Edward Thomas: Selected Poems by Edward Thomas 2014

Thomas has been a figure of interest for me for many years, primarily due to the fact that he became a good friend of Robert Frost’s when Frost lived in England prior to WWI.  Frost had yet to publish any books of poetry when he decided to move his young family from New Hampshire where he had been a less than successful farmer and teacher, to London.  There he met T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Edward Thomas.  Eliot, the emigre American from St. Louis and Harvard, was the editor at Faber and Faber publishers, and he published Frost’s first two books of poems, “A Boy’s Will” and “North of Boston” in 1913 and 1914.  Faber and Faber is also the publisher of this book of Thomas’s poems.

Frost was influential in urging Thomas to write poetry after he had enjoyed a relatively successful career as a reviewer, critic, and biographer.  Thomas went on to write over 100 poems before enlisting in the British Army and dying at the age of 39 in France, having only seen one of his poems published while he was alive.

Thomas’s poetry is reminiscent of Frost’s, dealing with the hard facts of rural living along with the beauties of nature.  A troubled man beset by episodes of depression and several suicide attempts, he is often credited with bringing emotion and realism into the Romantic poets of the early 20th C.  In referring to a recent biographer, a reviewer wrote in the Literary Review that “even at his most tortured and torturing, he has a matter-of-fact resilience. … Poetry freed him from his motives. Or, rather, it freed him from his obsession with ‘thinking out my motives for this or that act or word in the past until I long for sleep’ by allowing him to observe and to create things he didn’t feel the need to account for.”  

This beautiful poem demonstrates Thomas’s depressive soul as well as his love of Nature:

The Child on the Cliffs

Mother, the root of this little yellow flower
Among the stones has the taste of quinine.
Things are strange to-day on the cliff. The sun shines so bright,
And the grasshopper works at his sewing-machine
So hard. Here’s one on my hand, mother, look;
I lie so still. There’s one on your book.
But I have something to tell more strange. So leave
Your book to the grasshopper, mother dear,—
Like a green knight in a dazzling market-place,—
And listen now. Can you hear what I hear
Far out? Now and then the foam there curls
And stretches a white arm out like a girl’s.
Fishes and gulls ring no bells. There cannot be
A chapel or church between here and Devon,
With fishes or gulls ringing its bell,—hark!—
Somewhere under the sea or up in heaven.
“It’s the bell, my son, out in the bay
On the buoy. It does sound sweet to-day.”
Sweeter I never heard, mother, no, not in all Wales.
I should like to be lying under that foam,
Dead, but able to hear the sound of the bell,
And certain that you would often come
And rest, listening happily.
I should be happy if that could be.