew Hollis called Now All Roads Lead to France, a Life of Edward Thomas. I'm dazzled, and glad to be so. The book is carefully and comprehensively researched, literate, sensible, and compassionate. Its author is confident enough not to overwhelm the poor reader with pounds of extraneous detail. I'm not easily rivetted, but this biography was truly rivetting. Thank you, Matthew Hollis.
I'm a longtime Edward Thomas enthusiast. Thomas learned how to employ the language really used by men more successfully than some of his highly-regarded predecessors. I didn't know much about Thomas's life, and therefore hadn't realized (though I might have guessed had I been more astute) how much Thomas had learned from Robert Frost. The two became inseparable friends during Frost's English years and spent hours and hours together, neglecting their wives and families but talking poetry and poetic language. Clearly, they cross-fertilized.
In fact, if you listen closely, you can hear overtones of Frost in Thomas's best-known poem.
Yes, I remember Adlestrop --
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop -- only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
The first line of the poem is so casual and demotic that it sounds like what later came to be called "found poetry." I'm glad to know that there is an actual Adlestrop up there in the Cotswolds, though surely Thomas was well aware that "Adlestrop" sounds as though it were invented by the Ministry of Silly Names.
The poem is a latter-day pastoral which contrasts the hiss of industrial steam with the with perennial birdsong and cloudlets. A brief ecstatic revelation.
My all-time favorite poem by Thomas is this blank-verse masterpiece:
As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.
The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away? '
'When the war's over.' So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out? ' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps? '
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm, I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more...Have many gone
From here? ' 'Yes.' 'Many lost? ' 'Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.
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