First Known When Lost

That is the title of an excellent poetry blog I visit (see my sidebar on Codlins and Cream).  I thought I would start the New Year off with poetry, and have been reading poems daily this past week.  Thomas Hardy, R S Thomas, Edward Thomas. . .  I hope you enjoy this one of ET's:

FIRST KNOWN WHEN LOST

I never had noticed it until
'Twas gone, - the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill,

It was not more than a hedge overgrown,
One meadow's breadth away
I passed it day by day,
Now the soil is bare as a bone,

And black betwixt two meadows green,
Though fresh-cut faggot ends
Of hazel make some amends
With a gleam as if flowers they had been.

Strange it could have hidden so near!
And now I see as I look
That the small winding brook,
A tributary's tributary, rises there.


This is one of my favourite poems of Edward Thomas.  How we often take things for granted in the familiar landscape around us, hardly deigning it with a second glance until it is altered, ruined . . .

Edward Thomas walked like the rest of us drew breath.  It was his escape from reality, his reward for hard work, his balm, his challenge, his inspiration, his creative time, his life.  In a day he might walk 20 miles or far more, taking in the landscape he saw around him in great minutiae, jotting down sentences, descriptions in his notebook to write up later in his poetic prose which finally matured into poetry.  I can just imagine him pulling up short by this little field edge corner and thinking, it was there yesterday and now . . . and out came his notebook.

RIP Edward Thomas 1878 - 1917

At 7.30 a.m. on this day in 1917, at the Battle of Arras, Philip Edward Thomas lost his life in the blast from an exploding shell as he was standing at the Beaurains Observation Post.  He is buried in Agny Military Cemetary.  

In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again. 

Edward Thomas.

How COULD she do that?

 A quiet corner of Laugharne, a village that ET knew well.

Last week my Edward Thomas Fellowship newsletter arrived, but I was feeling somewhat hornswaggled at the time with this fresh virus, so only settled down to read it earlier on this week.

I have always been a champion of the underdog, I respect honesty in others (and am stupidly honest myself) and I guess the term "what you see is what you get" was written with me in mind.  I am also a Big Softee (the capitals are essential) and my kids used to call me Softee Mummie.  Because of this, I was absolutely horrified to read Richard Emeny's article about the Thomas's friendship with the Ransomes (as in Arthur Ransome of Swallows and Amazons  - et al - fame).  Apparently he and his wife Ivy married secretly for some reason or another in 1909.  ET and Helen were their witnesses.

Anyway, Mr Emeny goes on to write about a time during the First World War (just after ET had joined the Army) when ET's daughter Myfanwy went to stay with Ivy Ransome and her daughter Tabitha, her husband being busy in Russia, as a War correspondent.  Myfanwy wrote letters home to Helen, often asking Ivy how words should be spelt as she wasn't very good at spelling.  But instead of spelling the words that Myfanwy wanted to use, Ivy spelt out  "the most cruel and spiteful criticisms of Mother's looks and behaviour" which, being read by Helen, already distraught and with nerves as taut as piano wires over Edward going to be a soldier, absolutely broke her heart.  Then she gradually realized that a child would never write such awful things and the truth dawned on her. 

I just cannot believe how spiteful and downright nasty that woman was, and to feel SO sorry for poor Helen, who was - at best - ill-equipped to cope with such venom, especially without the support - ANY support, just having ET under the same roof would have helped her - of Edward at this dreadful time.  You may imagine, subsequent parcels of goodies from Ivy (guilty conscience?) were returned unopened, and it will be no great surprise to hear that the Ransomes divorced in 1924, and his daughter Tabitha refused to see him after that (doubtless poisoned by her mother's lies).  Ivy apparently saw herself as a lady, and perhaps had lowered herself to marry Ransome in the first place, hence the secrecy.  Ransome's biographer, Hugh Brogan, wrote that "it was impossible to be a good husband to Ivy". 

Meanwhile, I am sitting here writing this 100 years on, and wishing SO MUCH that I could scoop Helen up and give her a big hug, and tell her not to pay any attention to such a jealous miserable b*tch.  I won't tell you what I'd have liked to say to Ivy!  Ain't life strange?

Walk around Llyn Llech Owain - a favourite spot for Edward Thomas

You must forgive the prolonged interval since I last posted on this blog.  Unfortunately illness played a part, and I think I had quite over-egged the Edward Thomas cake by putting in so much reading and note-taking before I gave my talk last May.  Now my brain seems to be functioning more clearly, and I have some fresh books about Edward Thomas and his work, and I am gradually taking a deep breath and moving on.

Above is a photo of the area at the edge of Llyn Llech Owain at Gorslas in Carmarthenshire - a favourite walk of Edward Thomas's when he was staying in Ammanford.  Just out of sight to the right is the spring which fills the lake, and it is quite a determined gushing spring at that.  The legend which is associated with the lake is best told in Thomas's own words:

". . . and Llyn Llech Owen, and have wondered that only one legend should be remembered of those that have been born of all the gloom and the golden lilies and the plover that glories in its loneliness; for I stand in need of a legend when I come down to it through rolling heathery land, through bogs, among blanched and lichened crags, and the deep sea of heather, with a few flowers and many withered ones, of red and purple whin, of gorse and gorse-flower, and (amongst the gorse) a grey curling dead grass, which all together make the desolate colour of a "black mountain"; and when I see the water for ever waved except among the weeds in the centre, and see the water-lily leaves lifted and resembling a flock of wild-fowl, I cannot always be content to see it so remote, so entirely inhuman, and like a thing a poet might make to show a fool what solitude was, and as it remains with its one poor legend of a man who watered his horse at a well, and forgot to cover it with the stone, and riding away, saw the water swelling over the land from the well, and galloped back to stop it, and saw the lake thus created and bounded by the track of his horse's hooves; and thus it is a thing from the beginning of the world that has never exchanged a word with men, and now never will, since we have forgotten the language, though on some days the lake seems not to have forgotten it."

I couldn't resist climbing up this little incline, to see the view . . .  It reminded me very much of Canford Heath in Dorset, which I know quite well from years gone by.  Better view from the top though.

It is not at its most welcoming in winter.  Poor peaty soil supports only moor grass, heather and ling and gorse, and a few pine trees.  Since the time ET knew it, the area was planted up with conifer forests (by the Forestry Commission) but this has all been cleared now and improvements for wildlife are being made all the time.  Dormice boxes for one.

 

The Visitor Centre - which had underfloor heating, and was a nice place to sit and warm up out of the wind.

 Display board telling you something about the site now.

A little bit about the history of this area.

Some of the wild birds regularly seen here.

Some photos of the Dormice and the nesting boxes they are putting up.  The chew-holes in the Hazlenuts are characteristic.

I hope you can read this - some more of the history and archaeology of this area.

The sombre January landscape was lit fleetingly by sun.

 

I wonder what ET would make of it now?  I am sure he would appreciate the fact that it is now an SSSI, and that steps are being taken to balance the flora and fauna of the area, following the depredation of the Forest Commission plantings.  He would probably hate the "managed" and "controlled" aspects of it though and prefer it wild and unvisited as when he knew it.

Perhaps the last word could go to Walter de la Mare, a good friend of ET's, and whose poems were reviewed by the latter, this included "Sorcery", the first verse of which is here:

"What voice is that I hear
Crying across the pool?"
"It is the voice of Pan you hear,
Crying his sorceries shrill and clear,
In the twilight dim and cool."

All Day It Has Rained by Alun Lewis

 

All Day It Has Rained

All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
And from the first grey wakening we have found
No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain
And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap
And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap.
All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,
Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream
Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly
Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly
Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces.
And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,
Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,
Reading the Sunday papers - I saw a fox
And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home; -
And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome,

And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees;

As of ourselves or those whom we
For years have loved, and will again
Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain
Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.

And I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart
Than the children I watched in the woods on Saturday
Shaking down burning chestnuts for the schoolyard's merry play,
Or the shaggy patient dog who followed me
By Sheet and Steep and up the wooded scree
To the Shoulder o' Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long
On death and beauty - till a bullet stopped his song.

Alun Lewis :

 

 

I thought of this poem today, as we have had rain since before I got up this morning.   Now it has stopped for a while, and a Blackbird is singing from the apple tree on the lawn.  I thought I would share this with you.

The small river in spate feeds into the Cothi, and marks the ancient border of the Tally Abbey lands (the adjacent cottage is called "Monachdy" - "Monk's House") and there was once a small grange of theirs very close, which was ruinous by mid-Victorian times and eventually used as a stable before being broken up and used for building stone (we have one or two pieces here - our house being on a direct trackway to Monachdy).

KILLED IN ACTION by W H Davies

W H Davies was the tramp-turned-poet fellow-Welshman friend of Thomas's and who he often helped out with his rent, even though he and Helen were struggling on the pittance Thomas earned reviewing books and writing them.  Here is his tribute to his friend.

KILLED IN ACTION

(Edward Thomas)

Happy the man whose home is still
In Nature's green and peaceful ways;
To wake and hear the birds so loud,
That scream for joy to see the sun
Is shouldering past a sullen cloud.

And we have known those days, when we
Would wait to hear the cuckoo first;
When you and I, with thoughtful mind,
Would help a bird to hide her nest,
For fear of other hands less kind.

But thou, my friend, art lying dead:
War, with its hell-born childishness,
Has claimed thy life, with many more:
The man that loved this England well,
And never left it once before.



You may know "supertramp" W H Davies' poem Leisure . . . "What is life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare . . ."  One from my childhood, committed to memory.

96th Anniversary of tghe death of Edward Thomas, poet

 (Photo to follow later - blogger playing up).

On this day, the 9th April 1917, Edward Thomas was killed by the blast from a shell in the Battle of Arras.  I will turn to Eleanor Farjeon, who loved him as his patient wife Helen did, to explain what happened, in the words of the Sergeant of Edward's company, whom Helen and Eleanor met when he was on leave from the Front:

The Sergeant recollected: "At the end of the day when the battle was over we had the Huns on the run, and the plain was full of our men shouting and singing and dancing.  We thought we had won the war!  Mr Thomas came up from the dug-out behind his gun and leaned in the opening filling his clay pipe.  One of the Huns turned as he was running and shot a stray shot, and Mr Thomas fell.  It was over in an instant.  I went out to the men and called, "Men, we've lost our best officer."  The cry went up, "Not Mr Thomas?" and there was no more shouting that day.

When Edward fell he was still holding his half-filled clay.  It did not break, and came back to Helen with his other things.  She gave it to Merfyn.

This was the story as nearly I remember it in the Sergeant's own words.  But my memory had misled me about the stray shot, it was a stray shell.  When Helen came to know Edward's Captain, Franklin Lushington, he told her that as Edward stood by his dug-out lighting his pipe, all the Germans had retreated, but a last shell they sent over passed so close to him that thhe blast stopped his heart.  'He told me', Helen writes, 'there was no wound and his beloved body was not injured.  This was borne out by the fact that when the contents of his pockets were returned to me - a bundle of letters, a note-book and the Shakespeare sonnets I had given him, they were all strangely creased as though subject to some terrible pressure, most strange to see.  There was no wound or disfigurement at all.  He just died standing there in the early morning after the battle.'  Captain Lushington told Helen that Edward could have had a job 'back and safe, but he chose the dangerous front observation post.'


Edward Thomas: you are not forgotten, nor ever will be.