The poetry of Edward Thomas affects one morally as well as æsthetically
and intellectually. We have grown rather shy, in these days of pure
æstheticism, of speaking of those consoling or strengthening qualities
of poetry on which critics of another generation took pleasure in
dwelling. Thomas’s poetry is strengthening and consoling, not because it
justifies God’s ways to man or whispers of reunions beyond the grave,
not because it presents great moral truths in memorable numbers, but in
a more subtle and very much more effective way. Walking through the
streets on these September nights, one notices, wherever there are trees
along the street and lamps close beside the trees, a curious and
beautiful phenomenon. The light of the street lamps striking up into the
trees has power to make the grimed, shabby, and tattered foliage of the
all-but autumn seem brilliantly and transparently green. Within the
magic circle of the light the tree seems to be at that crowning moment
of the spring when the leaves are fully grown, but still luminous with
youth and seemingly almost immaterial in their lightness. Thomas’s
poetry is to the mind what that transfiguring lamplight is to the tired
trees. On minds grown weary in the midst of the intolerable turmoil and
aridity of daily wage-earning existence, it falls with a touch of
momentary rejuvenation.
The secret of Thomas’s influence lies in the fact that he is genuinely
what so many others of our time quite unjustifiably claim to be, a
nature poet. To be a nature poet it is not enough to affirm vaguely that
God made the country and man made the town, it is not enough to talk
sympathetically about familiar rural objects, it is not enough to be
sonorously poetical about mountains and trees; it is not even enough to
speak of these things with the precision of real knowledge and love. To
be a nature poet a man must have felt profoundly and intimately those
peculiar emotions which nature can inspire, and must be able to express
them in such a way that his reader feels them. The real difficulty that
confronts the would-be poet of nature is that these emotions are of all
emotions the most difficult to pin down and analyze, and the hardest of
all to convey. In “October” Thomas describes what is surely the
characteristic emotion induced by a contact with nature—a kind of
exultant melancholy which is the nearest approach to quiet unpassionate
happiness that the soul can know. Happiness of whatever sort is
extraordinarily hard to analyze and describe. One can think of a hundred
poems, plays, and novels that deal exhaustively with pain and misery to
one that is an analysis and an infectious description of happiness.
Passionate joy is more easily recapturable in art; it is dramatic,
vehemently defined. But quiet happiness, which is at the same time a
kind of melancholy—there you have an emotion which is inexpressible
except by a mind gifted with a diversity of rarely combined qualities.
The poet who would sing of this happiness must combine a rare
penetration with a rare candour and honesty of mind. A man who feels an
emotion that is very difficult to express is often tempted to describe
it in terms of something entirely different. Platonist poets feel a
powerful emotion when confronted by beauty, and, finding it a matter of
the greatest difficulty to say precisely what that emotion is in itself,
proceed to describe it in terms of theology which has nothing whatever
to do with the matter in point. Groping after an expression of the
emotions aroused in him by the contemplation of nature, Wordsworth
sometimes stumbles doubtfully along philosophical byways that are at the
best parallel to the direct road for which he is seeking. Everywhere in
literature this difficulty in finding an expression for any undramatic,
ill-defined emotion is constantly made apparent.
Thomas’s limpid honesty of mind saves him from the temptation to which
so many others succumb, the temptation to express one thing, because it
is with difficulty describable, in terms of something else. He never
philosophizes the emotions which he feels in the presence of nature and
beauty, but presents them as they stand, transmitting them directly to
his readers without the interposition of any obscuring medium. Rather
than attempt to explain the emotion, to rationalize it into something
that it is not, he will present it for what it is, a problem of which he
does not know the solution. In “Tears” we have an example of this candid
confession of ignorance:
It seems I have no tears left. They should have fallen—
Their ghosts, if tears have ghosts, did fall—that day
When twenty hounds streamed by me, not yet combed out
But still all equals in their age of gladness
Upon the scent, made one, like a great dragon
In Blooming Meadow that bends towards the sun
And once bore hops: and on that other day
When I stepped out from the double-shadowed Tower
Into an April morning, stirring and sweet
And warm. Strange solitude was there and silence.
A mightier charm than any in the Tower
Possessed the courtyard. They were changing guard,
Soldiers in line, young English countrymen,
Fair-haired and ruddy, in white tunics. Drums
And fifes were playing “The British Grenadiers.”
The men, the music piercing that solitude
And silence, told me truths I had not dreamed,
And have forgotten since their beauty passed.
The emotion is nameless and indescribable, but the poet has intensely
felt it and transmitted it to us who read his poem, so that we, too,
feel it with the same intensity. Different aspects of this same nameless
emotion of quiet happiness shot with melancholy are the theme of almost
all Thomas’s poems. They bring to us precisely that consolation and
strength which the country and solitude and leisure bring to the spirits
of those long pent in populous cities, but essentialized and distilled
in the form of art. They are the light that makes young again the
tattered leaves.
Of the purely æsthetic qualities of Thomas’s poetry it is unnecessary to
say much. He devised a curiously bare and candid verse to express with
all possible simplicity and clarity his clear sensations and
emotions.... “This is not,” as Mr. de la Mare says in his foreword to
Thomas’s _Collected Poems_, “this is not a poetry that will drug or
intoxicate.... It must be read slowly, as naturally as if it were prose,
without emphasis.” With this bare verse, devoid of any affectation,
whether of cleverness or a too great simplicity, Thomas could do all
that he wanted. See, for example, with what extraordinary brightness and
precision he could paint a picture:
Lichen, ivy and moss
Keep evergreen the trees
That stand half flayed and dying,
And the dead trees on their knees
In dog’s mercury and moss:
And the bright twit of the goldfinch drops
Down there as he flits on thistle-tops.
The same bare precision served him well for describing the interplay of
emotions, as in “After you Speak” or “Like the Touch of Rain.” And with
this verse of his he could also chant the praises of his English
countryside and the character of its people, as typified in
Lob-lie-by-the-fire:
He has been in England as long as dove and daw,
Calling the wild cherry tree the merry tree,
The rose campion Bridget-in-her-bravery;
And in a tender mood he, as I guess,
Christened one flower Love-in-idleness....