I met with Death in his country,
With his scythe and his hollow eye,
Walking the roads of Belgium.
I looked and he passed me by.
Since he passed me by in Plug Street,
In the wood of the evil name,
I shall not now lie with the heroes,
I shall not share their fame;
I shall never be as they are,
A name in the lands of the Free,
Since I looked on Death in Flanders
And he did not look at me.
_Edward Thomas_
Edward Thomas, one of the little-known but most individual of modern
English poets, was born in 1878. For many years before he turned to
verse, Thomas had a large following as a critic and author of travel
books, biographies, pot-boilers. Hating his hack-work, yet unable to
get free of it, he had so repressed his creative ability that he had
grown doubtful concerning his own power. It needed something foreign
to stir and animate what was native in him. So when Robert Frost, the
New England poet, went abroad in 1912 for two years and became an
intimate of Thomas's, the English critic began to write poetry.
Loving, like Frost, the _minutiae_ of existence, the quaint and casual
turn of ordinary life, he caught the magic of the English countryside
in its unpoeticized quietude. Many of his poems are full of a slow,
sad contemplation of life and a reflection of its brave futility. It
is not disillusion exactly; it is rather an absence of illusion.
_Poems_ (1917), dedicated to Robert Frost, is full of Thomas's
fidelity to little things, things as unglorified as the unfreezing of
the "rock-like mud," a child's path, a list of quaint-sounding
villages, birds' nests uncovered by the autumn wind, dusty
nettles--the lines glow with a deep and almost abject reverence for
the soil.
Thomas was killed at Arras, at an observatory outpost, on Easter
Monday, 1917.