EDWARD THOMAS “I CANNOT BITE THE DAY TO THE CORE.”

EDWARD THOMAS   “I CANNOT BITE THE DAY TO THE CORE.”

Mike Haldenby explores the tensions and contradictions in the life of Edward Thomas that, ironically, inspired him to write some of the most memorable poetry of the 20^th Century.

Edward Thomas’ life (1878-1917) was one of uncertainty, vacillation and misunderstanding.  He was a writer, but for years hated what he wrote. He loved the countryside, but couldn’t understand why.   He wanted to fight in the Great War, but resisted enlisting.  He loved his family but couldn’t live with them, preferring his own company.  He was a poet, and he didn’t know it.  Yet the poems that he wrote between December 1914 and  January 1916- none published under his own name during his lifetime- have been praised widely, not least for their “unflinching emotional honesty” (Scannell, p.21). 

Thomas wrote in the “shadow of his brooding preoccupation with impermanence and mortality”(Lucas, p.82); yet, according to John Lucas “bright images gleam in the shadow” (ibid).  He wrestled with his contradictions and paradoxes for years; yet these very tensions are, arguably, what make him a great poet. The quest to “possess experience” yet “failing to do so” ( ibid.) provided him with the inspiration to write, and to continue to write.  

“Edward Thomas is a nature poet, but we cannot call him that.” R. Kirkham¹

To attempt to define and categorise the poetry of Edward Thomas causes problems.  Convinced by his great friend Robert Frost that he should rewrite his imaginative and poetic prose as verse, Thomas, like Frost, valued “the speech of life” as the “speech of poetry” (Motion,p.60) ; he saw little value in “poetic” language. In other words, he was out of step with the literary establishment of the day. He could not become part of the mainstream Georgian movement of Edwardian England, with its idealised portrayals of nature. Yet he was not, strictly, a modernist, or “Imagist” either, despite his radical, stripped-down approach and being in “critical dialogue” (Longley, p. 11) with radical poets such as Ezra Pound. Contemporary literary critics were uncertain about Thomas; the poet, himself a critic for many years, was also far from sure of his own ground.

He never really believed that he was a poet, or could write poetry.  When Robert Frost told him that his prose was “as good a poetry as anyone alive”, it helped encourage Thomas to begin to write verse, although, crucially, it never defeated or even alleviated the depression that was to continually haunt him. As the war in Europe looked likely to continue long past Christmas 1914, his poetic output grew in both intensity and variety as reports of injury and death among his generation became more and more commonplace.  Ironically, he spent early 1915 “wounded” with an injured ankle, which delayed any decision about enlisting and channelled his energies towards his poems.

“To scare myself with my own desert places” Robert Frost ²

Sharing Frost’s determination to write with the natural cadences of ordinary speech, as Spring 1915 grew toward Summer Thomas found inspiration in his first love; the countryside.  Unsuccessfully fighting bouts of his “poets’ disease” (depression was then then called “neuralgia”) and tramping solitary miles through the lanes and woodland surrounding his cottage in Steep, Hampshire, he absorbed the abstract sounds of the wind, the joyful music of birdsong and the savage beauty of the seasons. Yet whether he was writing prose or poetry, he was always striving, usually unsuccessfully, to understand and process the significance of his experiences; his writing reflected “the hesitation and doubt that he found so disabling in his own life”  (Hollis, p.196). He knew that he wanted to somehow protect the land he loved from destruction, yet at thirty-six felt that he had little to offer the military, even if his ankle healed successfully.  An inveterate wanderer, it is no accident that his poems often find him travelling down unmapped, stumbled-upon pathways; it seems that he was looking for direction, searching (continues Lucas), “(for) the secret heart of England…which seems to hoard a secret meaning”.  (ibid. p.84) Yet if he ever found a meaningful pathway, Thomas failed to follow it.  His depressions deepened; he grew distanced from his wife and family, and more than once thought of suicide.

“When a man is unhappy, he writes damn bad poetry” Coleridge ³   

These frustrations did not harm his poetry. On the contrary, the tensions arising from his uncertainties provided him with a unique voice. He strove to find purpose and meaning in the powerful, almost spiritual experiences and beliefs that, when immersed in the countryside, he sensed but could not rationalise. He seemed, paradoxically, to draw strength from this lack of understanding;  it “signalled a kind of withheld power and undeniable if unattainable reality” celebrating “absent presences, intimations glimpsed, nearly held, tracked almost to their sources” (Lucas p. 83). Thomas hints at this himself, in “Melancholy” (April 1915): “Naught did my despair, but sweeten the strange sweetness.”

This sense of unknowable power did not summon up in the atheist/agnostic Thomas the view that nature was evidence of an all-encompassing God, however; Thomas centred his obsession with the indefinability of nature upon himself. In “The South Country” (1909) he had written that literature sent us to nature for both “the joy of the senses…and of the soul, which if found complete …might be called religious” (p.142).  We are reminded here of Wordsworth’s thought processes in “Tintern Abbey” in which the his pantheistic love of nature manifests itself on two distinct levels; as, simply, “beauteous forms” which delight the senses as “on the banks of this delightful stream/ we stood together”, but also in a deeper sense, as memories, providing reserves of positive energy to be drawn upon when spirits are low; “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart”.  In “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth does not try to understand or apply logic to the power of his memories but, upon recall, seems to find them more evocative, powerful and transformative than the experience itself:

“To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened…”   (Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey l.38-43)

“I would rather give up others more sweet” Edward Thomas  ⁴  

Despite findings connections of a spiritual (if not religious) kind in “The South Country” Thomas, growing frustrated at his shortcomings of perception, expressed these concerns regularly in his poems.  In “The Unknown Bird” (Jan. 1915) he laments, “he never came again”;  “The Path” (March 1915) again offers him direction until “sudden, it ends”;  “what I desired, I knew not, but whate’er my choice, vain it must be, I knew” reflects the poem’s title, “Melancholy”, and despite being surrounded by “the glory of the beauty of the morning” (“The Glory”, May 1915) Thomas must “be content with discontent” not knowing “what is meant by happiness”.  He cannot understand “Beauty” (Jan. 1915) (“What does it mean?”); he “cannot bite the day to the core” (The Glory) because, unlike Wordsworth, when he is “fast-pent,” his time is “dreary-swift”; he has “naught to travel to” (Tintern Abbey).

However, the poem “Old Man” (Dec. 1914) is strangely contradictory in this sense.  It reminds us of the power with which sensual memories  spontaneously recreate vividly powerful feelings, and seems to echo Wordsworth’s belief that happy memories can be transcendental in their power to rejuvenate, reinvigorate and replenish. Indeed, as he writes, Thomas seems to be optimistic that, in future, his daughter will be transported back to the (hopefully) happily-remembered days of her childhood each time she smells the herb. Like Wordsworth, Thomas realises that such a memory will, in all likelihood, be rose-tinted in that it will filter out any negativity in recapturing a mood or a feeling- in this case, the innocence and joy of a carefree childhood.  Yet this gives Thomas himself little pleasure.  While being able to understand Wordsworth’s concept of the regenerative “sensations sweet”, Thomas confesses that he himself “has mislaid the key” to this sort of fulfilment.  Frustratingly, he cannot access the treasure trove that falls so naturally to Wordsworth. While he can recognise the scent of “Old Man’s Beard”, the neurological bonds that the rest of us use to draw upon our memories have, for Thomas, somehow become broken, and this disability becomes the emphasis of the poem.  Despite beginning with another path, this time a hopeful one (“a bent path to a door”) he ends with the dead-end knowledge that no memories will ever be sparked when he catches a random whiff of the herb; and that such inability can only result in “an avenue, dark, nameless and without end”, that, as in “Lights Out” (Nov. 1916), one of his last poems, “suddenly now blurs”.  He chooses to place the focus of “Old Man” on his own shortcomings, not the delights that his daughter will experience in years to come. 

“ The outward scene is accessory to an inner theatre.” F.R. Leavis ⁵

Leavis describes Thomas’ writing as trying “to catch some shy intuition on the edge of consciousness” (ibid. p.69) implying, like Coombes, that he was “a poet who never fully satisfies himself as to the cause of his most characteristic mood” (p.198) – ie, his melancholy.    Yet there seems to be evidence that perhaps Thomas could come to an understanding of his relationship with his environment. Time and time again, we feel, hopefully, that Thomas’ memories do provide him with positive images of strength and support. In “Birds’ Nests” (Dec. 1914)he concludes that “seeds found soil and grew”; “Adelstrop” (Jan. 1915) swells to a climax with soaring hyperbole as Thomas reaches out to “all the birds/Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire” and in “Tears” (Jan. 1915), which focuses on two specific memories, Thomas is moved by “truths I have not dreamed”.  

Yet, in the final analysis, it was Thomas’ solipsistic views of himself that counted; views which ignored the protestations of friends and family, denied the possibility of redemption and ruled out any sense of personal peace. 

“The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning                                                                                                  

All I can ever do, all I can be…”                                              (“The Glory”)

 

 

 

Edward Thomas, “The South Country” 1909

Vernon Scannell  http://www.questia.com/read/95950251/edward-thomas p.16

William Cooke “Edward Thomas- A Critical Biography” Faber & Faber 1970

Andrew Motion “The Poetry of Edward Thomas” Routledge & Kegan Paul 1980

H. Coombes “Edward Thomas” London, 1956

Matthew Hollis “Now All Roads Lead To France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas” Faber & Faber 2011

John Lucas “Modern English Poetry” Batsford 1986

Edward Thomas “Collected Poems” Edited by Edna Longley Bloodaxe 2008