A singing star in time's abyss

Edward Thomas

On the first day of the battle of Arras, April 9, 1917, Edward Thomas was killed by an artillery shell. He had arrived in France just months before and had been writing poetry for only three years (most of Thomas’s poems, such as “Rain,” were written between 1914 and his death).  Almost immediately following Thomas’s death, other writers wrestled their grief into words. Eleanor Farjeon wrote “Easter Monday (In Memoriam E.T.),” and Walter De La Mare composed a short poem of heart-aching beauty.  

To E.T.

You sleep too well—too far away,
   For sorrowing word to soothe or wound;
Your very quiet seems to say
   How longed-for a peace you have found.

Else, had not death so lured you on,
   You would have grieved — ’twixt joy and fear—
To know how my small loving son
   Had wept for you my dear.
        —Walter De La Mare (1918)

Four years later, in 1922, Ivor Gurney wrote “The Mangel-Bury,” which opens with a remembrance of Thomas:

        It was after war; Edward Thomas had fallen at Arras—
        I was walking by Gloucester musing on such things
        As fill his verse with goodness....*

Each of these poems can be read in the collection Elected Friends: Poems for and about Edward Thomas, compiled by Anne Harvey. One of my favorites is “The Golden Room,” by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, written in 1925. Gibson, Robert Frost, Lascelles Abercrombie, and Rupert Brooke were among the Dymock poets, a group of friends who lived in rural Gloucestershire, meeting for walks and dinners to share ideas, laughter, and poetry.  

The Golden Room

Do you remember that still summer evening
When, in the cosy cream-washed living-room
Of the Old Nailshop, we all talked and laughed—
Our neighbours from The Gallows, Catherine
And Lascelles Abercrombie; Rupert Brooke;
Eleanor and Robert Frost, living in a while
At Little Iddens, who’d brought over with them
Helen and Edward Thomas? In the lamplight
We talked and laughed; but, for the most part, listened
While Robert Frost kept on and one and on,
In his slow New England fashion, for our delight,
Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips,
And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes?

Wilfrid and Geraldine Gibson 
The Old Nailshop, Greenway

We sat there in the lamplight, while the day
Died from rose-latticed casements, and the plovers
Called over the low meadows, till the owls
Answered them from the elms, we sat and talked:
Now, a quick flash from Abercrombie; now,
A murmured dry half-heard aside from Thomas;
Now, a clear laughing word from Brooke; and then
Again Frost’s rich and ripe philosophy,
That had the body and tang of good draught-cider,
And poured as clear a stream.

’Twas in July
Of nineteen-fourteen that we sat and talked;
Then August brought the war, and scattered us.

Now, on the crest of an Ægean isle,
Brooke sleeps, and dreams of England: Thomas lies
’Neath Vimy Ridge, where he, among his fellows,
Died, just as life had touched his lips to song. 

And nigh as ruthlessly has life divided
Us who survive; for Abercrombie toils
In a black Northern town, beneath the glower
Of hanging smoke; and in America
Frost farms once more; and, far from the Old Nailshop,
We sojourn by the Western sea. 

And yes,
Was it for nothing that the little room,
All golden in the lamplight, thrilled with golden
Laughter from the hearts of friends that summer night?
Darkness has fallen on it; and the shadow
May never more be lifted from the hearts
That went through those black years of war, and live.

And still, whenever men and women gather
For talk and laughter on a summer night,
Shall not that lamp rekindle; and the room
Glow once again alive with light and laughter;
And, like a singing star in time’s abyss,
Burn golden-hearted through oblivion?
—Wilfrid Gibson, 1925**

Gibson and his wife, Geraldine, lived in The Old Nailshop, a thatched cottage in Greenway Cross, and Rupert Brooke came to stay with them in July of 1914. Within walking distance were the homes of Edward and Helen Thomas, and Robert and Elinor Frost. Eleanor Farjeon, a friend of the Thomases, relates the story of the night when she “drank all the poets in Gloucestershire under the table”: 

Everyone was wiping his eyes with laughter, and we finished the meal with the cheese. Mrs. Farmer rose. I rose, and Helen rose, and Elinor Frost. Mr. Farmer rose. The Poets attempted to rise, relapsed on to their seats, and regarded each other with comical consternation. They were perfectly sober, though exceedingly gay; but the gallons of strong cider, against which I had been inoculated, had gone to their legs, and not one of them could stand without support. I saw Edward and Robert stagger to their feet, clutch each other, and go down; they rose again with great caution, clinging together. On the other side of the table Gibson and Abercrombie were behaving similarly. Two brace of poets staggered out into the moonlight and went hilariously homeward like two sets of Siamese Twins.***

Gibson’s poem is a memorial to the summer of 1914, and its lines shimmer with repeated references to golden light. Cream-washed walls, clear West Country cider, warm laughter, and the magic of lamplight shine with promise and potentiality. 

Yet by August of 1914, the world had descended into war, darkness, and shadow. 

Gibson wrote “The Golden Room” over ten years after that idyllic summer, reflecting on the grief and loss of the intervening years. Abercrombie had accepted the position of Professor of English at the University of Leeds; Gibson and his family had moved to a coastal town in Wales; Brooke had been dead for a decade, and Thomas nearly that long. 

“And still....” 

So begins the last stanza of “The Golden Room.” In the poem's last lines, Gibson blesses future gatherings of friends and writers, comparing them to “a singing star in time’s abyss.” Bonds of love and comradeship will rekindle the lamp “whenever men and women gather / For talk and laughter on a summer night.”
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* The poem was The Guardian’s “Poem of the Week,” 27 April 2009, accompanied by a rich discussion by Carol Rumens. **
The poem was published in The Atlantic magazine’s February 1926 issue and in Gibson’s 1928 collection, The Golden Room and Other Poems.
*** Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years, Oxford UP, 1958, p. 94.

Youth was in our hands

Rupert Brooke, 1913, by Sherril Schell
National Portrait Gallery NPG P101

In August of 1915, just months after Rupert Brooke’s death, his friend and literary executor Edward Marsh wrote a memoir, intending to publish it with Brooke’s collected poems. Marsh wrote that “Circumstances prevented this,” and Rupert Brooke: A Memoir wasn’t published until 1918. The delay allowed Marsh to include excerpts from Brooke’s letters. 

Aboard a troopship bound for Gallipoli, shortly before his death from “acute blood poisoning,”* Brooke wrote to his friend and fellow poet Lascelles Abercrombie:

I know now what a campaign is .... It is continual crossing from one place to another, and back, over dreamlike seas: anchoring, or halting, in the oddest places, for no one knows or quite cares how long: drifting on, at last, to some other equally unexpected, equally out of the way, equally odd spot: for all the world like a bottle in some corner of the bay at a seaside resort. Somewhere, sometimes, there is fighting. Not for us. In the end, no doubt, our apparently aimless course will drift us through, or anchor us in, a blaze of war, quite suddenly; and as suddenly swirl us out again .... One just hasn’t, though, the time and detachment  to write, I find. But I’ve been collecting a few words, detaching lines from the ambient air, collaring one or two of the golden phrases that a certain wind blows from (will the Censor let me say?) Olympus, across the purple seas.**

Noel Olivier,  Maitland Radford,
Virginia Woolf (née Stephen),
and  Rupert Brooke
Aug 1911 (unknown photographer)
NPG x13124)

Marsh’s memoir includes several of the words, lines, and “golden phrases” that Brooke recorded in his notebook. These fragments of half-finished poems offer enigmatic hints of what could have been. The following is from Brooke's draft of a sonnet:

The poor scrap of a song that some man tried
Down in the troop-decks forrard, brought again
The day you sang it first, on a hill-side,
With April in the wind and in the brain.
And the woods were gold; and youth was in our hands. 

Brooke died on the island of Skyros on April 23, 1915; the news appeared in the London Times on April 26th, and Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty of the British Navy, praised the young poet and his “simple force of genius” that communicated “the sorrow of youth about to die, and the sure triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit.” Churchill wrote, “The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and memory remain; but they will linger.”***

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*From Marsh’s memoir; other contemporary accounts attribute his death to sunstroke. Modern historians believe he died of septicemia from an infected mosquito bite.

** Rupert Brooke, in Rupert Brooke: A Memoir, by Edward Marsh, Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1918, pp. 173–174. 

***Winston Churchill, “Death of Mr. Rupert Brooke: Sunstroke at Lemnos,” London Times, 26 April 1915. 

 

Perishing things and strange ghosts

Imagining the future has an added poignancy in a time of war.  Rupert Brooke, one of the most famous of the soldier poets of the Great War, is best known for his poem “The Soldier” and its memorable first lines, “If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England.”  In that poem, he speculates on his own death. 

Brooke’s lesser-known poem “Fragment,” however, imagines the future of others, of soldiers on troop ships headed for the Dardanelles and the battle of Gallipoli in the spring of 1915.  

 Fragment

I strayed about the deck, an hour, to-night

Under a cloudy moonless sky; and peeped

In at the windows, watched my friends at table,

Or playing cards, or standing in the doorway,

Or coming out into the darkness. Still

No one could see me.

                                          I would have thought of them

—Heedless, within a week of battle—in pity,

Pride in their strength and in the weight and firmness

And link’d beauty of bodies, and pity that

This gay machine of splendour ’ld soon be broken,

Thought little of, pashed, scattered …

                                                                        Only, always,

I could but see them—against the lamplight—pass

Like coloured shadows, thinner than filmy glass,

Slight bubbles, fainter than the wave’s faint light,

That broke to phosphorus out in the night,

Perishing things and strange ghosts—soon to die

To other ghosts—this one, or that, or I.
              --Rupert Brooke

The poem’s first stanza creates a mood of eerie tension:  the speaker of the poem is an outsider, a self-imposed exile from the camaraderie of his friends and fellow soldiers.  He haunts the deck unseen and “still.”  Recklessly careless – “heedless”-- the men dining, playing cards, and enjoying the last week before battle are both admired and pitied for their “link’d beauty of bodies” that will soon be “pashed” -- violently thrown and shattered to bits.  Despite their strength, “weight and firmness,” these are men without any control over the future that awaits them.

As fleeting as bubbles, their lives flicker in the lamplight with a wondrous and glowing beauty, made more real by its transience   Seeing them as ghosts, as men about to die, these men linger in memory forever, fixed for all time in this darkly lit moment on a ship quietly moving through the night.   The last lines of the poem capture the randomness of war death – who lives and who dies is also entirely out of anyone’s control. 

It’s a curiously prescient poem, as if Brooke stares into the future and sees not only the brutal losses of the Gallipoli campaign, but also the ways in which war creates its own despairing beauty and consigns survivors to a future that is fixated on memories of a time when “this gay machine of splendour,” was not utterly wrecked and broken.   

Brooke was one of the most popular of the First World War poets. W.B. Yeats is reported to have said he was “the handsomest young man in England,” and Brooke’s early death in April of 1915 transformed him into an iconic figure.  The man was far more complicated than the myth, however, and scholars such as Timothy Kendall have argued that neither Brooke’s views of war and nor his poetry are as naïve or idealistic as often assumed.  “The Fragment” enacts a complexity and subtlety for which Brooke is seldom recognized.