Poets' Corner

Number Nine : 20^th May 2013

Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas (1878-1917) became a friend of the Welsh tramp/poet W.H. Davies , whose career he helped to develop. Davies was the author of the famous poem Leisure , with its opening lines “What is this life if , full of care , We have no time to stand and stare ? ..” Thomas's poetry is noted for its close attention to the English countryside. He immortalised the now-abandoned railway station at Adlestrop in a poem of that name after his train made an unscheduled stop at the Cotswolds station in the summer of 1914 , shortly before the outbreak of the First World War :

Yes. I remember Adlestrop -
The name , because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

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

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.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by , and round him , mistier ,
Farther and farther , all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Here is an overpowering sense of nostalgia for a lost summer’s day. It evokes the elegaic stability of the Edwardian decade that historians have embalmed in a myth that Geoff Dyer points out was generated by the cataclysm about to overtake it. In Orwell’s words ⁽¹⁾ , “From the whole decade before 1914 there seems to breathe forth a smell of the more vulgar kind of luxury , a smell of brilliantine and crème-de-menthe and soft-centred chocolates”. Although he was a mature married man who could have avoided enlisting , Thomas did so in July 1915. He was killed in action soon after he arrived in France on Easter Monday , 1917. Although he survived the actual battle of Arras , he was killed by the concussive blast wave of one of the last shells fired as he stood to light his pipe. As Dyer tells us in his meditation on that War , The Missing of the Somme , “sixty per cent of casualties on the Western Front were from shell-fire , against which shelter was the infantryman's only defence. Artillery fire transformed the foot soldier from an active participant in conflict to an almost passive victim of a force unleashed randomly around him ….. the real aggressor was industrial technology itself , as the soldier of the First European war comes to resemble the civilian sheltering from aerial attack in the Second”.

The golden summer of 1914 evoked in this poem is a construct obscuring the fact that the industrial technology facilitating the coming carnage had evolved in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century , a period whose “peace” hid a latent state violence : class unrest , bitter strikes , militant suffragettes at home , Ireland on the brink of civil war , European colonial oppression (and 'ethnic cleansing') in Africa and Asia. An idyllic scene viewed from a railway carriage in rural England gave way to trains that were instrumental in transporting shells and artillery , human cannon-fodder and thousands of doomed horses to their destiny in northern France. A few decades later , rail transport was to take millions of civilian 'undesirables' to the death-camps in Germany and Poland.

Archive

Poets' Corner #1 – Poetic Pessimism, 13^th September 2012
Poets' Corner #2 – The Workman's Friend, 10^th October 2012
Poets' Corner #3 – On The Trail of Two Dylans, 12^th November 2012
Poets' Corner #4 – Omar Khayyam, 14^th December 2012
Poets' Corner #5 – William Blake, 25^th January 2013
Poets' Corner #6 – A Minor Poet, 19^th February 2013
Poets' Corner #7 – Thomas Hardy, 20^th March 2013
Poets' Corner #8 – Shakespeare's Sonnets, 21^st April 2013
Poets' Corner #9 – Edward Thomas, 20^th May 2013
Poets' Corner #10 – Harry Smith's Anthology, 19^th June 2013
Poets' Corner #11 – William Plomer, 21^st July 2013
Poets' Corner #12 – Ghosts , 20^th August 2013
Poets' Corner #13 – William Dunbar, 20^th September 2013
Poets' Corner #14 – Bathtub Thoughts, 20^th October 2013
Poets' Corner #15 – Bagpipe Music, 20^th November 2013
Poets' Corner #16 – Sylvia & Emily, 20^th December 2013
Poets' Corner #17 – The Fall Of Icarus, 16^th January 2014
Poets' Corner #18 – Those Gone Before, 20^th February 2014
Poets' Corner #19 – Rudyard Kipling, 20^th March 2014
Poets' Corner #20 – Martin Bell, 20^th April 2014
Poets' Corner #21 – Another Modest Proposal, 20^th May 2014
Poets' Corner #22 – Thomas Gray and The Eighteenth Century, 20^th June 2014
Poets' Corner #23 – Edgar Allan Poe, 18^th July 2014
Poets' Corner #24 – Tread Softly, 19^th August 2014
Poets' Corner #25 – Mad To Be Saved, 24^th December 2015
Poets' Corner #26 – Wants, 20^th January 2016
Poets' Corner #27 – Samuel Johnson, 15^th February 2016
Poets' Corner #28 – T.S.Eliot, 10^th March 2016
Poets' Corner #29 – Alfred Lord Tennyson, 18^th April 2016
Poets' Corner #30 – Leonard Cohen, 12^th November 2016