Edward Thomas (1878–1917)

Biography | Analysis of 'A Private' | More poems by Thomas

Photograph of Edward Thomas

Biography

Edward (Philip) Thomas was born in Lambeth, London, of Welsh descent and he was educated at St Paul's college and then Lincoln College at Oxford University (where he studied history). A prolific writer of prose (including biographies of Richard Jefferies, Swinburne, and Keats), and a moderately successful journalist, he began writing poetry in 1912 under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway, but did not devote himself fully to the medium until 1913 after a meeting with Robert Frost, the American poet, who by then was living in England.

Thomas enlisted in 1915 with the Artists' Rifles as a private but was killed two years later at Arras having achieved the rank of 2nd Lieutenant. His poems include some of the most noted pieces from the genre, capturing the love of the English countryside unlike any other.

Biography by: Dr. Stuart Lee, 1997

A Private

This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors
Many's a frozen night, and merrily
Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:
'At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush,' said he,
'I slept.' None knew which bush. Above the town,
Beyond 'The Drover', a hundred spot the down
In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps
More sound in France - that, too, he secret keeps.

Poems of the First World War: 'Never Such Innocence', ed. Martin Stephen (Everyman, 1995), p. 164

Literary Criticism of 'A Private'

A Private (title)
The anonimity of the central character of the poem is established by simply calling the poem 'A Private'. Thomas then is not writing a memorial poem to a certain person, but rather to the multitude of dead. Nevertheless he fills the poem with personal details giving character to the dead soldier.
'This ploughman' (L.1)
The ploughman is an important figure to Thomas, representing his love for the country and in particular, England (see also the appearance of the ploughman in 'As the Team's Head Brass').

Thomas's admiration for the countryside is well-documented, but a couple of examples will serve to illustrate this. In his essay 'England' he praises Izaak Walton's (1593–1683) The Compleat Angler as 'a book that filled me so with a sense of England...I touched the antiquity and sweetness of England - English fields, English people, English poetry, all together' ( The Last Sheaf: Essays, Edward Thomas (J. Cape, 1928), p.109.). In 1915 he compiled an anthology entitled This England in which he claims 'I wished to make a book as full of English character and country as an egg is of meat'.
''Many's a frozen night" (L.2)
This mirrors the frozen nights spent in the trenches by the ploughman (and Thomas of course).
"The Drover" (L.6)
By giving the detail of the pub's name, Thomas adds personality to the dead ploughman.
''where now...he secret keeps" (L.7 & 8)
The ending is serene, with the long vowels of the rhyming 'sleeps' and 'keeps' adding to the calm. There is no bitterness here as one would find in Sassoon or Owen - the sleep of the ploughman is 'sound' and secret.

Edward Thomas: As the Team's Head-Brass

As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away?'
'When the war's over.' So the talk began -
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out?' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps?'
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm, I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more...Have many gone
From here?' 'Yes.' 'Many lost?' 'Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

Poems of the First World War: 'Never Such Innocence', ed. Martin Stephen (Everyman, 1995), pp. 165–6

Edward Thomas: This Is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong

This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
Beside my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true:-
A kind of god he is, banging a gong.
But I have not to choose between the two,
Or between justice and injustice. Dinned
With war and argument I read no more
Than in the storm smoking along the wind
Athwart the wood. Two witches' cauldrons roar.
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
Out of the other an England beautiful
And like her mother that died yesterday.

Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
The phoenix broods serene above their ken.
But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate our foe.

Poems of the First World War: 'Never Such Innocence', ed. Martin Stephen (Everyman, 1995), pp. 72–3

Edward Thomas: 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 this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night 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 for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. Jon Silkin (Penguin Books, 1981), p. 95