Edward Thomas. Judy Kendall
use of ‘open-air’ diaries when editing The Book of the Open Air.
After his death, Thomas’s editors continue to recognize the importance of notes in his creative oeuvre. In Edward Thomas: Selected Poems and Prose, David Wright separates Thomas’s war diary from other prose items, placing it next to the poems. R. G. Thomas included the same diary as an appendix to his edition of Edward Thomas’s Collected Poems, observing that it ‘is carefully phrased and Thomas corrects words and phrases as in all his working drafts’.14 R. G. Thomas also wrote that the diary
seems to contain the germs of ideas, books, and poems that were never to be written but that were surely present in his mind. Even more clearly it reveals the consistency of the poet’s entire writing life grounded as that was upon his powerful sensuous response to the world of living and natural things.15
In the preface to The Icknield Way, Edward Thomas makes clear that his notes, taken while travelling along the Icknield Way, are not merely preparatory but integral to the composition process. He observes how, in the course of writing the book, both the ancient road and his physical journey along it become images of the book’s composition process. The Icknield Way is ‘in some ways a fitting book for me to write. For it is about a road which begins many miles before I could come on its traces and ends miles beyond where I had to stop.’16 His composing process starts, literally as well as metaphorically, ‘many miles’ before he actually begins to write the book, initiating with his travels along the road; the notes he takes during this journey; and the ways in which the subject matter and style of those notes are affected by the journey. The environment and the composing process are closely entwined. Thomas’s awareness of this comes to fruition in A Literary Pilgrim in England, written in 1914 although not published until 1917. This book observes the close relation between the composing activity of a disparate number of poets and their environment. They include, among others, Matthew Arnold, Hilaire Belloc, William Blake, George Borrow, Emily Brontë, Robert Burns, William Cobbett, S. T. Coleridge, Thomas Hardy, William Hazlitt, Robert Herrick, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, William Morris, P. B. Shelley, A. C. Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson and William Wordsworth.
Thomas’s poems also relate closely to the environment. They refer to journeys, roads and the dark, conditions in which many were drafted. He told Frost that ‘I sometimes write in [sic] the train going home late’, and described to Farjeon the ‘long slow’ train journeys from military camp.17 The length of these journeys is mirrored in the winding, clause-ridden sentence constructions of poems such as ‘The Owl’, ‘Good-night’, ‘It rains’, ‘It was upon’ and ‘I never saw that land before’. The rapidly changing perspectives in ‘The Barn and the Down’ also suggest a train journey:
Then the great down in the west
Grew into sight,
A barn stored full to the ridge
With black of night;
And the barn fell to a barn
Or even less
Before critical eyes and its own
Late mightiness. (pp. 68–9)
Similarly, Thomas wrote ‘Roads’, an exploration of roads, while travelling home.
R. G. Thomas recognized the connection in Edward Thomas’s work between physical environment and poem when he observed that the ‘train journey home [from military camp] was long and roundabout and two poems at least, “The Child in the Orchard” and “Lights Out”, were worked on in semi-darkness’.18 As Thomas told Farjeon, he began writing ‘Lights Out’ while ‘coming down in the train on a long dark journey when people were talking and I wasn’t’.19 Lack of light is present not only in the poem’s title, but in the sense of blurred vision and silent isolation in stanzas that describe entering a dark forest,
the unknown
I must enter and leave alone, (p. 136)
The almost mnemonic repeated lines and nursery-rhyme-like echoes of ‘The Child in the Orchard’ also reflect external writing conditions. The darkness of a train journey forces the composing poet to depend more on memory than on the written page.
Thomas’s habit of composing poems on train journeys from military camp to his home resulted in work that refers constantly to the search for a home. The word ‘home’ forms the title of three poems, and references to buildings occur in at least eleven other titles. The poems allude frequently to lost, present, ideal or fleeting senses of home. The opening and ending lines of ‘The Ash Grove’ run:
Half the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made Little more
than the dead ones made of shade.
If they led to a house, long before had they seen its fall:
But they welcomed me;
At the end of the poem, a snatch of song signals a brief rediscovery of a paradoxically fleeting sense of rootedness:
The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,
And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,
But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die
And I had what I most desired, without search or desert or cost. (p. 108)
Thomas’s care in noting the conditions of composition of eleven of the poems in the fair handwritten copy of sixty-seven poems in the Bodleian manuscript of 1917 Poems indicates the important connection he saw between physical conditions experienced in the composition period, such as travel, direction of travel and a strong sense of home, and the completed poem. In each case he observed that the poem was composed in transit and, apart from once, when the note does not specify the destination, he recorded that he was ‘going home’ or ‘coming home’, mainly from military camp.
Early versions of ‘Liberty’ and ‘Rain’ are among the drafts including indications of composing conditions. Both poems focus on solitude, loneliness and homelessness, at night, the time when Thomas often travelled. Other poems refer to a longing for home. ‘No one so much as you’ suggests separation from home in its emphasis on the distance in an apparently close relationship. ‘I never saw that land before’ describes a search for, and loss of, an ideal home: ‘some goal / I touched then’, and ‘Some eyes condemn’, written eight or nine days later, echoes this in ‘I had not found my goal’ (pp. 120, 121). ‘What will they do?’ revolves around the sense of a lost home, while ‘The Sheiling’ celebrates the discovery of a spiritual home. In the case of ‘The Sheiling’, the composition process begins while ‘travelling back from Gordon Bottomley’s (Silverdale)’, a spiritual home or place of sanctuary for Thomas, as the poem’s content declares.
‘Some eyes condemn’ and ‘What will they do?’ reflect physical conditions particular to train journeys. The traveller, stationary in a moving vehicle, watches through the window people apparently moving away from him. In ‘Some eyes condemn’, composed in Hare Hall military camp, ‘Hare Hall & train’, the speaker appears passive, while the ‘eyes’ he observes move restlessly, the movement emphasized by a twisting enjambement:
Others, too, I have seen rest, question, roll,
Dance, shoot. And many I have loved watching. Some
I could not take my eyes from till they turned
And loving died. I had not found my goal. (p. 121)
A draft of ‘What will they do?’ includes the note ‘going home to Steep’. The speaker’s observations in this poem also suggest a position behind a glass window, echoing the conditions of composition on a long, slow train journey:
I have but seen them in the loud street pass;
And I was naught to them. I turned about
To see them disappearing carelessly. (p. 133)
Physical conditions of composition have a strong effect on ‘The Lofty Sky’, composed while Thomas was confined inside at home with an injured