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.

A quiet place apart

Robert Frost and Edward Thomas

On an August day in 1914, Edward Thomas and Robert Frost “were sitting on an orchard stile near Little Iddens, Frost's cottage in Gloucestershire…when word arrived that Britain had declared war on Germany. The two men wondered idly whether they might be able to hear the guns from their corner of the county.”*

Frost would later describe Edward Thomas as “the only brother I ever had.” The First World War separated the two poets: Frost returned to America, and in 1915 Thomas enlisted in the British Army, but the two men frequently exchanged letters.  In December of 1916, Frost sent Thomas a letter about talk of the war in the United States: “Silly fools are full of peace talk over here…. It's none of my business what you do: but neither is it any of theirs. I wrote some lines I've copied on the other side of this about the way I am struck. When I get to writing in this vein you may know I am sick or sad or something.” Frost enclosed this poem with the letter:

Suggested by Talk of Peace at This Time

Popular anti-war song, 1915

France, France I know not what is in my heart.
But God forbid that I should be more brave
As a watcher for a quiet place apart
Than you are fighting in an open grave.

I will not ask more of you than you ask,

O Bravest, of yourself. But shall I less?

You know the extent of your appointed task,

Whether you still can face its bloodiness.

Not mine to say you shall not think of peace.
Not mine, not mine. I almost know your pain.
But I will not believe that you will cease
I will not bid you cease, from being slain.

And slaying till what might have been distorted

Is saved to be the Truth and Hell is thwarted.

Shortly before being posted to the Western Front, Edward Thomas replied to Frost in a letter dated 31 December 1916:**

War poster, 1917

My dear Robert,

I had your letter & your poem ‘France, France’ yesterday.

I like the poem very much, because it betrays exactly what you would say & what you feel about saying that much. It expresses just those hesitations you or I would have at asking others to act as we think it is their cue to act. Well, I am soon going to know more about it.

In previous letters to Edward Thomas, Frost had written,“You know I haven't tried to be troubled by the war. But I believe it is half of what's ailed me ever since August 1914,” and “You rather shut me up by enlisting….Talk is almost too cheap when all your friends are facing bullets.”†

Frost’s poem expresses his own ambivalence toward the Great War as well as the uncertainty many Americans felt towards the conflict.  Frost is deeply worried for his soldier-friend Edward Thomas, who prepares for “fighting in an open grave” while Frost watches in safety “from a quiet place apart.” The repeated refrain “Not mine, not mine” speaks not only of Frost's surrendering his  right to comment on a war that the US had not yet entered, but also of Frost's respect for Thomas’s decision to enlist and even for Thomas’s willingness to die in battle. It is a very hard thing to concede that our loved ones have the right to sacrifice their lives that are so very precious to us. 

Edward Thomas was killed on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917.  In his letter of sympathy to Helen, Thomas’s widow, Frost wrote,

“I have heard Edward doubt if he was as brave as the bravest. But who was ever so completely himself right up to the verge of destruction, so sure of his thought, so sure of his word? He was the bravest and best and dearest man you and I have ever known….

            

Edward Thomas

Of the three ways out of here, by death where there is no choice, by death where there is a noble choice, and by death where there is a choice not so noble, he found the greatest way.  There is no regret—nothing that I will call regret. Only I can’t help wishing he could have saved his life without so wholly losing it and come back from France not too much hurt to enjoy our pride in him.  I want to see him to tell him something.  I want to tell him, what I think he liked to hear from me, that he was a poet….”††

*Guardian article “Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and the road to war,” by Matthew Hollis, published Friday, 29 July 2011.  This link

**“A Poem from Robert Frost for Edward Thomas,” A Century Back. Blog post 31 Dec. 2016.

† “Between Friends: Rediscovering the War Thoughts of Robert Frost,” by Robert Stilling. Virginia Quarterly Review 82.4, Fall 2006.

†† Robert Frost: An Adventure in Poetry, 1900- 1918, page 178. The book is written by Leslie Lee Francis, Frost’s granddaughter.

Gone, gone again

Edward Thomas is not a forgotten poet of the First World War; he is commemorated in Westminster Abbey’s Poet Corner, and his poems “Rain” and “As the team’s head-brass” are frequently included in collections of war poetry.

However, others of Thomas’s poems may be less familiar, and one of these is the beautiful, neglected poem “Gone, Gone Again,” written in the early autumn of 1916 as the battle of the Somme was entering its third month.  It has been set to music by Toby Darling and can be listened to here. 

 
Gone, Gone Again

Gone, gone again,

May, June, July,

And August gone,

Again gone by,

Not memorable

Save that I saw them go,

As past the empty quays

The rivers flow.

And now again,

In the harvest rain,

The Blenheim oranges

Fall grubby from the trees,

As when I was young—

And when the lost one was here—

And when the war began

To turn young men to dung.

Look at the old house,

Outmoded, dignified,

Dark and untenanted,

With grass growing instead

Of the footsteps of life,

The friendliness, the strife;

In its beds have lain

Youth, love, age, and pain:

I am something like that;

Only I am not dead,

Still breathing and interested

In the house that is not dark:—

I am something like that:

Not one pane to reflect the sun,

For the schoolboys to throw at—

They have broken every one.

            --Edward Thomas

The poem echoes with melancholy: the passing of summer, the death of so many young men, the loneliness of life and of aging.  And while other poets have written of desolate homes destroyed by the war (Margaret Widdemer in “Homes” and May Sinclair in “After the Retreat”), Thomas compares himself to an abandoned house, “Dark and untenanted,/With grass growing instead/

Image: Dr. Neil Clifton

Of the footsteps of life.” At nearly forty, Thomas was older than the typical volunteer soldier; his poem “Gone, Gone Again,” resonates with undertones that are deeply conscious of mortality and powerlessness. 

Thomas did not survive the war, but was killed in the Battle of Arras on Easter Monday, 1917.  His wife, Helen, was told that his death was bloodless, that he was killed by the concussive blast of a shell as he stood to light his pipe. The reality was much grimmer.  A letter from Thomas’s commanding officer was recently found in an American archive, and it reveals that he was “shot clean through the chest.”*

In her poem “Easter Monday: In Memoriam E.T,” Thomas’s friend and fellow-poet Eleanor Farjeon wrote of receiving one of his last letters:
….Then you spoke

Of the coming battle and said, ‘This is the eve.

Good-bye. And may I have a letter soon.’

Thomas did not receive the last letters sent to him by Farjeon and other friends, for he, too, joined the thousands of other men who were “Gone, gone again,” and as his poem comments, their bodies were left to fertilize the soil of France, Belgium, Russia, Poland, Italy, Mesopotamia, and the countless other battlefields of the Great War. 

Thomas's grave at Agny, France

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*“Myth of war poet’s ‘bloodless’ death”

Easter Monday and Memory

Eleanor Farjeon

Easter Monday (In Memoriam E.T.) 

by Eleanor Farjeon (1917)

In the last letter that I had from France
You thanked me for the silver Easter egg
Which I had hidden in the box of apples
You liked to munch beyond all other fruit.
You found the egg the Monday before Easter,
And said, ‘I will praise Easter Monday now -
It was such a lovely morning’. Then you spoke
Of the coming battle and said, ‘This is the eve.
Good-bye. And may I have a letter soon.’

That Easter Monday was a day for praise,
It was such a lovely morning. In our garden
We sowed our earliest seeds, and in the orchard
The apple-bud was ripe. It was the eve.
There are three letters that you will not get.

Edward Thomas, from the Edward Thomas Fellowship

With direct and simple language, this poem celebrates life's simple pleasures:  apples, hidden gifts, and spring mornings.  The poem speaks tenderly of the "earliest seeds" and ripe buds, signs of growth and life.  Twice repeated is the sentence "It was such a lovely morning" (lines 7 and 11), and the sender of the box of apples and the soldier who has received them both glory in the first day of Holy Week: "I will praise Easter Monday now," and "That Easter Monday was a day for praise."  

The poem, however, foreshadows a darkness that is set against Easter, resurrection, and lovely mornings, when it repeats "This is the eve," and "It was the eve," premonitions of an ending felt by the man in the trenches and the woman in her garden.

In language that tells all without speaking directly of either war or grief, the poem's final line is gentle and yet blunt, delivering the news foreshadowed in the first line "the last letter that I had from France." The man who loved to munch apples, the friend who so politely begged the favor of another letter, is dead, and so "There are three letters that you will not get."  The form of the poem itself is incomplete, a 14-line sonnet, written in iambic pentameter, but without the pattern and fulfilment of rhyme. 

In its last line, the poem offers a stark statement that expresses the reality of death in a seemingly mundane detail:  letters will not be delivered nor read.  Just that quickly, all is ended and a dear friend is gone from this world forever.    

Eleanor Farjeon wrote the poem in memory of her close friend and neighbor Edward Thomas, who was killed at Arras on April 9, 1917.   An imaginative and versatile author, Farjeon wrote not only poetry, but novels, plays, and stories, many composed for children.  She is perhaps best known for writing the lyrics to the song "Morning Has Broken."  In his poem "The Sun Used to Shine," one can imagine Edward Thomas sharing an evening walk with a friend like Farjeon:

"Under the moonlight—like those walks

Now—like us two that took them, and

The fallen apples, all the talks

And silence—like memory's sands…."

Rain, midnight rain

There are war poems that ring with exultation: “Stand in the trench, Achilles,/ Flame-capped, and shout for me.” Others sound with ear-shattering blasts and the confusion of artillery fire: “Dance, little girls, beneath the din!/The four-point-ones are talking.” Edward Thomas’s poem “Rain” never raises its voice above a whisper as it contemplates the loneliness of war.

Nevinson's "After a Push," from bbc.co.uk

Rain

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me

Remembering again that I shall die

And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks

For washing me cleaner than I have been

Since I was born into solitude.

Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:

But here I pray that none whom once I loved

Is dying tonight or lying still awake

Solitary, listening to the rain,

Either in pain or thus in sympathy

Helpless among the living and the dead,

Like a cold water among broken reeds,

Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,

Like me who have no love which this wild rain

Has not dissolved except the love of death,

If love it be towards what is perfect and

Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

                       --Edward Thomas

The poem recalls the soporific properties of rain at night, but sets the sound in a lonely context, where even though this man has found “bleak” shelter, he listens in solitude and in chilling awareness of the dead and wounded that lie out in the cold rain.  The poem is a quietly desperate prayer for all who are “Helpless among the living and the dead.”  Both the living and the dead share in the broken paralysis of war that transforms men into “myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff.” 

What is amazing is the beauty that is found in this poem of despair: there is blessing and cleansing in the “wild rain,” and the repetition of the word “rain” and “rains” in the line “Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon,” gives the poem an incantatory sense.  There is peace here even in the face of wild rain, a peace that comes from the love which is left, the love of death.  In this way, the poem recalls Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and its lines, “for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death,/....Now more than ever seems it rich to die,/To cease upon the midnight with no pain.” 

It was Robert Frost who encouraged Thomas to write poetry and who shared his love of countryside rambles.  Frost tried to discourage Thomas from enlisting, and in the early months of the war, Thomas considered emigrating to America with his family to live near the Frosts.  However, in July of 1915, the 37-year-old Thomas decided to enlist in the British Artists Rifles, and “Rain” was written while training in Essex.  Sent to the Western Front in early 1917, Thomas wrote his wife, “It becomes harder for me to think about things at home somehow.  Although this life does not absorb me, I think, yet, I can’t think of anything else.  I don’t hanker after anything.  I don’t miss anything.  I am not even conscious of waiting.  I am just quietly in exile, a sort of half or quarter man.…”

Before the war, Thomas had turned his gaze to the solitary, singular moments in everyday life:

Adlestrop

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.

Rather than describe the war directly, nearly all of Thomas’s poems explore its effects on men and women through meditations on landscapes and natural scenes.  When asked by a friend on a countryside walk in England, “Do you know what you are fighting for?”, Thomas stopped and picked up a handful of earth and answered, “Literally, for this.” He was killed on the first day of the Battle of Arras, Easter Monday, 1917.