‘The Other’ is one of Edward Thomas’s earliest poems, written towards the end of 1914, and also one of his longest, about his sense of there always being a doppelganger or alter ego somewhere ahead of him that he can never quite catch up with. I don’t think that the poem as a whole quite comes off: it is a little prolix and uncertain, as if the poet himself is not sure what he is trying to say, and later his poems would become much more distilled. But as usual with Thomas it has some fine lyrical touches, especially in its evocation of a wild twilight in stanzas seven and eight.

Edward Thomas came my way once, in the summer of 1911, when he was researching material for one of his commissioned books on the countryside, ‘The Icknield Way’, making forays on foot or by bicycle along the length of the ancient trackway. On the day in question he had come down from Edlesborough in the north, following the course of the Way by lane and footpath through Wendover, Swyncombe, Ewelme and across Grim’s Ditch, until about evening he passed by Ipsden with its ‘little, solitary church’, continued down a rough road that dwindled to a footpath, and turned west to follow ‘a hard and hedgeless road, winding and undulating through corn that rises on either side to a crested ridge’. He crossed the Woodcote-Crowmarsh road (I guess at the turn out from Braziers Park), came along by Ivol Barn, across the crossroads at the foot of South Stoke Road, up Catsbrain Hill and so saw before him ‘the red roofs and walls of suburban Cleeve, and the Berkshire downs’. For some reason Edward did not take to Cleeve at all, which I have always thought a rather pleasant place with its tree-lined roads. Perhaps it was the end of a long day, and he was tired and far from home, but for whatever reason it triggered in him one of those fits of melancholy that characterised his temperament, and he let fly with a diatribe against the ‘blocks of redbrick houses’, wondering how people could bear to live in so spiritless a place.

Now I know that section of road over the upland to Cleeve intimately, since it forms part of one of my standard 10K loops from home, that I have run a hundred times, on harvest evenings, in winter moonlight. Sometimes, as twilight comes down over the ploughland, I have seen in my mind’s eye that figure in front of me on his lonely road, bitter with knowledge of the wasted power within him, and I have wished that time could be different, that one could go back and tell him that now, an unimaginable century on, he is where he would have wished to be, secure in his honour among the English poets. But of course, the future can say nothing to the past.

The Other

The forest ended. Glad I was
To feel the light, and hear the hum
Of bees, and smell the drying grass
And the sweet mint, because I had come
To an end of forest, and because
Here was both road and inn, the sum
Of what’s not forest. But ‘twas here
They asked me if I did not pass
Yesterday this way. ‘Not you? Queer.’
‘Who then? and slept here?’ I felt fear.

I learnt his road and, ere they were
Sure I was I, left the dark wood
Behind, kestrel and woodpecker,
The inn in the sun, the happy mood
When first I tasted sunlight there.
I travelled fast, in hopes I should.
Outrun that other. What to do
When caught, I planned not. I pursued
To prove the likeness, and, if true,
To watch until myself I knew.

I tried the inns that evening
Of a long gabled high-street grey,
Of courts and outskirts, travelling
An eager but a weary way,
In vain. He was not there. Nothing
Told me that ever till that day
Had one like me entered those doors,
Save once. That time I dared: ‘You may
Recall; – but never-foamless shores
Make better friends than those dull boors.

Many and many a day like this
Aimed at the unseen moving goal
ttAnd nothing found but remedies
For all desire. These made not whole;
They sowed a new desire, to kiss
Desire’s self beyond control,
Desire of desire. And yet
Life stayed on within my soul.
One night in sheltering from the wet
I quite forgot I could forget.

A customer, then the landlady
Stared at me. With a kind of smile
They hesitated awkwardly:
Their silence gave me time for guile.
Had anyone called there like me,
I asked. It was quite plain the wile
Succeeded. For they poured out all.
And that was naught. Less than a mile
Beyond the inn, I could recall
He was like me in general.

He had pleased them, but I less.
I was more eager than before
To find him out and to confess,
To bore him and to let him bore.
I could not wait: children might guess
I had a purpose, something more
That made an answer indiscreet.
One girl’s caution made me sore,
Too indignant even to greet
That other had we chanced to meet.

I sought then in solitude.
The wind had fallen with the night; as still
The roads lay as the ploughland rude,
Dark and naked, on the hill.
Had there been ever any feud
‘Twixt earth and sky, a mighty will
Closed it: the crocketed dark trees,
A dark house, dark impossible
Cloud-towers, one star, one lamp, one peace
Held on an everlasting lease:

And all was earth’s, or all was sky’s;
No difference endured between
The two. A dog barked on a hidden rise;
A marshbird whistled high unseen;
The latest waking blackbird’s cries
Perished upon the silence keen.
The last light filled a narrow firth
Among the clouds. I stood serene,
And with a solemn quiet mirth,
An old inhabitant of earth.

Once the name I gave to hours
Like this was melancholy, when
It was not happiness and powers
Coming like exiles home again,
And weaknesses quitting their bowers,
Smiled and enjoyed, far off from men,
Moments of everlastingness.
And fortunate my search was then
While what I sought, nevertheless,
That I was seeking, I did not guess.

That time was brief: once more at inn
And upon road I sought my man
Till once amid a tap-room’s din
Loudly he asked for me, began
To speak, as if it had been a sin,
Of how I thought and dreamed and ran
After him thus, day after day:
He lived as one under a ban
For this: what had I got to say?
I said nothing. I slipped away.

And now I dare not follow after
Too close. I try to keep in sight,
Dreading his frown and worse his laughter.
I steal out of the wood to light;
I see the swift shoot from the rafter
By the inn door: ere I alight
I wait and hear the starlings wheeze
And nibble like ducks: I wait his flight.
He goes: I follow: no release
Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.

Edward Thomas

I find this a very sad poem, while recognising that for the most part sad writes deeper than happy. One’s home should be a place of sanctuary,  and moving into a new house, at least when one is young, should be a time of excitement and new beginnings, not of bleak forebodings as here. But of course for Edward Thomas, who spent most of his adult life as a poorly rewarded reviewer and hack writer, his home was also his place of work, and thus bound up with his feelings of dissatisfaction, of spending his spirit on uncongenial tasks he knew to be unworthy of him – a common enough situation for most of us but one especially lacerating for the sensitive man who came so late to the discovery of his true gift and had so little time to enjoy it.

The sentiment of the last two lines seems ambiguous. Is Thomas finding some dour consolation in the thought that his troubles are transient and will end with nothing having changed, while the timeless elementals of the earth continue on their uncaring way? Or does the thought of this future wind merely intensify his desolation, his sense of time lost or ill-spent, but either way never to be recaptured?

The New House

Now first, as I shut the door,
    I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
    Began to moan.

Old at once was the house,
    And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
    Of what was foretold,

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
    Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain: old griefs and griefs
    Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught
    Could I foresee;
But I learned how the wind would sound
    After these things should be.

Edward Thomas

I see that badger culls are in the news again, with a Government plan to end them by 2029. This is not the place to get into a discussion of the rights and wrongs of culling, which is purportedly to prevent the spread of bovine tuberculosis, though I will say that many I have spoken too, including some farmers, feel that the slaughter of these beasts, with over 200,000 killed since the start of culling in 2009, is both inhumane and ineffective.

I remember watching for badgers one holiday evening in a wood near Cilgerran, crouching in some undergrowth not far from a rather muddy sett beneath a mossy oak. The minutes go by; I watch the patterns of ash leaves darken on the darkening sky; a blackbird pinks, a wood pigeon murmurs, far off a horse whinnies. I start to nod off, head on knees, pleasantly lassitudinous from a day of sun and exercise, but a sudden prod from my wife brings me alert. There, a few feet away, a badger is looking at us, its black-and-white mask vivid in the gloom. It turns its head from side to side, making a curious ticking, whiffling noise; then another appears, larger and not so clean looking, that rolls lumberingly along the path for a short way, then disappears down another hole. A brief enough encounter, but still a privilege, and one that it will be sad if future generations can no longer enjoy.

Edward Thomas’s poem  of course, relates not to the possibly excusable practice of culling but the quite inexcusable practice of killing for sport. Though he does not openly condemn, it is clear where his sympathies lie. And the closing appellation, ‘That most ancient Briton of English beasts’, is a masterstroke, especially given that the traditional name ‘brock’ for a badger has Celtic roots.

The Combe

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.
Its mouth is stopped with brambles, thorn, and briar;
And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk
By beech and yew and perishing juniper
Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots
And rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter,
The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds
Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,
Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark
The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,
Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,
That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

Edward Thomas

I imagine most people first come upon Edward Thomas through the celebrated ‘Adlestrop’, but my own acquaintance began with this lesser known but entirely characteristic piece. I was immediately attracted by its beautiful precision – the diamonds of rain on the grassblades, the unshaken petals further down, the parsley stalks that ‘twilight has fined to naught’. I did not fully appreciate at the time that how deeply sad a poem this is, and how subtly revealing of the writer’s temperament. It turns on that almost throwaway phrase that begins the third verse, ‘Unless alone..’, an admission that he can no longer respond to human love as he did in the first flush of courtship, that happiness now is a thing to be sought only in solitude. This would of course have been hurtful to those who loved him, particularly his long-suffering wife Helen, but that’s how it goes: a poet’s passion for truth can be a sharp blade on which others cut themselves.

Parsley: this is of course cow-parsley with its white umbels, not the garden herb.

It Rains

It rains, and nothing stirs within the fence
Anywhere through the orchard’s untrodden, dense
Forest of parsley. The great diamonds
Of rain on the grassblades there is none to break,
Or the fallen petals further down to shake.

And I am nearly as happy as possible
To search the wilderness in vain though well,
To think of two walking, kissing there,
Drenched, yet forgetting the kisses of the rain:
Sad, too, to think that never, never again,

Unless alone, so happy shall I walk
In the rain. When I turn away, on its fine stalk
Twilight has fined to naught, the parsley flower
Figures, suspended still and ghostly white,
The past hovering as it revisits the light.

Edward Thomas

Well, I seem to have made it to week 500: my thanks to all those who have encouraged and assisted me on the way. Having just turned seventy-eight I can’t absolutely guarantee that I’ll make it through the next ten years to week 1000 but I’ll do my best. ‘For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,/Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green’.

I started in week one with the poet I love best, Edward Thomas, so it seems fitting to mark this optimistically putative halfway point with another of his. This one, written in the spring of 1916, is a deeply wistful recollection of the evening walks he took with Robert Frost in the fields around Dymock during the great summer of their friendship, 1914, and shows him becoming the master of a relaxed, conversational style, able to take in its stride enjambements and potentially awkward rhymes. It also shows that equilibrium I like so much in his work: how, although a very self-orientated poet concerned, reasonably enough, with his own moods and desires, he always has time too for the otherness of the world. That ‘yellow flavorous coat/Of an apple wasps had undermined’, for example – I suppose it might be possible to devise some symbolic role for this in the poem, but I think it is there simply because he took a quiet pleasure in such things for their own sake and liked to give them their due, just as he does to the betony, a common enough wild flower with its stiff reddish spike, renowned in herbal medicine but up to that point little celebrated in verse. But best of all in this poem I like the closing lines, with their aching sense of the transience of all things, even memory, balanced by the consoling thought that for others at least friendship, love and the beauty of the earth will go on.

The Sun Used to Shine

The sun used to shine while we two walked
Slowly together, paused and started
Again, and sometimes mused, sometimes talked
As either pleased, and cheerfully parted

Each night. We never disagreed
Which gate to rest on. The to be
And the late past we gave small heed.
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;

Or a sentry of dark betonies,
The stateliest of small flowers on earth,
At the forest verge; or crocuses
Pale purple as if they had their birth

In sunless Hades fields. The war
Came back to mind with the moonrise
Which soldiers in the east afar
Beheld then. Nevertheless, our eyes

Could as well imagine the Crusades
Or Caesar’s battles. Everything
To faintness like those rumours fades –
Like the brook’s water glittering

Under the moonlight – like those walks
Now – like us two that took them, and
The fallen apples, all the talks
And silences – like memory’s sand

When the tide covers it late or soon,
And other men through other flowers
In those fields under the same moon
Go talking and have easy hours.

Edward Thomas 

I find this poem a pure delight. For one thing it is, uncharacteristically for Edward Thomas, an essentially happy poem, even if the happiness is tinged with wistfulness: ‘If I should ever by chance grow rich’ – Thomas knew quite well that he was never going to grow rich, certainly not rich enough to own a tract of English countryside, having chosen the penurious life of a literary hack.

Then there are the field names: Codham, Roses, Pyrgo. Thomas loved to pore over maps finding these curious old appellations, so expressive of our ancient, many-layered, parcelled-out countryside, and letting them conjure up for him memories and visions of the landscape he was so intimate with. And there is the playful relationship in the poem with his small daughter Bronwen, the only one who could lighten his black moods, the one he would take on his spring walks, competing with her to find the first flowers of the year. So it is a light rent that he imagines asking of her first, and then really no rent at all, since it would be quite difficult not to find a blossom on furze at any time of year: hence the country saying ‘When gorse is out of bloom, kissing’s out of season’.

Happy, I called it, if  a little wistful. Yet I suspect that for the Thomas family, after Edward’s death in France in 1917, there must have been a sadness beyond wistfulness about this particular poem, having to stand as it did for all the things a father might have wished to give to a daughter whose growing up he was never to see.

If I Should Ever by Chance

If I should ever by chance grow rich
I’ll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,
And let them all to my elder daughter.
The rent I shall ask of her will be only
Each year’s first violets, white and lonely,
The first primroses and orchises –
She must find them before I do, that is.
But if she finds a blossom on furze
Without rent they shall all for ever be hers,
Whenever I am sufficiently rich:
Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo and Lapwater, –
I shall give them all to my elder daughter.

Edward Thomas

I imagine that those brought up to think that a poem must always mean something beyond itself may find this little piece, together with why I find it so satisfying, somewhat puzzling. ‘Yes, but what do the nettles represent?’, they may ask. Nothing, so far as I know: they are just nettles in their own right, a humble and easily overlooked part of the creation, but this time they have been seen, and the poetry is in the seeing. It is as Thomas himself observed of his hero Richard Jefferies: ‘To see… as clearly as he saw the sun-painted yellowhammer in Stewart’s Mash is an office of the imagination’. And when it results in observation as affectionately meticulous as that in the last three lines of this poem, it is no mean office either.

Tall Nettles

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.

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.

Edward Thomas

Remembrance Sunday comes round again, and this week’s piece, though not in itself a war poem, does confront us, indirectly but powerfully, with one truth about the Great War which we are understandably reluctant now to recognise, but which goes some way towards explaining the enthusiasm with which the war was initially greeted: namely, that enlistment gave to many the chance of escape from an unhappy and unfulfilled working life. And one such was the poet Edward Thomas, who as a mature married man had no need to volunteer, but did so anyway in 1915, going on to be killed at Arras in 1917. This poem looks back on the years of badly paid literary hackwork that had been his lot in the years leading up to the war, and it is hard not to speculate on what might have happened had he not been caught up in the great events of his time. Would the dam that was holding in all that pent-up rare original poetry of his own never have broken? Would he have simply carried on with the drudgery he so despised, his hand continuing to crawl on towards age, until the last of those hundred leaves fell from the willow?

The Long Small Room

The long small room that showed willows in the west
Narrowed up to the end the fireplace filled,
Although not wide. I liked it. No one guessed
What need or accident made them so build.

Only the moon, the mouse and the sparrow peeped
In from the ivy round the casement thick.
Of all they saw and heard there they shall keep
The tale for the old ivy and older brick.

When I look back I am like moon, sparrow, and mouse
That witnessed what they could never understand
Or alter or prevent in the dark house.
One thing remains the same – this my right hand

Crawling crab-like over the clean white page,
Resting awhile each morning on the pillow,
Then once more starting to crawl on towards age.
The hundred last leaves stream upon the willow.

Edward Thomas

Another of those Edward Thomas poems that may seem to be about nothing much – a clump of nettles in a corner of a farmyard, a bundle of faggots, or in this case a lost path under trees – but which root themselves in the mind because they themselves are rooted in a world half-forgotten yet still obscurely important to us.

I am not sure about the gnomic line ‘To name a thing beloved man sometimes fails’. It’s a good line, but is it actually true? It seems to me that naming a thing is an essential part of the love act, and what we don’t name we don’t notice, let alone love. But if one is moved now and then to query a poet’s assertion, that is merely another way of engaging in that ongoing dialogue between the living and the dead that we call reading.

Stormcock is another name for the missel-thrush.

Women He Liked

Women he liked, did shovel-bearded Bob,
Old Farmer Hayward of the Heath, but he
Loved horses. He himself was like a cob,
And leather-coloured. Also he loved a tree.

For the life in them he loved most living things,
But a tree chiefly. All along the lane
He planted elms where now the stormcock sings
That travellers hear from the slow-climbing train.

Till then the track had never had a name
For all its thicket and the nightingales
That should have earned it. No one was to blame.
To name a thing beloved man sometimes fails.

Many years since, Bob Hayward died, and now
None passes there because the mist and rain
Out of the elms have turned the lane to slough
And gloom, the name alone survives, Bob’s Lane.

Edward Thomas