The Heart of England

By Edward Thomas

This early work by Edward Thomas was originally published in 1909 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Heart of England' is one of Thomas's works on the subject of nature. Philip Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth, London, England in 1878. His parents were Welsh migrants, and Thomas attended several schools, before ending up at St. Pauls. Thomas led a reclusive early life, and began writing as a teenager. He published his first book, The Woodland Life (1897), at the age of just nineteen. A year later, he won a history scholarship to Lincoln College, Oxford. Despite being less well-known than other World War I poets, Thomas is regarded by many critics as one of the finest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: May 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781473395886

Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas was born near Uxbridge in 1943 and grew up mainly in Hackney, east London in the 1950s. His teaching career took him to cental Africa and the Middle East. Early retirement from the profession enabled him to concentrate on writing. Along with authorship of half a dozen books, he has contributed regular columns to several journals.

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Edward Thomas

Philip Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth, London, England in 1878. His parents were Welsh migrants, and Thomas attended several schools, before ending up at St. Pauls. Never entirely happy with urban life — he took many trips to Wiltshire and Wales, fostering an attraction to the natural world which would inform much of his later poetry — Thomas led a reclusive early life, and began writing as a teenager. He published his first book, The Woodland Life (1897), at the age of just nineteen. A year later, he won a history scholarship to Lincoln College, Oxford.

In 1899, while still an undergraduate, Thomas married Helen Noble, daughter of the essayist and poet James Ashcroft Noble (1844-1896). Encouraged by his wife’s father, Thomas committed himself to becoming a man of letters. He worked frantically, reviewing up to fifteen books a week (usually poetry collections) for the Daily Chronicle, and penning six collections of essays in eight years. Thomas was a skilful critic; in 1913, The Times described him as the man with the keys to the Paradise of English poetry. He also became a close friend of the Welsh poet W. H. Davies, whose career he almost single-handedly developed.

Thomas was never entirely happy with life as a prolific essayist, however. In correspondence with the poet Gordon Bottomely, he described himself as a hack writer, a hurried and harried prose man whose exhaustion left his brain wild. Thomas suffered from chronic depression, apparently carrying a vial of poison (which he described as his saviour) with him at all times. In 1911, he suffered a severe mental breakdown.

In the spring of 1914, in what was arguably the most formative event of his life, Thomas met the American poet Robert Frost. Although Frost is now one of America’s most adored poets, at this point no one would publish his work in the United States, and he had emigrated to England in search of artistic fortune. Thomas had previously reviewed Frost’s work at great length, and, upon meeting, the men engaged in lengthly discussions on the nature and form of poetry.

On one of their many long countryside walks, Frost suggested to Thomas that sections of his In Pursuit of Spring (1913) — a meditative travelogue documenting Thomas’ pilgrimage by bicycle from Clapham Common, London, to the Quantock Hills of Somerset — might be turned into poems. Together, the two men experimented with composing lines that followed, in loose poetic form, the sound-patterns of speech — building on theories of rhythm and form Thomas had expressed in his critiques of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1912) and Walter Pater (1913).

Frost’s advice turned out to be transformative. Thomas returned to his accumulated writings with new imagination. He began to pen loose and lyrical poems, calling them quintessences of the best parts of my prose books which purged the stultifying effects of damned rhetoric from his writing. As well as being a creative release, Thomas found the process of writing poetry to be highly therapeutic; in his journals, he spoke of them as fostering a sense of strong mental calm.

Thomas began writing poetry seriously in December of 1914 — five months after the onset of World War I. He published several poems under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway, which variously baffled and delighted reviewers. Meanwhile, he deliberated over whether to join the war effort or not (Frost penned what would become his most famous poem, The Road Not Taken, in response to Thomas’s dilemma).

Eventually, despite being overage, Thomas enlisted in a voluntary unit in July 1915. He then returned to his poetry with a renewed vigour. However, Thomas was not a war poet in the same sense as Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon — the trenches barely feature in his work, and he only wrote one poem after reaching France — nor was he any less conflicted than these men about the conflict. For Thomas, World War I compounded a range of complex feelings he harboured regarding England, the countryside, culture and identity. Speaking of his enlistment in the essay ‘This Is England’, he said Something, I felt, had to be done before I could again look composedly at English landscape. However, he stressed elsewhere that I hate not Germans nor grow hot/With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.

In November 1916, Thomas was commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery as a second lieutenant. Soon after arriving in France, Thomas was involved in the Battle of Arras, a British offensive. On Easter Monday (9th April), while standing to light his pipe, one of the last shells fired during the battle landed close to him, causing a concussive blast from which he didn’t recover. He was aged 39.

Despite being less well-known than other World War I poets, Thomas is regarded by many critics as one of the finest. Since the seventies, five new anthologies of his verse have appeared (the vast majority of Thomas’ work wasn’t published during his brief literary life), and the longtime British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes went so far as to call him the father of us all. In 2011, a biography of Thomas by Matthew Hollis entitled Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas won the Costa Biography Award.

In 1985, Thomas was among sixteen World War I poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner. Meanwhile, in Steep, East Hampshire — where Thomas and his wife lived between 1913 and 1916, and where he composed the bulk of his poems — a memorial stone has been erected to the memory of the poet. The stone’s inscription includes the final line from his essay collection, Light and Twilight (1911): And I rose up and knew I was tired and I continued my journey.

NOTE

Or the five songs printed at the end of this book, only La Fille du Roi has been published before, I believe. The Holm Bank Hunting Song and Poor Old Horse were sung by competitors for folksong prizes at the annual Westmoreland Musical Festival, and I owe them to the kindness of Mr. George Rathbone. The Mowing Song and Mary, come into the Field, were given to me by friends.

Edward Thomas

PART I

LEAVING TOWN

THE HEART OF ENGLAND

CHAPTER I

LEAVING TOWN

SUNDAY afternoon had perfected the silence of the suburban street. Every one had gone into his house to tea; none had yet started for church or promenade; the street was empty, except for a white pigeon that pecked idly in the middle of the road and once leaned upon one wing, raised the other so as to expose her tender side and took the rain deliciously; so calm and unmolested was the hour.

The houses were in unbroken rows and arranged in pairs, of which one had a bay window on the ground floor and one had not. Some had laurels in front; some had names. But they were so much alike that the street resembled a great storehouse where yards of goods, all of one pattern, are exposed, all with that painful lack of character that makes us wish to rescue one and take it away and wear it, and soil it, and humanise it rapidly.

Soon a boy of nine years old came out of one house and stood at the gate. At first he moved briskly and looked in every direction as if expecting to see some one whom he knew; but in a little while he paused and merely looked towards the pigeon, so fixedly that perhaps he saw it not. The calm silenced him, took him into its bosom, yet also depressed him. Had he dared, he would have shouted or run; he would have welcomed the sound of a piano, of a dog barking, of a starling coldly piping. While he still paused an old man rounded the corner of the street and came down in the roadway towards him.

The old man was small and straight, and to his thin figure the remains of a long black coat and grey trousers adhered with singular grace. You could not say that he was well dressed, but rather that he was in the penultimate stage of a transformation like Dryope’s or Daphne’s, which his pale face had not altogether escaped. His neglected body seemed to have grown this grey rind that flapped like birch bark. Had he been born in it the clothing could not have been more apt. The eye travelled from these clothes with perfect satisfaction—as from a branch to its fruit—to his little crumpled face and its partial crust of hair. Yet he walked. One hand on a stick, the other beneath a basket of watercress, he walked with quick, short steps, now and then calling out unexpectedly, as if in answer to a question, Watercresses! No one interrupted him. He was hungry; he nibbled at pieces of cress with his gums, and so kneaded his face as if it had been dough. He passed the boy; he stooped, picked up a rotten apple, and in the act frightened the pigeon, which rose, as the boy saw, and disappeared.

The boy raised his head and watched. He saw the old man—as in an eloquent book and not with his own usually indolent eyes—and thought him a traveller. Yes! that was how a traveller looked—a strange, free man, hatless, walking in the road, ignoring puddles, talking carelessly to himself; from the country—such was his stick and the manner of his clothes; with something magnificent and comely in his hoariness; sleeping the boy knew not where, perhaps not at all, but going on and on, certainly not to church, but perhaps to places with mountains, icebergs, houses in the branches of trees, great waters, camels, monkeys, crocodiles, parrots, ivory, cannibals, curved swords. And the boy flushed to think that the quiet street was an avenue to all the East, the Pole, the Amazon . . . to dark men who wondered about the sunlight, the wind, the rain, and whence they came . . . to towns set down in the heart of forests and lonely as ships at sea. But whatever he was, the old man was more blessed than any one whom the boy had ever seen.

The old man was gone out of sight. The boy started to run and follow; but he stumbled and fell and uttered his intolerable longing in a fit of grave tears, while the street began to be bright and restless again.

I thought to follow him myself. But the next day I was still in that grey land, looking at it from a railway train.

The hundreds of streets parallel or at angles with the railway—some exposing flowery or neglected back gardens, bedrooms half seen through open windows, pigeon houses with pigeons bowing or flashing in flight, all manner of domesticities surprised—others a line of shop fronts and gorgeous or neat or faded women going to and fro—others, again, a small space that had been green and was still grassy under its encumbrance of dead trees, scaffolding and bricks—some with inns having good names—these streets are the strangest thing in the world. They have never been discovered. They cannot be classified. There is no tradition about them. Poets have not shown how we are to regard them. They are to us as mountains were in the Middle Ages, sublime, difficult, immense; and yet so new that we have inherited no certain attitude towards them, of liking or dislike. They suggest so much that they mean nothing at all. The eye strains at them as at Russian characters which are known to stand for something beautiful or terrible; but there is no translator: it sees a thousand things which at the moment of seeing are significant, but they obliterate one another. More than battlefield or library, they are dense with human life. They are as multitudinous and painful and unsatisfying as the stars. They propose themselves as a problem to the mind, only a little less so at night when their surfaces hand the mind on to the analogies of sea waves or large woods.

Nor at the end of my journey was the problem solved. It was a land of new streets and half-built streets and devastated lanes. Ivied elm trunks lay about with scaffold poles, uprooted shrubs were mingled with bricks, mortar with turf, shining baths and sinks and rusty fire grates with dead thistles and thorns. Here and there a man in a silk hat or a little girl with neat ankles and high brown boots stepped amidst the deeply rutted mud. An artist who wished to depict the Fall and some sympathy with it in the face of a ruined Eden might have had little to do but copy an acre of the surviving fields.

A north wind swept the land clean. In the hedges and standing trees, it sobbed at intervals like a bitter child forcing himself to cry; in the windowless houses it made a merrier sound like a horn. It drove workmen and passers-by to spend as much time as possible in The King’s Head, and there the medley of the land was repeated. Irish and Cockney accents mingled with Kentish; Americans would have been out of place. No one seemed to dislike the best room in the inn, where there was a piano, a coloured picture of Lord Roberts and of the landlord as a youth, an old print of snipe-shooting, some gaudy and fanciful advertisements of spirits, and no fire to warm the wall-paper which had once had a pattern characteristic of poor bathrooms.

I felt a kind of exalted and almost cheerful gloom as I stepped out and saw that it was raining and would go on raining. O exultation of the sorrowful heart when Nature also seems to be sorrowing! What strange merriment is this which the dejected mind and the wind in the trees are making together! What high lavolt of the shuffling heels of despair! As two lovers wounded and derided will make of their complainings one true joy that triumphs, so will the concealing rain and the painful mind.

The workmen had gone; faint lights began to appear through the blinds of the finished houses. There was no sunset, no change from day to night. The end of the day was like what is called a natural death in bed; an ill-laid fire dies thus. With the darkness a strange spirit of quiet joy appeared in the air. Old melodies floating about it on that mourning wind. The rain formed a mist and a veil over the skeletons round about, but it revealed more than it took away; Nature gained courage in the gloom. The rain smoothed her as it will wash away tears on the lonely hills. The trees were back in Eden again. They were as before in their dim, stately companies. The bad walking was no annoyance. Once I came upon a line of willows above dead reeds that used to stand out by a pond as the first notice to one walking out of London that he was in the country at last; they were unchanged; they welcomed and encouraged once more. The lighted windows in the mist had each a greeting; they were as the windows we strain our eyes for as we descend to them from the hills of Wales or Kent; like those, they had the art of seeming a magical encampment among the trees, brave, cheerful lights which men and women kept going amidst the dense and powerful darkness. The thin, incompleted walls learned a venerable utterance.

The night grew darker. The sound of pianos mingled with the wind. I could not see the trees—I was entrapped in a town where I had once known nothing but fields and one old house, stately and reticent among the limes. A sense of multitude surged about and over me—of multitudes entirely unknown to me—collected by chance—mere numbers—human faces that were at that moment expressing innumerable strange meanings with which I had nothing to do. Had I said to one who entered an adjacent house that I was retrospectively a lodger of his, since I had once hidden for half a day in the hollow oak in his front garden, he would have stared. Here were people living in no ancient way. That they supped and slept in their houses was all that was clear to me. I wondered why—why did they go on doing these things? Did they ever sit up thinking and thinking, trying to explain to themselves why they were there, and then fall asleep in their chairs and awake still with the same goalless thought and so go shivering to bed? The window lights were now as strange to me and as fascinating as, to a salmon swaying by a bridge, the lights and faces of the poachers on the bank. As if it were new came back to me the truism that most men are prisons to themselves.

Reviews for The Heart of England

[alaudacorax · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Reading this I knew little of Edward Thomas: I vaguely remember we did some of his poems at school – long, long time ago – and vaguely remember liking them, and I think I bought this on the strength of that when it turned up amongst Amazon recommendations and was just pence for a Kindle downloadThis is a book of prose writings on the countryside.I didn’t believe in it. It read as if he was casting around for something to write about, decided the countryside might be a good idea, but didn’t really have it in his heart, or, at least, not the natural world part of it – which is the larger part of the book.His descriptive writing was too self-consciously ‘poetic’, too self-consciously whimsical in its imagery and crusted with flowery ornamentation that really wore me down. Over and over I found myself wondering what he thought was the purpose of a particular adjective, metaphor or simile (if he did purpose anything other than ornamentation). ‘Ham-fisted’ came to mind, prose knee-deep in adjectives and with lumbering, awkward similes like wayward giants staggering drunkenly through pensively green fields of contemplative cabbages – oops! Sorry.He didn’t, even when writing of aspects of the natural world most familiar to me, conjure those little flashes of recognition the best writing does. In fact, I often found myself thinking that such-and-such a tree just doesn’t look like that, or such-and-such a bird doesn’t sound like that, and so on – an effect of the writer stretching too far for original description and falling down.I found it liberally sprinkled with ‘What the hell is he talking about?’ moments. I don’t mean disagreeing with him, here – I mean literally not being able to work out what he thinks he’s saying. An example, and this is a comparatively short one: I think I would take it somewhat amiss if a wind got uppity and ‘blew softly from over Lethe and breathed upon our eyelids, coming as delicate intercessors between us and life’ – quite apart that winds should leave the more delicate work to breezes, what does it mean? To use a long-winded and tortuous simile of my own, his prose was often like those little paths you find in ornamental woodlands, that wander in and out and up and down without particularly going anywhere, eventually turning back into themselves (on second thoughts, that’s a much more sensible simile that a lot of Thomas’s).He often mixed chunks of philosophizing into his descriptions. It wasn’t impressive; it was mostly unconvincing and always tedious.The work improved somewhat in the places where he dealt with country people, as when he wrote about meeting the tramp who claimed to have participated in a murder or the old man with the tragic love story in his past. There was the stamp of truth about these. They read as if they were, at least at base, memories of real-life encounters, told relatively plainly with the literary whimsy kept more or less under control. The book sparked into life in these places. However, the less directly the narrative voice was involved with these characters, the more the annoying whimsy crept back.However, those high spots only served to more convince me that the broad mass of his verbiage and foliage didn’t stem from genuine involvement and observation.I got the strong impression that his forte was people and the human condition, and definitely not the natural world. Unfortunately, the larger part of the work was description of the natural world ...I was determined to finish the book and slogged on and eventually found it developing a sort of gooey, perverse fascination, like having in your fridge one of those sticky, sweet confections that you have to keep nibbling away at just because it’s there, even though you know it’s not good, healthy sustenance. And, of course, there was always the hope of another of those ‘real person’ anecdotes.By the time I got to the unexpected Arthurian bit at the end, though, I just didn’t have any investment in the book left to me to wonder why it was there or what, in this context, it meant. I was just glad to be through it.I don’t think I’m ever going to be re-reading this. There are plenty of much better writers on the countryside out there.In the meantime, I shall drift away like a lonely barn owl fading into a misty distance like a defeated winter sun declining into the ghostly, soft greynesses of the – Stop it! Someone might read this! Just stop it!!!