POETS Day! Edward Thomas

Illustrated by Rene Sears

It’s a brand-new year with a brand-new slate of sick days tempting you to do evil. Don’t waste those quite yet. A half day’s like a skip day you didn’t sleep through the first half of and if you playthings right, there’s fifty-two of them. That’s a lot. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Happy New Year.

Seize the afternoon and enjoy the remains of a Friday on your terms. But first, some verse.

***

Everybody knows Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken.” Most of us, myself included, are told that it’s an anthem, a call to individualism, by a teacher. It’s presented to us young. Someone gives us the gist – usually in lauding, reverent tones – and we read it as accepting sponges.

I never questioned the received assessment. For years I unfairly filed the poem, and Frost too, away as starter kit stuff; Johnson’s Baby Poetry, to mangle a line from P.J. O’Rourke. People with a desire to seriously immerse themselves in a subject like poetry—dive in and learn the whats and whyfores—need to shed assumptions. I didn’t do that. I assumed that since I “knew” about Frost and “The Road Not Taken,” it couldn’t be all that great; jingoistic popular stuff. I wanted the esoterica. That was dumb.

Frost wrote the poem as a joke. Katherine Robinson wrote a wonderful article for Poetry Foundation (or maybe Poetry, which is the same organization and I can never figure out what counts as a web post and what gets to be exalted as a magazine article over there) in 2016 called “Robert Frost: ‘The Road Not Taken.’” She notes, “the critic David Orr has hailed “‘The Road Not Taken’ as a poem that ‘at least in its first few decades … came close to being reader-proof.’”

Rather than individualism, Frost wrote about memory and time lionizing decisions. “Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same,” but years on he predicts he’ll sigh and claim one was “less travelled by” and resulted in a “difference,” though no quality to that difference is given. Follow the link to Robinson’s article/post. If you’re like me, “The Road Not Taken” was filed away and erroneously regarded as read and understood, maybe scanned when encountered again, but not given thought or consideration. Read the Robinson article/post. I had a “Why the hell didn’t I notice that?” moment. She rightly blames Robin Williams, at least in part, for my acceptance of groupthink.

Frost wrote the poem to tease his good friend, Edward Thomas. The two men would often take walks together through the woods and Thomas apparently agonized at every decision. Would there be a pretty creek this way, would they see a fox that? That sort of thing. Thomas didn’t take it well. He thought he was pointedly being criticized, to Frost’s surprise. Nobody got it, as it turned out.

From Robinson,

“Soon after writing the poem in 1915, Frost griped to Thomas that he had read the poem to an audience of college students and that it had been ‘taken pretty seriously … despite doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling. … Mea culpa.’”

It was Frost who convinced Thomas to write and publish his poetry. I feel like Frost’s influence is strong, particularly in tone. The unsung biographer at Poetry Foundation (in this case I’m pretty sure it’s Poetry Foundation rather than Poetry) notes “the poet’s profound sense of solitude” as a recurring theme in Thomas’s poetry.

The New House
Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

Now first, as I shut the door,
I was alone
In the new House; and the wind
Began to moan.

Old at once was the house,
And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
Of what was foretold,

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain: old griefs and griefs
Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learn’d how the wind would sound
After these things should be.

One of his more popular works is “Adlestrop,” about a stop at a station on a train ride through Gloucestershire in 1914. War had not yet been declared, but the winds were blowing.

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.

Thomas made his living as a critic and prose writer. I read that he would review up to fifteen books a week and assumed that to be a typo, but if so, it’s a typo that has flourished across numerous sites and sources. I can’t imagine that kind of output.

It’s been written that he wasted his time on hack work. It’s true that he didn’t enjoy writing much of what he produced, but the needs of his growing family required it of him. The question gets brought up, did this hack work steal time that would have better been spent in service of his poetic instincts or writing novels, or was his artistic output the beneficiary of tricks and habits learned toiling? People argue about stuff like that.

His first book of poetry was published as Six Poems in 1916 under the pen name Edward Eastaway. He was worried that if he published under his own name, rival critics would treat him unfairly. He’d never see the printing of his next book, Poems. Its 1917 publication came months after his death in the Battle of Arras.

Thomas was in his thirties when the Great War broke out. He had a family and was under no obligation to fight, legally or reputationally. No one would have thought poorly of him. It’s hard to guess his motivations. He suffered depression and attempted suicide multiple times so I can’t imagine a Byronic zest for adventure, but maybe. Maybe patriotism, outrage. Whatever factored into his deliberations, he did decide, and that made a difference.

The Sign-Post

The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy.
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry,
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hilltop by the finger-post;
The smoke of the traveller’s-joy is puffed
Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.

I read the sign. Which way shall I go?
A voice says: You would not have doubted so
At twenty. Another voice gentle with scorn
Says: At twenty you wished you had never been born.

One hazel lost a leaf of gold
From a tuft at the tip, when the first voice told
The other he wished to know what ‘twould be
To be sixty by this same post. “You shall see,”
He laughed— and I had to join his laughter—
“You shall see; but either before or after,
Whatever happens, it must befall,
A mouthful of earth to remedy all
Regrets and wishes shall freely be given;
And if there be a flaw in that heaven
‘Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may be
To be here or anywhere talking to me,
No matter what the weather, on earth,
At any age between death and birth,—
To see what day or night can be,
The sun and the frost, the land and the sea,
Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring,—
With a poor man of any sort, down to a king,
Standing upright out in the air
Wondering where he shall journey, O where?”