If a death can be good then the poet Edward Thomas probably had one of the best. A casualty of the First World War, he died, aged just 39 years old, a century ago on the 9 April 1917. The date of his death just happened to be Easter Monday, a day associated with rebirth. And Thomas’s poetry has certainly gone through any number of reinterpretations since it was written in a burst of creativity in the years 1914-1916, a process that has kept the poems fresh for each subsequent generation. Initially categorised as a nature poet and/or war poet, Thomas is now more likely to be seen as a quintessential ‘modern’, ‘the father of us all’, according to the poet Ted Hughes.
All this suggests that Thomas managed to create a relatively-small but nevertheless perfectly-formed body of work in those early war years so that his death in that same conflict amounts to the grammatical equivalent of a neat full-stop. He was a poet, in other words, who didn’t outstay his welcome. No doubt this is true. But the essential reason Thomas had a good death is that he’d already fulfilled his artistic vocation before his passing, and he knew it, achieving a serenity in the process that marks him out as a kind of artistic saint.
There is no shortage of circumstantial evidence for this view. Just two months before his death at the battle of Arras in northern France, for instance, he, an artillery officer, recounts a foray to examine some observation posts, where he was ‘disturbed by trench mortars’.
‘I enjoyed the exercise,’ he writes. ‘Altogether I have never seen or done anything out of doors more exciting or interesting and not much more pleasant.’
Considering that Edward Thomas is almost as famous for his serial melancholy as he is for his poetry, it’s not surprising that such nonchalance in the face of death has been widely mistaken for an exhausted resignation. He had, after all, written to a friend, the poet and playwright Gordon Bottomley, in November 1912: ‘My habit of introspection and self- contempt has at last broken my spirit.’
But if circumstantial evidence is subject to misinterpretation, his poetry is more precise, ‘a language not to be betrayed,’ in his famous phrase. And, where that’s concerned, there can be little doubt that serenity trumps resignation hands down.
Thomas, a so-called country writer, biographer and literary critic, was influenced to write poetry by the American poet Robert Frost once the outbreak of war destroyed the traditional market for his work. ‘I dragged him out from under the heap of his own work in prose he was buried alive under,’ Frost explained years later. Thomas, meanwhile, told Frost after the first few poems had begun to ‘run’: ‘But I am in it and no mistake…I find myself engrossed and conscious of a possible perfection as I never was in prose.’
In reality, though, he had been moving towards a greater precision in his prose that would probably have led to poetry anyway. ‘I feel the shape of the sentences and alter continuously with some unseen end in view,’ he told his friend, the children’s writer Eleanor Farjeon, just a year before he wrote his first poems.
So just what exactly was the ‘end in view’? Thomas tells us in his monumental poem ‘Wind and Mist’, written on April Fool’s Day, 1915:
They met inside the gateway that gives the view,
A hollow land as vast as heaven …
The poem offers Thomas’s view of the reality of life lived under the spell of the ‘dream-come-true’ of happiness, channelled through his own experience of living in the view-rich ‘dream house’ built for him and his family in the village of Steep in Hampshire:
Yes. Sixty miles of South Downs at one glance.
Sometimes a man feels proud of them, as if
He had just created them with one mighty thought.
————————… I have seen that house
Through mist look lovely as a castle in Spain,
And airier. I have thought: “’Twere happy there
To live.” And I have laughed at that
Because I lived there then…
… Doubtless the house was not to blame,
But the eye watching from those windows saw,
Many a day, day after day, mist – mist
Like chaos surging back – and felt itself
Alone in all the world, marooned alone.
Here is Thomas’s precise view of the human condition: pride, the desire for power, and what he saw as the inevitable consequence of that desire: alienating dreams – illusion, in a word – symbolised by that reality-blinding ‘mist’. According to this philosophy, happiness is nothing but an airy (i.e. hollow) ‘castle in Spain’ (i.e. illusion) created by a desire to control the world around us, a world that forever slips through our fingers in the process: ‘Wanting a thousand little things/That time without contentment brings,’ as he gently tells his daughter Myfanwy in his poem to her, ‘What I Shall Give?’
Again, in ‘The Glory’, we have:
How dreary-swift, with naught to travel to,
Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core.
The theme has its fullest expression in the poem ‘Ambition’, where mankind’s desire for power is categorised, firstly, in terms of a jackdaw: ‘… and one was racing straight and high/Alone, shouting like a black warrior/Challenges and menaces to the wide sky.’ More pertinent, though, is the image of ‘a train that roared along,’ with which Thomas equates galloping human ambition: ‘Omnipotent I was.’
What the vaulting ambition creates, however, is merely the steam train’s plumes of trailing smoke: ‘a motionless white bower/Of purest cloud,’ a synonym for the ‘mist’ of ‘Wind and Mist’, which is subsequently ‘scattered’ – or vanishes into thin air. Similarly, ‘all the folk astir/Made only plumes of pearly smoke to tower…’
This is Thomas the angst-ridden ‘modern’ of twentieth century poetry, the ‘father’ of poets including Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, and contemporary of T. S. Eliot, whose absurdist ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry magazine.
But this is only the half of Edward Thomas. There is another side to the poet, which provides an antidote to the ‘mist’ of illusion in the shape of the ‘wind’ of ‘Wind and Mist’. Devoutly non-religious, Thomas nevertheless took this image from the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles, where it is ‘a rushing mighty wind,’ expressing a spirit of truth. It is this spirit that reveals reality to those ‘like me made/Who answer when such whispers bid,’ according to Thomas in ‘I Never Saw That Land Before,’ just as the desire for power leads in the opposite direction to that of the spirit of truth, i.e. towards illusion.
Those ‘like me made’ are artists or truth-seekers, those individuals whose vocation is to seek to answer the question Why. Why am I alive? What is the purpose or meaning of life? And, according to Thomas, the only way to answer that question is to follow the spirit of truth towards reality.
Thus in ‘Wind and Mist’, we have:
You would not understand about the wind.
It is my subject…
There were whole days and nights when the wind and I
Between us shared the world, and the wind ruled
And I obeyed it and forgot the mist.
The human mind face to the spirit of truth is the soul; face to the desire for power it is the self or ego. And for the soul to follow the spirit of truth towards reality it must ‘forget’ the self, turn away from the opposing desire for power, from the temptation of happiness. Unfortunately for Thomas, as for any number of other artists, this was easier said than done:
And yet I still am half in love with pain,
With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth,
With things that have an end, with life and earth…
——————————————————‘Liberty’
This was Edward Thomas’s dilemma. It also explains his melancholy. As early as July 1905, when he was 27 years old, Thomas had already nailed this dilemma in a letter to Bottomley: ‘I am sure I get worse and worse… and no week – hardly a day – passes without my thinking that I must soon cease to try to work and live…I am plagued by such little thoughts as how much I shall earn this week…and such big thoughts as whether any thing is worth while…You see – I must have some motive and to be honest, my responsibility to (my family) is not a motive. I must believe in myself or forget myself and I cannot.’
Perhaps it would have been more accurate for Thomas to write: I must believe in my self or forget my self and I can do neither: i.e. settle for the pursuit of happiness and give up on answering the question Why or dedicate himself to the spirit of truth and give up on any idea of human happiness. Or, to put this another way: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’ As Thomas told Farjeon: ‘I suppose every man thinks that Hamlet was written for him, but I know he was written for me.’
Edward Thomas’s dilemma underpins virtually all his poetry. ‘The Sign- Post’, for instance, posits the choice between self and soul as the inescapable absolute facing the artist, the ‘overwhelming question,’ according to T. S.
Eliot in ‘Prufrock’, although he, unlike Edward Thomas, chose to duck the question: ‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet.’
In one of Thomas’s most famous poems, ‘Old Man’, the bitter scent of the feathery herb encapsulates his self/soul’s mixed feelings towards his first experience of staring into the void, of understanding: ‘Vanity of vanities; all is vanity’:
—————————-I cannot like the scent
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet
With no meaning, than this bitter one.
I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing…
Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.
In ‘The Other’, meanwhile, Thomas envisages the battle between truth and desire, soul and self, as an epic Hollywood-style do-or-die chase movie, no doubt with a title like ‘Killing Ego’ or ‘Forget It!’:
——————-I wait his flight.
He goes: I follow: no release
Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.
Finally, in April 1916, after writing his so-called ‘testamentary’ poems to his three children and his wife, Helen, Thomas wrote ‘The Wind’s Song’:
I sat in the sun listening to the wind alone,
Thinking there could be no old song so sad
As the wind’s song; but later none so glad
Could I remember as that same wind’s song
All the time blowing the pine boughs among.
My heart that had been still as the dead tree
Awakened by the West wind was made free.
Where divorce from the self was concerned, this poem was the decree nisi.
Decree absolute was signalled in November 1916 with the terrifyingly sublime ‘Lights Out’:
Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends;
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.
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,
I know not how.
The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.
The lines can be taken as his famous last words.
Michael Karwowski is a writer and critic specialising in the work of Bob Dylan, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and French writers including Michel Houellebecq and Yasmina Reza. His most recent article in The London Magazine was entitled ‘Bookending Dylan Thomas’ and appeared in the August/September 2014 issue.