Edward Thomas:  A Nature/War  Poet 

Abstract 

First World War poetry is often related to graphical descriptions of ditch warfare and an overall tendency of presenting rage against those who took the decision to start war with its disastrous effects, disappointment, sympathy, damage and hopelessness are main themes of Edward Thomas’s war poetry, which correspondingly laments the loss of humanity and recognizes a sore disruption that characterizes the pre- and post-war world.

The greatest outstanding difference between Thomas’s war poetry and that of poets like Sassoon and Owen is that Thomas discusses the effect of war on nature. Thomas rarely discusses the war aggressions on soldiers or laments his personal experience.  He is concerned about the ecological effect of the war on the countryside and its impact on personal and communal level.

This makes his poetry controversial. Critics denote that Thomas majesty is evident in connecting both nature and war together. Communal, personal and collective effect of war differentiates Edward Thomas making him a poet whose unconventional, naturalistic presentation reflects the complexity of the humanistic naturalistic relation. It embodies the controlling human nature that disrupts nature and show how politicians unguided decisions lead to disastrous ends. 

The ecological component of Edward Thomas’s poetry reflects an unconventional form of war poetry that emphasizes the devastating environmental effect of war on the countryside. Edward disregards human experience and concentrates on the ecological effect. He thus creates a distinctive war literature. He also creates a universal effect and timeless poetry as wars affect the environment. Subtly connecting war with nature is majestic. He effectively explores environmental transformation and enhance awareness that is significant to the present anxieties concerning the ecological catastrophe and the repercussions of the political and economic decisions. 

Edward Thomas Views 

Edward Thomas views on war were knowledgeable and solid.  His views differed from ‘…the crude, for what everybody is saying or thinking, or is ready to begin saying or thinking’. Like many of his contemporaries, Thomas was pessimistic about war and detested the prevalent poetry it stimulated, censuring the genre for recurrently elapsing into ‘bombastic, hypocritical or senseless’ reactions to might. His hatred for nationalistic war verse is common.  Still, his form of disapproval of war considerably differs from his contemporaries in theme and form. 

Thomas’s permanent reaction to war was formulated by what Edna Longley has described as the ‘ecocentric structures’ and ‘eco-historical’ standpoint that contests conventions.  Thomas disliked those who ‘have been turned into poets by the war’, but he presented war differently, and was concerned about the effect of war on the environment. Thomas’s love for nature made him try to raise the listeners and readers awareness of the effect of war on the environment. 

Presenting Nature Differently

The war inspired Thomas to reconsider his attitude to nature and evade the decorative or idealistic inclinations of presentation evident in his prose. His poetry shattered the fixed idea of nature as a peaceful refugee and reflected how nature changed dramatically.  His poetry showed how modern reality affects nature disastrously. Nature is no longer a safe refugee but a vulnerable arena destructed by man decision and inconsideration. 

All I can tell is, it seemed to me that either I had never loved England,

 or I had loved it foolishly, aesthetically, like a slave, not having realised 

that it was not mine unless I were willing and prepared to die rather than leave it [...]. Something, I felt, had to be done before I could look 

composedly at English landscape [...] (Farjeon 1979, 154).

War affected Thomas’s standpoint concerning nature and made him believe in his role in changing reality via raising awareness and protecting land. He dominant view was ‘consciousness entails responsibilities’ inspired him to work hard to guard nature at war time. This made disregard personal experience and concentrate on presenting nature in his poetry. 

Depopulation of the Rural 

Thomas is concerned about the effect of the war on changing the demographic of rural Britain. He shows how the countryside is depopulated, how fences are discarded to become ruins, how fields are not taken care of, how the country lack hands, and how the working hands namely women and children are weak, untrained, and powerless. Paul Thompson enforces that Thomas’s poetry reflects ‘the beauty of decay’.  In ‘May the Twenty-third’, the speaker’s encounter with ‘Jaunty and old, crooked and tall’ Jack Noman is ‘welcome as the nightingale’.  His poetry though show the beauty of the countryside it enforces how it is falling apart as it lacks the caring human touch and it is facing the continuous threat of being conquered. 

The poem ‘Man and Dog’ is also a comment on the idea of depopulation, unskilled labourers, and the need for a caring skilled labourer. Thomas states:

His mind was running on the work he had done

[...] navvying on dock and line 

From Southampton to Newcastle-on-Tyne,—

In ‘seventy-four a year of soldiering

With the Berkshires, —hoeing and harvesting

In half the shires where corn and couch will grow.

War and its disastrous effects are also discussed. Thomas states: ‘[…] Many a man sleeps worse tonight | Than I shall.’ ‘In the trenches.’ His sons are at war and apart from the loyalty of a mongrel dog who is ‘company, | Though I’m not’ he is alone. The poem reflects the struggles of the marginalized, down to earth worker. The poem is a dark comedy as the speaker is skilled, experienced, active, but cannot find work. The skilled labourer fate is clear, he did not find a job and he leaves with his loyal, hungry dog ‘for good | Together in the twilight of the wood’.

The state of sorrow, powerlessness, feebleness is also the status quo of soldiers. They are dragged to a deadly battle though they do not want to fight, leaving their beloved families, their possessions and good memories at home.  In ‘A Private’ the speaker grieves a ‘ploughman dead in battle’ and buried in a foreign land. His nights in the battlefield were deadly ‘Many a frozen night, and merrily’. Thomas draws an effective cinematic portrait of the soldier’s harsh nights at the battle field.

The Effect of War on the Land 

In his poems, Thomas represents the effect of war on the landscape. In the poem ‘As the Team’s Head-Brass’ he shows the disastrous effects of abandoning the land to fight in France.  The land is weak, unorganized, in dire need of a bigger number of working hands. When it will become as strong and healthy as before is not known. ‘When the war’s over’, is a hypothetical comment on the fear that the war will last longer. The phrase presents the deadly repercussions, and the ploughman ponders that ‘Everything | Would have been different’ if there was no war. Hope is seen in lovers who meet who may eventually get children who care for the aging, aching land. 

Social Impact of War

War has a social impact. It disrupts social customs, shatter values, and even dilute rituals. People become vicious and lose goodness. Inhumanity to one another and fear of one another prevails. In addition, the hope for a better future is scare as men are not there, women have no suitors and the future of the countryside is gloomy as it is deprived of men, love, and future children. Thomas portrays this in his poem ‘The Cherry Trees’ in which the agricultural calendar is not followed, marriages are postponed, social gatherings are discontinued: 

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding,

On the old road where all that passed are dead,

Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding

This early May morn when there is none to wed. 

This idea of the fear of tomorrow is repeated in ‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)’ in which the absence of men in the villages show that future of the country is vague. He states: 

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts,

should

Have gathered them and will do never again. 

The poem anticipates the views poets such as T. S. Eliot and Charlotte Mew who present the cultural horrors of war, and its effect in leading to the death of religious values.  To Thomas nature needs work to flourish not abandonment. Working on the land leads to revival, abundance, and prosperity. Going to war led to degeneration of the countryside on both social and economic aspects. 

Thomas’s View on the World 

Thomas reflected nature but his presentation was highly pessimistic because of the hazardous effect of the war on nature.  The poem ‘The Cuckoo’, reflects death and despair ‘died that Summer’.  The ‘deafness’ and being ‘drowned by the voice of | my dead’ enforce loss of hope. The poem ‘The Thrush’ enforces the themes of loss, despair and death: ‘what died in April’.  Edna Longley’s enforces that Thomas uses poetry to reflect his hostility to war even if it is for a noble cause namely defending the country. He hates death and believes, ‘sacrifice … was … the inescapable fact of war’. Soldiers are deprived of their basic needs. They face physical, physiological, and psychological abuse: ‘hungry, and yet not starved; | Cold, yet had heat within me’. 

Continuing Relevance

The delicate ways in which Edward Thomas’s poems disclose how war disrupts the natural human bond and the effect of nature poetry as a confrontational weapon. Nature poetry also documents the effect of war on nature. In his article on war poetry published December 1914, Edward Thomas comments on how ‘No other class of poetry vanishes so rapidly, has so little chosen from it for posterity’. He enforces the documentary nature and its value for its historic and multidisciplinary effect.  This made him take the informed decision to continue using nature as a weapon to fight war and convince decision makers on the harsh effect of war on the demographic arena and the natural composition of the land. The relevance Edward Thomas poetry increases as the Russian Ukrainian war continues to demolish the natural, demographic aspects of the land.  His concentric ecological war poetry relevance increases because of confrontational nature, fighting brutality, aggression, cruelty and ruthlessness on both individual and communal level. By reflecting on the human unkindness to the environment, and the disastrous, calamitous, catastrophic war effect, Thomas displays how evocative contact with nature can further empathetic comprehension of themes including mutilation, destruction, viciousness and ambiguity, as well as underscoring the lasting emotional, ecological, psychological effect of poetry. His verse also enlightens the relevance of retaining close connection with nature. Whilst the disastrous effect of war still affects the French scenery, Thomas offers an artistic documentation of how war shaped the British arena and enlightened his mind making him decide to enlist to save his environment and his country. As a poet, his intricate, multi-layered,   effective poems continue to illustrate the connection between international tensions and provincial disturbances, domestic identity and individual obligation, and personal differences to millennia of ecological transformation. 

Using his poems “Beauty”, “The New Year”, Lights Out”, “Aspens”, “May twenty-third”, ‘As the team’s head brass’ as examples, rationalize the inclusion of Edward Thomas poems within Great War poetry anthologies. These poems among his other poems differ drastically from other war poems as they indirectly address the war. None of these poems exhibit nationalistic assertiveness, antagonism, hostility or animosity. Instead, the poems tackle the natural landscape and lightly focus on the gruesome truth of warfare and its devastating effect on nature is presented. Accordingly, some critics refuse to categorize Thomas as a ‘war poet’. Bernard Bergonzi states: in his affectionate intensity on the changeable order of nature and rural community, the war is present only as a gloomy effect is consciously excluded. Likewise, John Johnston declares that Thomas: ‘refused to let the conflict interfere with [his] nostalgic rural visions.’ Nevertheless, the fact that their inclusion and presence within the ‘war canon’ is often argumentative, such seemingly reasonable interpretations, in that they mirror turbulence at Thomas’s anthological state alongside more openly military poets, in the view of this poet are faulty. Within the war, as William Cooke explains, a ‘division between the “two Englands” (the nation at home and the nation overseas) was being created’.5  Thomas was entirely a ‘home front’ lyricist who wrote his poetry during a highly artistic era of thirty-month prior being sent to France in February 1917 and being killed at the Battle of Arras in April.6

Edward Thomas: A War or Nature Poet 

This paper analyses and endorses Thomas’s entitlement to be recognised as a bona fide ‘war poet’ – albeit with a singular approach. It examines one of Thomas’s frequently anthologised poems and assesses how it reflects the themes that he chose to adopt. In so doing, the writer concurs with John Lehmann’s view that within Thomas’s 1914-1917 poetry, the war is there, almost always, as a dark shadow at the side of the picture, if not explicitly referred to, and runs as an undercurrent … in his intensified awareness of his attachment to his country and all it has meant to him.7

 Thomas’s preferred themes, as noted in the Bergonzi quote, reflect the constancy of nature and society within an English rural setting. Yet, although many of his verses describe, indeed celebrate, a range of living things within the countryside, such depictions tend to relate to man’s interaction with his pastoral surroundings. Thomas’s form of literary ‘patriotism’ therefore centres upon extolling a contented, Arcadian ‘English’ way of life and, through subtle symbolism and allusion, highlighting its vulnerability during the wartime emergency. 

This approach had been partially provoked by exasperation; Thomas had been appalled by press and recruiting poster displays of hostile patriotism and had determined that, It wasn’t just a flag that men were fighting and dying for, it was Hampshire lanes, Wiltshire downs, Welsh valleys, village greens, parish churches, country pubs, and man’s liberty to speak his mind in them.8

So that to counter omnipresent wartime stridency, Thomas’s gentle rural imagery is positioned as a redolent assertion of traditions within a wider context of conflict and potential for death or injury. In addition, the rustic tranquillity of the verses is designed to be read as a restorative moderation of the horrors of war so that troubled readers might gain consolation. 

Anthologised within some Great War collections, Thomas’s May 1916 blank verse poem, ‘As the team’s head brass’,9 written when the recently-enlisted poet was living in Hampshire  shortly before volunteering for a front-line posting, exhibits several of the themes that  consistently emerge. As well as the finely-crafted images of people situated within scenes of serene agricultural activity, Thomas introduces the pervasive reality of wartime calamity made poignant by the rural setting and the gentleness of a perfunctory conversation  between self-conscious strangers. 

As with many Thomas poems, the opening is intensely visual as the poet meticulously describes his own placement (sitting in ‘the boughs of a fallen elm / that strewed an angle of the fallow’) and his observed surroundings prior to the exchanges that will occur. The scenario is not complex: a spring day; a diminishing ploughed square of yellow weeds in a tree-skirted fallow field; the sunlight flashing upon the horse-brasses as the plough-team turns at the end of each furrow; the ploughman plodding behind the horses then pausing to  chat at each turn; a pair of lovers vanishing into the woods. This will be a ‘war poem’ disengaged from hostility – quiet, written with a mood of placidity and whimsical detachment. 

Several words in the opening are thus chosen for their long-vowelled tone of tranquillity or the mildness of their half rhymes, e.g.: ‘boughs’, ‘strewed’, ‘plough’, ‘leaned’ and ‘fallen’, ‘fallow’ and ‘yellow’.

However, within this pastoral setting, images are created that suggest the ‘dark shadow’ of war as noted by Lehmann - for example, the elm that serves as the poet’s observation point has ‘fallen’, the familiar euphemism for wartime death. And the ‘blizzard that felled the elm whose crest / I sat in’, having occurred simultaneously with the battle-fatality of the ploughman’s ‘mate’, symbolises the ruinous social effects of war and the shared vulnerability of nature and individuals. The peaceful, yet purposeful destruction of the charlock (wild mustard), albeit for reasons of agricultural regeneration in a Hampshire field, suggests a contrast with the mechanised artillery devastation of equivalent fields in Flanders. Indeed the choice of ‘charlock’ as the weed to be harrowed is interesting – perhaps Thomas was recalling John Roy Stewart’s patriotic poem ‘Culloden Day’ when the Young Pretender likens the hated Hanoverians to,

… foul weeds of charlock  Overcoming the wheat of the land.10

But it is the ensuing conversation that is central to this poem – not a deep deliberation, but rather, a cycle of sixty-second courtesies between strangers as the poet and the ploughman find that their forced proximity at every other furrow’s end, perhaps to avoid awkwardness,  compels them to speak: 

 Every time the horses turned 

 Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned 

Upon the handles to say or ask a word …

Eventually, they have a quintessentially English exchange – the discussion is commonplace, they talk about the weather, about what they can both see (the fallen tree) – and, because it is 1916, they mention the war. 

The differences in attitude towards the conflict are skilfully displayed. The ploughman’s lightly grumbling observations reveal his perception of the war as a distant inconvenience that has deformed his simple agricultural order: the elm will only be moved ‘when the war’s over’; conscription means that ‘only two teams work on the farm this year’ and with touching pragmatism, he explains, 

‘… One of my mates is dead. The second day 

 In France they killed him. It was back in March, 

 The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if 

He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.’

But in contrast, the poet, reflecting perhaps Thomas’s ‘front-line’ request, muses lightly in response to the inquiry as to his service aspirations and fears of death and injury – ‘I could spare an arm, I shouldn’t want to lose a leg’, a lightly-expressed Falstaffian mantra with a sense that is sharply separate from the ploughman’s humdrum, flippant way of perceiving the workaday nuisance effect of, what is in reality, human slaughter.11 But a oneness of viewpoint emerges when they realise the tragic reason for failure to remove the fallen tree (the synchronous blizzard and death of the ploughman’s ‘mate’) has occasioned their conversation - so the closing exchange is initiated, 

‘And I should not have sat here. Everything 

 Would have been different. For it would have been 

Another world.’ ‘Ay, and a better though

 If we could see all all might seem good’.

In these shared platitudes that close the dialogue, Thomas adroitly suggests how the ‘human’ effects of total war jeopardise national customs even as rudimentary as ploughing in the springtime – everything and everybody is affected. But in spite of this ‘dark shadow’,

Thomas’s poems are rarely without hope so that amid the war context, he suggests the regeneration that will follow - ploughing a weed-field in the spring is, after all, a precursor to replanting. And similarly, the lovers, having ‘disappeared into the wood’, re-emerge at the close of the poem, perhaps, as Andrew Motion suggests, having ‘initiated the next generation – the one responsible for employing the potential for good which remains even after the present upheaval.’12

 Within the final incisive lines, the poem shows Thomas’s awareness of the susceptibility to change of orthodox rural practices as mechanised ‘progress’, albeit accelerated by the impetus of war, is set to usurp traditional methods, 

The horses started and for the last time

I watched the clods crumble and topple over 

After the ploughshare and the stumbling team. (author italics) 

Thomas had originally suggested ‘The Last Team’ as the title for the work, a deliberation that both illustrates his apprehension as to the impermanence of aspects of rural life as represented by horse-drawn ploughing and the fact that many thousands of farm horses perished after being requisitioned for war service.14 The alternative representation of ‘clods’ (colloquially ‘rustic yokels’), as they ‘crumble and topple over’, can be construed as a stark evocation of the wastage of so many young human lives in the trenches. 

‘As the team’s head brass’ is an authentic example of Thomas’s juxtaposition of the 'dark shadow’ of war alongside idealised rural traditions. Among his output are several other poems that achieve the effects described by Motion as, ‘war poetry to nourish the present by recovering the best of the past, rather than to warn by mere analysis’. Many take the form of verses that offer images of country serenity to contrast gently with the chaotic, brutal impressions his assumed readership would have gained from the press and privately published, often posthumous, poetry volumes. Frequently the war itself remains unmentioned yet is implied through the timelessness of the imagery created. Less directly than ‘As the team’s head brass’, the idyllic poem ‘Haymaking’, for example, with its comparable ‘team’, ‘trees’, ‘weeds’ and ‘farm-worker’ images subtly infused by darker, gloomy symbols of warfare and death ‘after night's thunder far away had rolled’ and ‘the shadow of that single yew’) similarly reflects the threatened perpetuity of rustic life,

After night's thunder far away had rolled 

The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,

And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled, 

Like the first gods before they made the world 

And misery 

…

In beauty and in divine gaiety and the long waggon stood 

 Without its team; it seemed it never would 

Move from the shadow of that single yew. 

The team, as still, until their task was due, 

Beside the labourers enjoyed the shade 

That three squat oaks mid-field together made 

Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut.16

The poem “The Breaking of Nations”’ 

Thomas’s transition from journalism to poetry, as advised by Robert Frost in 1914, has been widely recorded. At Frost’s bidding, he ‘reworked’ many of his idyllic prose pieces into poetic form albeit that the ‘war’ symbolism, absent in the originals, was bestowed as part of the later versifying process. This approach renders much of his poetry to be highly individual within the ‘War Poetry’ canon. Establishing significant influences upon Thomas’s work is thus demanding as several of his poems reflect the literary dimension to his friendship with Frost. Thomas was an avid reader of Thomas Hardy however, and it is interesting to compare Thomas’s ‘head brass’ poem with Hardy’s frequently anthologised 1915 ‘Great War’ work, ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’ - a cheerful, merry poem that also uses ploughing metaphors and lovers to suggest the invincibility of rural tradition and the regeneration of the human spirit in wartime.17 Consider stanzas one and three in particular: 

Only a man harrowing clods 

 In a slow silent walk 

 With an old horse that stumbles and nods 

 Half asleep as they talk. 

 

Only thin smoke without flame 

 From the heaps of couch-grass; 

Yet this will go onward the same 

 Though Dynasties pass. 

 Yonder a maid and her wight 

 Come whispering by: 

War’s annals will cloud into night

 Ere their story die.18

In common with the Hardy poem, the absenteeism of dreadful aspects and his avoidance of resentment and boisterous patriotism distinguishes Thomas’s literary products from much of the ‘war’ literary productions. Nonetheless, emphasis upon this difference alone devalues Thomas’s efficiency in temperament reflection and method of presentation; his more delicate war-related representation and simple nationalism created upon ‘those aspects of the country he had enlisted to defend’ are reasons for considering him a War writer. As Paul Cubeta explains, Thomas’s work reflects, ‘an interior monologue of a man confronting a moral commitment to his country while he experiences deeply the beauty of the countryside’– specifically. 

His poetry represents individual isolation of the individual in their poetry. Thomas portrays a wandering individual who meanders the fields and the wildness. The old man cherishes his loneliness, but eventually chooses a “brown bitch” to accompany him. Thomas uses rhyming couplets to generate a lasting impact of the individual narrative also signifying the harmonious effect of the British countryside. He also employs narrative lyric to enhance imagery, gracefulness and serenity. This gives a dream like effect to his poetry.  It also enforces the continuous conflict between man and nature. He uses both assonance and alliteration to reflect how the characters feel, enhance the feel of comfort, but anxiety of the environmental surrounding. 

Thomas represents the severity of the nomadic life demonstrating how man can be isolated form the community. He communicates the peacefulness of the landscape, while the metaphors he employs reinforce that the man is detached from fellow human beings. 

The Legendary Poem Rain 

Before starting his battles in Europe, Thomas wrote the legendary poem, "Rain," in which he represents the aches of war and mortality. Thomas presents a speaker with whom he communicates and employs this speaker to symbolize the probable scenarios he might undergo during upcoming wartime. In "Rain," Thomas ' language, structure, and punctuation all show extreme troubling images, which in turn communicate the poem 's main theme of the destructive nature of war, immortality and degeneration.

Thomas ' word choice is effective, his diction produces an ongoing effect. This is clear in the opening lines of the poem when he writes, "Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain / On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me / Remembering again that I shall die" (1-3). The word "rain" is repeated thrice in the opening line, first in isolation, then with relation with the preceding adjectives "midnight" and "wild" to creates a continuous effect. This creates a picture of the poet and enforce his isolation. It also emphasizes his disturbed mental state. The themes of isolation, mental and psychological turmoil, and seclusion become more evident in the second line, using the words "solitude," echoing his solitude.

In terms of word choice, Thomas in addition integrates similes and metaphors into his poem. In line 13, he writes, "Like a cold water among broken reeds," to refer to his beloved friend fearing that he might be "helpless among the living and the dead" (12). This simile presents a tremendously gloomy picture, further demonstrating Thomas’s internal feelings, fear and discomfort. The diction choice namely “cold” and “broken” in this simile specifically underscores these emotions. The simile in lines 15 and 16 where Thomas writes, "Like me who have no love which this wild rain / Has not dissolved except the love of death" reflects the same effect.  He lacks affection because the rain has softened away whatever value he had. He ends up with a feeling of isolation and torment in the chilly, "wild rain" (15). In essence, the poem presents two notions personal isolation which is evident in the first half written in the first person, to emphasize personal dilemma; and the second notion is communal seclusion reflected in the second part of the poem. The shift starts in line 7, where a colon clearly marks the spot. Fear of death is clear but envy of the dead, respected soldiers is also evident. He states, "Blessed are the dead that rain rains upon" (7). Death is a gift for fighting for the county. It is eternal respect and continuous rest from worry and harsh life. The choice of the word "rain" only "rains" upon the dead portrays a serene picture full of peacefulness, exquisiteness, beauty, love, and respect.

The second part of the verse is dedicated to his beloved friends reflecting his hope that they are not having hard time, undergoing psychological torment waiting for death "or thus in sympathy" (11).  He also fears that they are powerless, deserted, and vulnerable "helpless among the living and the dead" (12). The speaker imagines lifeless bodies all around him - "Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff" (14), and he suffers loneliness, repeating the word "solitude" two time in lines 2 and 6 and "solitary" in line 10. The overall poet enforces ideas of mental dilemma, solitude, despair, and fear caused by war. 

 The poem ends with a personal thought that he has to do his duty and fight for country and concentrate on such obligation rather than thinking about his beloved ones. The phrase "what is perfect" emphasize this notion of personal obligation (17). Struggling with war imagery throughout the entire poem, Thomas enforces the idea of the gloominess of war, the notion of one’s obligation towards his country and the fear of death, though it is respected. Thomas employs diction, punctuation and caesura to reflect his ideas and give them a lasting effect. The first, the sixth and seventh lines present the themes discussed in the poem, the seventh acts as a transition line into the next sentence, which begins at line 8. Sentence structure acts as metaphors reflecting his emotions, which he communicates throughout the poem. Thomas’s thoughts are sporadic, but constant - reflecting on his existing bodily condition in the heavy rain thunderstorm, thinking about his friends, and the tormenting fear of death.

The Poem Tal Nettles

 The narrator of this poem, which is written in two quatrains, imagines a bend of the barnyard in which giant nettles cover up the outdated dairy farm tools and indicates that he adores it because it reminds him of changeability, reminiscence, and life. 

 

The first stanza concentrates on the gigantic nettles tower that shadows the tools, except for the wave handle, to enforce life superiority and emphasize that all items even made of the harshest materials are subjects to wear and tear and degeneration.  Even these gigantic nettles are temporary as they grow in spring and fade away eventually. Words like "cover up", "grow over", "attempt to conceal" enforce the idea of power, prominence, life and death. 

The poem represents different paradoxes that reality can be presented through imagination. Imagination here is the victory of natural life over man and the reality is that they both affect each other. Both are subject to change, and they continuously affect each other. The themes of change and mortality are enforced by assonance of the short -u- vowels in "cover", "done", "rusty" and "butt". In addition, Edward Thomas employs recurrent pauses to emphasize a sense of fatigue and underpins the concepts of immortality and continuous change.

The second stanza gives reasons for his presence in the arena namely nostalgia, love for nature, meditation, and reflection. He subtly explains that man has a role in life helping nature nourish rather perish. He also explains that one has a patriotic role in fighting for his family.  He explains the human hatred for death and the human respect for the beauty of nature. Diction choice like "bloom" and "dust", and "any", emphasize these ideas.

Long vowels like (I, bloom-prove, flower-shower, sweetness), word-inversion, the smooth diction flow, and the repetition of ideas enforce the complexity of human nature, mental turmoil, and the contradiction of thoughts that makes people divided. 

In this context, then, choosing the word "nettles" enhances ambiguity and enforces his philosophies in life namely interaction with nature, understanding one’s role towards enhancing one’s environment, the idea of change, blossom and decay, the notion of obligation towards one’s community and one’s country and the eternal reality of mortality. Such views make scholars divided whether to categorize his poetry as war or nature poems as they embed both war and nature. 

The Poems ‘Sedge-warblers’ and ‘The Word’ 

Edward Thomas’ poetry is considered transcendent, mystical, and controversial. His majesty is evident in the way he merges contradictory themes in a subtle way. His poetry is distinct from his fellow poets. Whilst Thomas may not be seen as an evident challenger for such a practice, his poetry presents the tangible natural life and reflect how he tranquilly transcends the natural aspects to represent the philosophical view indirectly to make his poetry timeless. His poems ‘Sedge-warblers’, ‘The Word’ manifest such brilliance of intertwining nature, war, and philosophy. The poems human sensitivity, poets sensibility, and poets thoughtfulness. His poetic work contains a vital continuous force that make the readers perceive ‘a new world within in contrast to what is presented in the poem. Edward Thomas is an understandable challenger to his contemporary poets, with critical responses often concentrating on areas like originality, innovation, nationalism, and developing the ecosystem. In addition, he connects nature and the divine. In the introduction to his Selected Poems of Edward Thomas, R. S. Thomas explains:

Somewhere beyond the borders of Thomas’ mind, there was a world he could never quite come at. Many of his best poems are faithful recordings of his attempts to do so: 

‘When First’, for instance; ‘Parting’; ‘Old Man’, and especially ‘The Unknown Bird’.

The employment of descriptive language in poems such as ‘Sedge-Warblers’ and ‘The Word’ signify both a sense of cohesion with nature and mystifying distinctiveness, creating notions on the possibility of gaining insight via understanding the messages nature give to man. 

The Poem ‘I Never Saw that Land Before’ 

The Poem ‘I Never Saw that Land Before’ the poem intertwines natural awareness of the ecosystem with human duty of development and change. This enforces the role of human towards nature, the fatal effects of abusive use of natural resources and the relevance of considering nature as a source of life. Robert Macfarlane admires the poem for it modernity achieved via choice of diction, movement between settings and the irregularity of presenting the observed and the spiritual. While Edward Thomas presentation is agonizing, it is eye opening and highly effective. Stan Smith enforces that Thomas poetry reflect socio-economic factors that enhanced Thomas’s feeling of isolation. The Poem ‘I Never Saw that Land Before’ enforces the idea of the effect of man in changing the way land can develop via imagination and planning. Pierre Hadot enforces this perspective through his contention that human isolation from the divine characteristics of nature is connected to the advancement of systematic science in changing the way nature looks. The poem also enforces Edward Thomas’s feeling deficiency and dislocation and considering himself an expatriate Welshman. Thomas states:

I realize that I belong to the suburbs still. I belong to no class or race and have no traditions. We of the suburbs are a muddy, confused, hesitating mass, of small courage though much endurance. As for myself, I am world-conscious, and hence suffer unutterable loneliness.

Still, Thomas is against incorrect, unplanned use of nature that leads to disastrous ends. He advocates planned development in which nature and man support each other. In which poetic language is used to enact the experience of nature. Thomas states: 

And yet, rid of this dream, ere I had drained

Its poison, quieted was my desire

So that I only looked into the water,

Clearer than any goddess or man’s daughter,

And hearkened while it combed the dark green hair

And shook the millions of the blossoms white

Of the water-crowsfoot, and curdled to one sheet

The flowers fallen from the chestnuts in the park

Far off. 

Associating his ‘dream’ of the water fairy with a ‘poison’ that demands draining enforces a powerful feeling of isolation and a contaminated relation with the environment. Alternatively, the expression could produce the bizarre state of bewilderment created via the ‘veil of dreams’ in contrast to becoming ‘awake’ and conscious. Thomas thus confines himself to the natural effect of the landscape. He, in addition, deliberately rejects the early ‘dreamlike’ methods of knowledge and engagement with nature. The phrase ‘combed the dark green hair’ shows the complexity of ‘dream’ rejection. The word the ‘sheet’ enforces the notion of fluidity. The poem continues to depict the sedge-warblers themselves:

…. And sedge-warblers, clinging so light

To willow twigs, sang longer than the lark

Quick, shrill or grating, a song to match the heat

Of the strong sun, no less the water’s cool,

Gushing through narrows, swirling in the pool.

Their song that lacks all words, all melody,

All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me

Than the sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.

This was the best of May – the small brown birds

Wisely reiterating endlessly

What no man learnt yet, in or out of school.26

The detailed manner in which the sedge-warblers are described as ‘clinging so light / To willow twigs’ suggest that Thomas is now succeeding in his decision to limit himself to precise, sensory description. The diction ‘Quick, shrill or grating’ presents the harmonious sounds of birds. Edna Longley enforces Thomas’s majesty in word choice and picture portrayal as if he is replicating or taking a photo of the natural landscape.  Words like cool/pool, melody/me and words/birds create an effective rhyme, enhance openness.

The Poem ‘The Path’

 ‘The Path’:

Running along a bank, a parapet

That saves from the precipitous wood below

The level road, there is a path. It serves

Children for looking down the long smooth steep,

between the legs of beach and yew, to where

a fallen tree checks the sight: while the men and women

Content themselves with the road and what they see

 30 Thomas, The South Country, p. 127.

Over the bank, and what the children tell.

The path suggests two methods of life, of travelling and interacting with nature, that of conscious choice and that of experimenting. Thomas advocates experimenting as in the case of children as it entails creativity, openness, love and respect. He dislikes the way adults go ‘travelling’ the world as its goal oriented and lacks creativity. Anna Stenning   enforces Thomas’s majesty in presenting the mobility of ‘the features of the environment’.

The poem ‘The Brook’ 

‘The Brook’ is another nature poem that reflect interaction with nature. Nature is cherished and respected. It comments on the children’s innocent interaction with nature. It is totally different from adults practical, inconsiderate interaction with the ecosystem which is based on usury and abuse that will lead to disastrous ends. Thomas states:

… All that I could lose

I lost. And then the child’s voice raised the dead.

‘No one’s been here before’ was what she said

And what I felt, yet never should have found

A word for, while I gathered sight and sound

Despite Thomas’ physical depictions of natural characteristics of the area is effective and carries wisdom. Doreen Massey enforces that Thomas succeeds in presenting how people interact in different ways with the environment depending on age, status and gender. As Edna Longley explains: Thomas’s versions of the artist involve not the builder or maker but the listener, the observer, the nomad, the receiver of signals from the environment, the apprentice to natural language, the vehicle of human language 41 Maia Duerr enforces that such ‘contemplative practice’ give Thomas a lasting effect. 

 

The Poem Words 

The opening of the poem is suggestive of the conventional classical allure to the muse. Instead of Miltonic loyalty and majesty, Thomas decides to reflect nature attractiveness in a tentative way that reflect human modesty and respect for the power of nature. He uses effective language in a novel way that that goes beyond a random Saussurian structure of symbols, creating a wonderful entity which possess distinct value and spirit. The diverse use of similes and metaphors generates an embracing feeling of magic and glamour as epitomized in his phrases ‘light as dreams’ and ‘tough as oak’. Thomas view that poets should intertwine ideas and create new images is evident in his words. He states:  

Proceeding from the depth of untaught things,

Enduring and creative, might become

The poem ‘Words’ ensures the different ways of interacting with nature. Thomas majesty is seen in the way the people differently interact with nature. It is personal choice of how one deals with the environment. Nonetheless, we should be environmentally responsible. Thomas states:

Out of us all

That make rhymes,

Will you choose

Sometimes –

As the winds use

A crack in the wall

Or a drain,

Their joy or their pain

To whistle through –

Choose me,

You English words? 

I know you:

You are light as dreams

Tough as oak,

Precious as gold,

As poppies and corn, 

Or an old cloak:

Sweet as our birds

To the ear,

As the burnet rose

In the heat of Midsummer:

Strange as the races

Of dead and unborn:

Strange and sweet

Equally,

The poem ‘Adlestrop’

The poem ‘Adlestrop’ is another controversial poem. It is a war poem which rotates on nature. The poem’s first stanza reflects the fear of worriers, Thomas’s contemplating nature, the idea of human interaction with Nature. Thomas employs a relaxed tone as he carries a conversation with the readers or listeners. Thomas narrates a meaningful recollection creating a sense of expectation. The first stanza sets the scene and the second stanza takes the audience directly to portray the picture. Thomas states: 

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop – only the name.44

Easthope illustrates that this poem and specifically this stanza enforces Thomas’s subjectivity. It also enforces his power as a war writer who uses different, influential imagery. 

The stanza can also be read as symbolizing the shift from an ordinary consciousness to a deeper, more introspective state, prompted by the sudden stop the train makes and the hollowness of the platform. using short sentences emphasise the tedious surrounding environment while concurrently underscoring the implication they accept in the perspective of the sudden stillness and Thomas’ increased mindfulness. The constant use of negative images throughout the stanza highlights the absence of life within the surrounding environment. It also highlights the fear of death in war zone. The third stanza extends the poet’s mindfulness and compassion. It shows the beauty of the deserted arena:

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.46

Thomas’ consciousness is highly intensified but is eventually slowed down by the use of long vowel sounds in ‘fair’, ‘high’ and ‘sky’. This enforces tranquillity and solitude. This disparity heightens the narrative, adding strength to the scene. The final stanza continues to show how solitude and loneliness pervade:

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Easthope describes this as a ‘moment of transcendent insight’, in which the poem subtly presents human feelings on nature, war, and interaction with surroundings. The practise of meditative honesty that reflects personal awareness is attained when the train stops, in which the views of ‘getting somewhere’ are substituted by a ‘childlike’ love ‘being with’ the scenery. Like the ideas of interaction with nature presented in ‘The Path’, the train movement, its definite schedule represents the human decision to take a movement in his case enlisting in the war to defend his country. The poem enforces the feelings of alienation ‘adults’ face and how they should contemplate to reach wisdom and personal growth. 

Thomas diction choice is effective as it represent the mood of the soldier who fears loneliness, death and longs for others. The word choice also shows the power of nature and how it withstands negligence and degeneration. The poem thus enforces the destructive nature of war on humans and on the environment. 

Again, Thomas is not rejecting the passage of human history and culture, merely reminding us that it is all underpinned by the vital forces that are embodied in nature. Thomas’ poetry therefore enacts not only the experience of the physical aspects of nature, but also the experience of elements that transcend the physical. the use poetic technique returns us to an appreciation of the sounds of words as well as their meaning.

In conclusion, Thomas’s poetry indirectly relates the Great War with the themes human presence, persistence, reminiscence, patriotism and interaction with nature. This makes his poetry timeless and influential. The poetry’s upbeat descriptions are contradicted by representations of abandoned homes, dark arenas, and fearful forests. All of his poems starts a dialogue the listeners evoking them to contemplate, and change their relation to nature, and think about the disastrous effects of war on the ecology.

Appendix 

As the Team's Head Brass 

As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn 

The lovers disappeared into the wood. 

I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm 

That strewed an angle of the fallow, and 

Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square 

Of charlock. Every time the horses turned 

Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned 

Upon the handles to say or ask a word, 

About the weather, next about the war. 

Scraping the share he faced towards the wood, 

And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed 

Once more. 

 The blizzard felled the elm whose crest 

I sat in, by a woodpecker’s round hole,

The ploughman said. “When will they take it away?”

“When the war’s over.” So the talk began—

One minute and an interval of ten, 

A minute more and the same interval. 

“Have you been out?” “No.” “And don’t want

to, perhaps?”

“If I could only come back again, I should.

I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose

A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so, 

I should want nothing more. . . . Have many gone 

From here?” “Yes.” “Many lost?” “Yes, a good few. 

Only two teams work on the farm this year. 

One of my mates is dead. The second day 

In France they killed him. It was back in March, 

The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if 

He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.”

“And I should not have sat here. Everything

Would have been different. For it would have been 

Another world.” “Ay, and a better, though

If we could see all all might seem good.” Then

The lovers came out of the wood again: 

The horses started and for the last time 

I watched the clods crumble and topple over 

After the ploughshare and the stumbling team. 

Haymaking 

After night's thunder far away had rolled 

The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold, 

And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled, 

Like the first gods before they made the world 

And misery, swimming the stormless sea 

In beauty and in divine gaiety. 

The smooth white empty road was lightly strewn 

With leaves - the holly's Autumn falls in June - 

And fir cones standing up stiff in the heat. 

The mill-foot water tumbled white and lit 

With tossing crystals, happier than any crowd 

Of children pouring out of school aloud. 

And in the little thickets where a sleeper 

For ever might lie lost, the nettle creeper 

And garden-warbler sang unceasingly; 

While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce glee 

The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow 

As if the bow had flown off with the arrow. 

Only the scent of woodbine and hay new mown 

Travelled the road. In the field sloping down, 

Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook, 

Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsook 

Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood 

Without its team: it seemed it never would 

Move from the shadow of that single yew. 

The team, as still, until their task was due, 

Beside the labourers enjoyed the shade 

That three squat oaks mid-field together made 

Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut, 

And on the hollow, once a chalk pit, but 

Now brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean. 

The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin, 

But still. And all were silent. All was old, 

This morning time, with a great age untold, 

Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome, 

Than, at the field's far edge, the farmer's home, 

A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree. 

Under the heavens that know not what years be 

The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements 

Uttered even what they will in times far hence -

All of us gone out of the reach of change - 

Immortal in a picture of an old grange.

Bibliography 

Abrams, MH (1986). The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 1893. ISBN 0-393-95472-2.

Bergonzi B., Heroes’ Twilight – a Study of the Literature of the Great War, (London: Constable, 1965) 

Coetzee, J. M. (2002). Youth. London: Secker & Warburg. p. 58. ISBN 0-436-20582-3.

Cooke W., Edward Thomas – a Critical Biography 1878-1917, (London: Faber and Faber,1970) 

Cooke W., Edward Thomas: a Portrait, (Derby: Hub, 1978) 

Edna Longley, England and Other Women, London Review of Books, Edna Longley, 5 May 1988.

Farjeon E., Edward Thomas – the last four years, (London: OUP, 1958) 

Farjeon, Eleanor (1997) [1958 OUP]. (Revised ed.). Sutton Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7509-1337-9 

Hardy T. & Gibson J. (ed.), Thomas Hardy – The Complete Poems, (London: Palgrave, 2001) 

Henderson, Alice Corbin (13 October 2017). Thomas, Edward (ed.). "The Late Edward Thomas". Poetry. 12 (2): 102–105. JSTOR 20571689.

Hollis, Matthew (2011). Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-24598-7.

 Ian McEwan, 2012, Sweet Tooth," Ian McEwan Nan A. Talese, 2012, pp 177-178

James, B. Ll. (1993). "The Ancestry of Edward Thomas". National Library of Wales Journal. 28, 1: 81–93.

James, B. Ll. (1993). "The Ancestry of Edward Thomas". National Library of Wales Journal. 28, 1: 81–93.

Jenkins, E. (1967). "50th Anniversary of the Death of Edward Thomas (1878-1917) Some of His Welsh Friends". National Library of Wales Journal. 15, 2: 147–156.

Kirkham M., The Imagination of Edward Thomas, (Cambridge: CUP, 1986) 

Lehmann J., ‘Robert Frost and Edward Thomas’ in Three Literary Friendships, (London: Quartet, 1983) 

 Longley, Edna (2005). "The Great War, history, and the English lyric". In Vincent Sherry (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the 

Lyon P. (ed.), Twentieth Century War Poetry, (London: Palgrave, 2005) 

Moore J., The Life and Letters of Edward Thomas, (London: Heinemann, 1939) 

Motion A., The Poetry of Edward Thomas, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) 

 Motion, Andrew (19 October 2002). "Guardian Essential Library: Poetry". Books to furnish a room... and enrich a mind. London: Guardian News and Media. Retrieved 2 February 2008.

 Motion, Andrew (2011). The Poetry Of Edward Thomas. United Kingdom: Random House. p. 11. ISBN 978-1-4464-9818-7. OCLC 1004975686.

 Robert MacFarlane, 2012, The Old Ways, Robert MacFarlane, Hamish Hamilton, 2012, pp 333-355

 Roberts, Gabriel (10 June 2010). "The Creations of Edward Thomas". Archived from the original on 27 September 2016. Retrieved 20 April 2018.

 Stuart Maconie, 2009, Adventures on the High Teas, Stuart Maconie, Ebury Press, pp 239-242.

Thomas E., The Collected Poems and War Diary, 1917, (London: Faber & Faber, 2004) 

Thomas, E. (1983). The Childhood of Edward Thomas: A Fragment of Autobiography. London: Faber & Faber.

Thomas, Edward. "Rain." The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Comp. Margaret Ferguson, Jon Stallworthy, and Mary Jo Salter. 5th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2005. 1255.

Thomas, P. H. (1913). A Religion of this World: Being a Selection of Positivist Addresses. London: Watts.

Thomas, R.G. (1987). Edward Thomas: A Portrait. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-818527-7.

Towns, Jeff, ed. (2018). Edward Thomas & Wales. Cardigan: Parthian. ISBN 9781912681129.

Wilson, Jean Moorcroft (2015). Edward Thomas: from Adlestrop to Arras; a biography. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-4081-871

Winter J. and Baggett B., 1914-1918. (1996) The Great War, London: BBC Books.

Websites

Per website http://www.tartanplace.com/tartanhistory/culoden.html, [accessed October 7th 2022]

Journals

Cubeta P. M., ‘Robert Frost and Edward Thomas: Two Soldier Poets’ in The New England Quarterly, Vol.52, No. 2. (June 1979)