COLERIDGE, EDWARD THOMAS AND ENGLISHNESS

SAEKO YOSHIKAWA

Coleridge, Edward Thomas and Englishness:

Poetry of Contemplation

Introduction
In March 1913 Edward Thomas made a bicycle tour from London to the Quantock
Hills, during which he reflected upon what he saw, heard and felt, and on writers
associated with the landscapes through which he passed. On approaching the
village of Nether Stowey, his goal, the association with Coleridge made him
excited and imaginative:

Honeysuckle ramped on the banks of the deep-worn road in such profusion

as I had never before seen. The sky had clouded softly, and the sun-warmed
misty woods of the coombs, the noise of slender waters threading them,
the exuberant young herbage, …but above all the abounding honeysuckle,
produced an effect of wildness and richness, purity and softness, so vivid
that the association of Nether Stowey was hardly needed to summon up
Coleridge. The mere imagination of what these banks would be like when
the honeysuckle was in flower was enough to suggest the poet. (Thomas,
In Pursuit of Spring 272–73)

Why the image of abounding honeysuckle is “enough to suggest” Coleridge is not

to be elucidated except in an imaginative and intuitive way. For Thomas, the wild
and sweet wayside flowers suggest the double aspect of Coleridge’s imagination,
responding to pure and homely images on the one hand, and to the rich and
magical on the other hand.1 It is notable how contemplating a landscape—gazing
upon it as he passes—leads Thomas seamlessly into a thoughtful contemplation
on the nature of Coleridge’s poetical imagination. This musing quality is
characteristic of the most distinctive works of Edward Thomas, where sensory
perceptions and meditation occur concurrently and continue uninterrupted. He

POETICA 85. 1–19 ©2016 Toshiyuki Takamiya ISSN 0287-1629

2 SAEKO YOSHIKAWA

was a contemplative poet, both in the sense that he observed something attentively,
and in the sense that he responded thoughtfully or pensively towards what was
thus being contemplated. Hovering between outward and inward contemplations,
many of his poems try to capture the sensory process of thinking, or thoughts
in their pre-linguistic states, as if he did not want to close-off contemplation by
fixing thoughts in definite words.
This mental attitude may remind us of Coleridge’s explanation of
“ideas,” distinguished from “conceptions” that consist in “a conscious act of
understanding”: an idea is what is “contemplated subjectively (i.e. as existing
in a subject or mind),” influencing us without our being “distinctly conscious”
or “competent to express it in definite words.”2 Elsewhere Coleridge describes
“the eyes quietly & steadfastly dwelling on an object not as if looking at it or as
seeing anything in it, or as in any way exerting an act of Sight upon it, but as if
the whole attention were listening to what the heart was feeling or saying about
it” (Notebooks 2. 3027). On this passage Kazuko Oguro comments that here
“the act of sight is integrated in the whole body of his senses, and is directed
both to the outer and to the inner world” (75). This contemplative mode both
outwardly and inwardly directed can be observed both in Coleridge’s and
Thomas’s poems, where the poet muses upon natural images “subjectively” or
inwardly. In Coleridge’s case, desultory musing is likely to be replaced by a more
“conscious” act of thinking, while in the case of Edward Thomas, he seems to try
to remain in this suspended mode as long as possible. In what follows, I would
like to explore contemplative aspects of Thomas’s poetry, showing how, like or
more than Coleridge, he attempted to give voice to what is elusive without losing
its elusive nature. I will also consider how Thomas, a poet “who died a soldier-
poet” of England,3 contemplated upon Englishness through reading Coleridge’s
poetry, and through writing his own poems.

1. Contemplation—Gazing without Thinking

I would like to begin with a haiga-like picture of a July water-scape:

Naught moves but clouds, and in the glassy lake

Their doubles and the shadow of my boat.
The boat itself stirs only when I break
This drowse of heat and solitude afloat
To prove if what I see be bird or mote,
Or learn if yet the shore woods be awake.
COLERIDGE, EDWARD THOMAS AND ENGLISHNESS 3

Long hours since dawn grew, — spread, — and passed on high

And deep below, — I have watched the cool reeds hung
Over images more cool in imaged sky:
Nothing there was worth thinking of so long;
All that the ring-doves say, far leaves among,
Brims my mind with content thus still to lie. (“July”)

In this serene picture the poet does nothing but lie and watch, in the dawn-light
gradually expanding. Nothing moves but clouds and their reflections on the water,
and nothing breaks the solitude but the poet himself, like in the opening lines of
Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” where “all [is] at rest,” leaving the poet to “that
solitude, which suits / Abstruser musings.” He cannot continue, however, such
abstract meditation:

’Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs

And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme stillness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! (8–13)

Disturbed, or bemused, by the extreme stillness, Coleridge’s mind slips from

the conscious act of thinking into a state of semiconscious, desultory musing:
all he can do now is to itemize “sea, hill, and wood” repeatedly. Although in a
different season, the solitary musing is shared by Thomas’s July poem. While in
the first stanza consciousness stirs (to “prove” something), the poem gradually
settles itself upon the perfect stillness of the water, on which the poet merely
floats, motionless, musing the reeds.4 In what Edna Longley calls an “idyllic
suspension” (303), the poet remains floating between the sky and the imaged sky,
perception and reflection, the conscious and the subconscious.
A similar state of mind without a particular object to think of can be observed
in “Sowing,” where sensory perceptions suggest the “meaning” of the poem’s
images. On an early spring day the poet feels with all five senses how perfect it
is for sowing: he smells and touches the prepared ground, “As sweet and dry…
/ As tobacco-dust” (3–4); hears the distant “Owl’s chuckling first soft cry” (7);
sees the first star (8); and “taste[s] deep the hour” (5) between the bird’s cry and
the appearance of the first star:
4 SAEKO YOSHIKAWA

A long stretched hour it was;

Nothing undone
Remained; the early seeds
All safely sown. (9–12)

As in “July,” the poet here enjoys an “idyllic suspension,” between day and night,
between fulfilment and expectation, between an end and a beginning. When the
rain starts silently (14), he listens to its sound and feels its light touch as if “Half a
kiss, half a tear” (15). These metaphors suggest a slight movement of his emotion,
stirred by sensory perception; but “hardly a thought or memory shap[ing] itself”
(Thomas, Horae Solitariae 166) from this musing, Thomas is content to inhabit
the “hour between” experience and reflection.
Subjective contemplation without a conscious act of understanding is often
associated with a function of senses, especially the olfactory sense—the sense
of smell—as can be seen in such poems as “Digging” and “Old Man,” and the
auditory sense as in “The Mill-Water.” In this last poem the poet is attracted to an
old mill whose water wheel is gone: “Only the sound remains / Of the old mill”
(1–2). But to the poet’s ear the water sounds like the music of the mill-wheel’s
busy roar. Listening to it, his thought is gradually merged with it:

Sometimes a thought is drowned

By it, sometimes
Out of it climbs;
All thoughts begin or end upon this sound, (25–28)

By day, the water-sound is “naught / Compared with thought” (10–11). But

night “makes the difference” (12); just as Coleridge’s musing was both disturbed
and guided by the hush in “Frost at Midnight,” the nocturnal sound of water
in “The Mill-Water” both overwhelms and stimulates thinking, as if those dark
“sometimes” are spaces between the “end” and the “beginning” of thoughts.
What these thoughts are about is not revealed, as in “The Eolian Harp”:

Full many a thought uncalled and undetained,

And many idle flitting phantasies,
Traverse my indolent and passive brain,
As wild and various as the random gales
That swell and flutter on this subject lute! (39–43)
COLERIDGE, EDWARD THOMAS AND ENGLISHNESS 5

Both in “The Eolian Harp” and in “The Mill-Water,” the poet’s mind is in a
passive and receptive state, and one thought after another emerges and submerges
without taking shape, or without being caught and fixed by definitive words.
In the case of “Old Man,” Thomas tries to “think” while sniffing the bitter
scent of wormwood or old-man, but eventually gives up trying to do so. As in
“Frost at Midnight,” where gazing at a film fluttering on the grate leads the poet
into a childhood memory and to a prayer for his own child, in “Old Man,” the
herb’s unique smell seems to bring back childhood memories to the poet and
also invites him to muse upon the future of his daughter. But unlike Coleridge,
Thomas cannot be certain about the future recollection by his daughter; neither
can he retrieve anything from his own past:

I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,

Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
Always in vain. (“Old Man” 26–29)

He tries to remember what he should, but cannot. Like the sound of the Mill-
Water, the herb’s bitter scent stirs contemplation, but also bewilders:

I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray

And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember: (32–35)

No childhood memory that Thomas would recall comes back to him, and he is
left alone in “an avenue, dark, nameless, without end” (39), suspended between
remembering and forgetting. But although ending with this bitter remark, the
poet does not regret that he cannot remember. His daughter, who now plucks a
feather-like tip from the door-side bush and sniffs it, “perhaps / Thinking, perhaps
of nothing” (14–15), is a mirror image of the poet’s own childhood self in an ideal
state of mind, indulged in pre-linguistic, subjective contemplation. And though in
a rather ironical way, his present state of forgetfulness simulates a frame of mind
in non-linguistic contemplation.
“Digging” is another poem that tries to capture the olfactory process of
thinking; starting with this remark: “Today I think / Only with scents” (1–2), the
poet is not so much thinking as savouring (rather than attempting to rationalise
and describe) various smells: dead leaves, bracken, wild carrot’s seed, the square
6 SAEKO YOSHIKAWA

mustard field. The smell of the “wounded” tree root, the smoke of “a bonfire
[that] burns / The dead” (10–11), “the waste” and “the dangerous” may suggest
the war, although this is not made explicit. While “Sowing,” another poem on soil
we have seen above, is associated with life and growth, “Digging” suggests the
paradoxical purging of death and decay as the “bonfire burns / …all to sweetness”
(10–12). As Edna Longley suggests, the fire may be a metaphor for poetry-writing
that beautifies everything (224). Or, it may be a metaphor for the past; in “Early
one morning” Thomas remarks that “the past is the only dead thing that smells
sweet” (15). The bonfire, like the past, turns all the bitterness of life into sweet
memories. “Digging” may also hint at the sweetness and bitterness of earthly
living, the awareness that we continue to live and laugh on the land where we
have laid the dead. But the poem says nothing clearly, allowing what cannot be
articulated as words, such as the smell of “dark earth” and the robin’s song, speak
all the more compellingly:

It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth. (13–16)

The oxymoronic last line may convey something like the joy and sorrow of
living, but it is only suggested through the robin’s song (heard also by Coleridge
in “Frost at Midnight” and by Keats at the close of “To Autumn”). The rhyming
of “mirth” and “earth” is also evocative, and is probably an echo of a phrase
appearing in “The Other,” where the protagonist, weary of his long pursuit of his
double, stands between the earth and sky, thinking nothing as he contemplates
the dying day:

And all was earth’s, or all was sky’s;

No difference endured between
The two. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
........................
The last light filled a narrow firth
Among the clouds. I stood serene,
And with a solemn quiet mirth,
An old inhabitant of earth. (“The Other” 71–73, 77–80)

Again with an oxymoronic phrase, “a solemn quiet mirth” and with rhyming
COLERIDGE, EDWARD THOMAS AND ENGLISHNESS 7

words of “mirth” and “earth,” the poet continues to reflect upon what it might
mean to live as an “old inhabitant of earth”—another redolent phrase, stirring
further reflection. These poems stimulate our ears and nostrils imaginatively,
inviting us to a ruminative mood, while declining to say what we should “think.”

2. Language Not to be Betrayed

As we have seen, Thomas seems to have been interested in the state of non-
linguistic contemplation in which thoughts are emerging and about to take
shape, rather than fully articulated. On the other hand, as can be seen in such
evocative phrases as “sad songs of Autumn mirth” and “an old inhabitant of
earth,” he attempted to capture in his poetry thoughts that remain elusive,
beyond articulation. In what way does he try to give voice to them without
conceptualization? In “The Word,” another poem referring to remembering and
forgetting, the poet is at first resigned to forgetting, letting things, events and
thoughts that once had real presence sink into the abyss again. He even lets go of
what is yet to happen:

All lost, as is a childless woman’s child

And its child’s children, in the undefiled
Abyss of what can never be again. (3–5)

The passage implies how potential thoughts or ideas are dispersed even as they
rise into contemplative consciousness, and are lost in the abyss of “what can
never be” like things “I have forgot that I forget” (9). Lesser things, however, like
an “empty thingless name” (12), are irresistibly called to mind. It is interesting
that such a moment comes while he is “thinking of the elder scent / That is like
food” (17–18) or “content / With the wild rose scent that is like memory” (18–
19). As in “Old Man” the poet thinks as if to smell and smells as if to recall; this
time, though, the key is not in the smell but in a bird’s call. While he is indulged
in sensory musing, one name is automatically recalled:

This name suddenly is cried out to me

From somewhere in the bushes by a bird
Over and over again, a pure thrush word. (“The Word” 20–22)

So the poet has grasped something here. But, although the bird is “saying it clear”
(15), because it is a thrush word we cannot know what it is — or whether, like
Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush,” the bird’s “carolings” tell of something “whereof he
8 SAEKO YOSHIKAWA

knew, / And I was unaware” (31–32).

Thomas regarded the language of birds, winds and trees as more suggestive
and insightful than human words, as is stated in “I never saw that land before.”
In the poem, while walking without any particular object to think of, and hearing
“the breeze / That hinted all and nothing spoke” (14–15), the poet reaches “some
goal” (16), possibly an epiphanic moment:

I never expected anything

Nor yet remembered: but some goal
I touched then; and if I could sing
What would not even whisper my soul
As I went on my journeying,

I should use, as the trees and birds did,

A language not to be betrayed;
And what was hid should still be hid
Excepting from those like me made
Who answer when such whispers bid. (16–25)

As these stanzas and “The Word” alike show, epiphanic moments arrive while
the poet is in a state of pre-linguistic contemplation. Furthermore, the lines 19–20
suggest that he dares to capture in his poems these pre-linguistic thoughts or
what he has not yet intelligibly understood. Thomas remarks elsewhere that
“[poets’] words have often come to mean something different from what was
consciously present in their minds when they wrote, and often more vast.”5 And
for him, these poetic words are akin to the utterances of birds, trees and winds.
In “The Penny Whistle” he says that the tin whistle, on which a boy plays an old
nursery melody, “Says far more than [he is] saying” (20); in “Home” the “sound
of sawing” rounds “all that silence [says]” (23). And Thomas thinks that to retain
their pristine integrity these non-verbal utterances should not be translated (and
thus “betrayed”) into human language—what is hidden should be kept hidden;
these utterances would not be “intelligible” except for those who have attentive,
receptive minds, which was the very thing Coleridge wished for his infant son:
“so shalt thou see and hear / The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible / Of that
eternal language” (“Frost at Midnight” 58–60).
In Thomas’s “The Brook” the poetic truth is voiced by a child. “Seated once
by a brook” (1), the poet watches a girl paddling, idly but with his ears dis-
cerning a blackbird and a thrush, his nostril perceiving a subtle honeycomb-like
COLERIDGE, EDWARD THOMAS AND ENGLISHNESS 9

scent of mugwort. As is often the case with Thomas, in this poem he enjoys the
state of in-between-ness: between attentiveness and idleness, or attachment and
detachment. Then his attention is gradually inclined to a butterfly just alighted
on a warm stone and balancing itself between motion and repose. Despite the
precarious situation in which it perches—the stone is in the middle of a road for
cart-horses—the butterfly seems poised contentedly between the warm sun and
earth. This image of self-composure disposes the poet to feel “as if I were the last
of men / And he the first of insects to have earth / And sun together and to know
their worth” (12–14). He feels as if he were alone with the butterfly in the world,
both after and before time, feeling an ecological harmony or balance between the
sun and the earth, between the butterfly and himself, between now and the eternal
flow of time. And as in “The Other,” he feels “moments of everlastingness” as
“an inhabitant of earth,” when suddenly the child’s voice awakens him from this
richly contemplative moment:

And then the child’s voice raised the dead.

‘No one’s been here before’ was what she said
And what I felt, yet never should have found
A word for, while I gathered sight and sound. (“The Brook” 25–28)

As the last line remarks, until the child utters these words the poet has not
acknowledged or articulated what he has been feeling, so the phrase “No one’s
been before” brings the poem sharply into focus even while abruptly ending its
tranquil, contemplative progress. The child’s utterance is no more articulate than
the bird’s, but “more vast” than what has been “present in the poet’s mind,” and
it brings an unexpected horizon into the poem, like Coleridge’s “therefore” at the
concluding section of “Frost at Midnight”:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. (65–74)
10 SAEKO YOSHIKAWA

The conjunction “therefore,” without introducing a logical result of what has

been mentioned, here gives a leap of imagination. In this affectionate description
of English countryside are to be seen a few instances of the “shapes and sounds
intelligible of that eternal language”: the song of the redbreast, the vapoury thaw,
eave-drops, trances of the blast, and the secret workings of frost and silent icicles.
These “intelligible” sounds and images, without being conceptualized, enabled
Coleridge to intuit the “eternal language” uttered by God. For Thomas, on the
other hand, natural images and sounds did not lead to a Coleridgean spiritual
meditation. They expressed nothing but the seasonal cycle, repeatedly observed
by generations of English people, reminding him of “some of the echoes called
up by the name of England” (This England, preface), evoked in such poems as
“Haymaking” and “The Manor Farm.”

3. Coleridge, Thomas, and Englishness

Both “Haymaking” and “The Manor Farm” contemplate what England or living
in England might mean to the poet. In each poem, the poet is walking in the
countryside, observing various elements that compose an English rural landscape.
Each poem is regulated by a sense of time’s flow, and there is a kind of epiphanic
moment at the end, which conveys a sense of the pristine quality of the place.
Like “Frost at Midnight,” “The Manor Farm” cherishes all seasons, though
it is set in February—between winter and spring; it begins with the image of a
thaw followed by rills sparkling down the road, though the animated mood is
soon subdued. The poem evokes a dreamlike mood, a sense of something abiding
for a long period of time. The earth, church, yew-tree, farmhouse, white pigeons,
cart-horses are all drowsy and lazy, and so is the poet who contemplates these
things. Then suddenly he is awakened to a truth:

The Winter’s cheek flushed as if he had drained

Spring, Summer, and Autumn at a draught
And smiled quietly. But ’twas not Winter—
Rather a season of bliss unchangeable
Awakened from farm and church where it had lain
Safe under tile and thatch for ages since
This England, Old already, was called Merry. (18–24)

What does Thomas try to convey by these seven lines? The phrase “a season
of bliss unchangeable” is as simple yet puzzling as “therefore, all seasons shall
be sweet to thee.” Despite the seeming simplicity and fairy-tale-like familiarity
COLERIDGE, EDWARD THOMAS AND ENGLISHNESS 11

of such a phrase as “Merry England,” these closing lines refuse to articulate

what has been revealed to the poet. Like the ending of “Frost at Midnight,” they
may celebrate what is enduring in a turbulent age—the seasonal circle cherished
through generations of people in England. But it is only suggested through the
“language not to be betrayed.”
“Haymaking” also captures something perpetual within a summer rural
landscape, where haymakers and cattle are enjoying a noontide rest. With finely-
honed senses, the poet contemplates the landscape of a “field sloping down” (20)
as a scene for thought. Beginning with traces of the thunder on the previous night,
the first half of the poem is stirred by the tumbling water of the mill, the dynamic
movement of a swift, the incessant songs of warblers. Then falls perfect stillness,
like that of a painting, were it not for “the scent of woodbine and hay new-mown”
(19) moving along the empty road. (Did the scent of honeysuckle remind him
of Coleridge?) Everything else is resting—haymakers, their tools, waggon and
horses are all in repose:

And all were silent. All was old,

This morning time, with a great age untold,
Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome,
Than, at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home,
A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree. (33–37)

As in “The Manor Farm” the poet is here impressed by the old, long-standing
quality of the landscape. Its “great age,” however, while associated with a long-
life or perpetuity, also suggests death and decay. In comparison with the poem’s
lively first part, its latter section is pervaded by the stillness of death. Although
the poet feels something everlasting in this scene of peacefulness, at the same
time he cannot but recognise man’s mortality:

Under the heavens that know not what years be

The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements
Uttered even what they will in times far hence—
All of us gone out of the reach of change—
Immortal in a picture of an old grange. (“Haymaking” 38–42)

Given that this was written immediately before his enlistment, it could be said
that Thomas was imagining the landscape after he had gone, a landscape he
wished to survive the war. But what was it that the farm landscape uttered to
12 SAEKO YOSHIKAWA

him? Again, he does not spell out what it is, as if trying to evade fixing it in
clear statements. Perhaps, in fact, there is no telling if he himself had clearly
understood it. Linguistic definition, for Thomas, will close-off contemplation.
In 1915 Thomas compiled an anthology, This England: Anthology from
Her Writers, one of the many anthologies of patriotic poems published during
the wartime,6 though Thomas said that he had excluded “professedly patriotic
writing” (preface). In the section called “Her Sweet Three Corners” were included
“Haymaking” and “The Manor Farm,” under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway,
juxtaposed with Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude: Written in April 1798, during
the Alarm of an Invasion.” In this poem Coleridge contemplates the landscape
surrounding the Quantock Hills, covered with “the never-bloomless furze” (6),
whose “fruit-like perfume” (204) leads him into a reflection upon what is going
to happen to England as it faces the threat of a French invasion. Here, too, we can
see contemplation’s double aspect (outward and inward). Thomas admires this
poem, as it carries “a most vivid sense of what his country [is],” and “It shows
us that, though a bad soldier, [Coleridge] was a tolerably complete Englishman,
aware of the follies both of peace and war” (A Literary Pilgrim 180). For Thomas,
to be an Englishman was to live on the land of England; and what constituted
England—such as lakes, hills, clouds, dales, rocks, and seas—constituted every
Englishman, as Coleridge declares in what follows:

O native Britain! O my Mother Isle!

How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy
To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills,
Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas,
Have drunk in all my intellectual life,
All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts,
All adoration of the God in nature. . . ?
..............................
There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul
Unborrowed from my country. (“Fears in Solitude” 182–88, 192–93)

As I have argued elsewhere, “in the topography of the Quantock Hills, Thomas
literally mapped the sensuous contours of Coleridge’s imagination” (Yoshikawa
34). In this passage from “Fears in Solitude” and also in “Frost at Midnight” and
“This Lime-tree Bower My Prison” the landscape surrounding Nether Stowey is
recognisable; and even in “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan,” “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner,” and the drama Osorio or Remorse, Thomas finds traces of the contours
COLERIDGE, EDWARD THOMAS AND ENGLISHNESS 13

of the Quantock Hills,7 which, he believes, made Coleridge’s poetical imagination

and his identity: “There lives nor form nor feeling in [his] soul unborrowed from
[his] country.”
The poem also corroborates what Thomas argues about the nation: “all ideas
of England are developed, spun out, from such a centre into something large or
infinite, solid or aëry, according to each man’s nature and capacity; …England is
a system of vast circumferences circling round the minute neighbouring points
of home” (“England” 538). What Coleridge outwardly contemplates in “Fears
in Solitude” is a particular local landscape, while inwardly he contemplates the
fate of the whole nation. For Coleridge, too, the love of England is concentrically
spun out from his love of Somerset home. What Thomas approved in Coleridge’s
poem he also found in Wordsworth, as can be seen in the following passage from
The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (1913), Thomas’s autobiographical novel:

A great poet [Wordsworth] said once upon a time that this earth is “where
we have our happiness or not at all”. For most of those who speak his
language he might have said that this England is where we have our
happiness or not at all. He meant to say that we are limited creatures,
not angels, and that our immediate surroundings are enough to exercise
all our faculties of mind and body. …England made you, and of you is
England made.8

We should love and reflect upon our immediate surroundings, Thomas suggests,
before talking about the nation, nationalism, or patriotism. Like many during
the First World War, Thomas sought for guiding principles in Romantic poets
such as Coleridge and Wordsworth rather than seeing them as exemplary figures
for rallying to the cause. He hated “jingoism,” as is clearly stated in “This is no
case of petty right or wrong”: “Beside my hate for one fat patriot / My hatred of
the Kaiser is love true” (5–6). On the other hand he remarks in “Home”: “one
nationality / We had, I and the birds that sang, / One memory” (4–6). This could
be said to be an “ecological” sense of belonging, beyond the political senses of
national boundaries. And in “Adlestrop” his sense of nationality, or community,
is expressed through the image of the songs of birds:

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. (13–16)
14 SAEKO YOSHIKAWA

As John Monks points out, given that it was written in 1915, looking back at one
June day a year before, the poem can be said to encapsulate that precious moment
of peacefulness immediately before the declaration of war (17). Through many
of his contemplative poems set in the English countryside, Thomas mused and
reflected upon what England was to him, what it meant to fight for it, and what
would survive the war. As he wrote in a letter in September 1914, he was “slowly
growing into a conscious Englishman” (quoted in Longley 262).

4. Contemplation during Wartime

The war was certainly one important factor that stimulated Thomas into
contemplation, and I would like to explore some of his war poems before
concluding this essay. “Bright Clouds,” another haiga-like piece, offers, as
in “July,” a still, motionless water-scape: “Bright clouds of may / Shade half
the pond” (1–2). As the somewhat oxymoronic opening indicates, the poem is
infiltrated by an uneasy mood despite its seemingly innocent brightness. The
“scum” of fallen blossoms drifted on the surface of the pond suggests that the
purity of white may-flower is tainted. The bright May sunlight does not reach the
shady bay of reeds, whose glossy emerald reminds the poet of the lustre of criss-
cross swords, though no one heeds:

Beyond,
All but one bay
Of emerald
Tall reeds
Like criss-cross bayonets
Where a bird once called,
Lies bright as the sun.
................
Till the moorhen calls
Again
Naught’s to be done
By birds or men. (3–9, 14–17)

The poem is again suspended between two moments, between the two bird’s
calls. Edna Longley comments that unlike “the idyllic suspension” of “July,”
here “a moment suspended between ‘calls’ and ‘criss-cross bayonets’ suggest
that Bright Clouds alludes to Thomas waiting for action” (303). He is no longer
“content thus still to lie” (“July” 12).
COLERIDGE, EDWARD THOMAS AND ENGLISHNESS 15

The drive for action is also to be observed in “A Dream,” which, written with-
in a few days of “Haymaking,” offers a totally different and strange landscape.
Thomas claims that this is based on a dream he actually had, from which he woke
saying to himself “somehow I shall be here again,”—the words that became the
last line of the poem (Spencer 83, quoted in Longley 250). In the dream Thomas,
walking with “an old friend” (supposed to be Robert Frost) through familiar
fields, came to an unknown stream, whose “dark waters were bursting out most
bright / From a great mountain’s heart” (3–4). As in “The Mill-Water” the sound
and motion of waters fascinated him:

I stood thinking there

How white, had the day shone on them, they were,
Heaving and coiling. So by the roar and hiss
And by the mighty motion of the abyss
I was bemused, that I forgot my friend
And neither saw nor sought him till the end,
When I awoke from waters unto men
Saying: ‘I shall be here some day again.’ (“A Dream” 7–14)

Though using the word “think” the poet is more “bemused” by the paradoxical
nature of waters, shining black and white, powerful and sinuous, suggestive both
of life and death. Then he emerges from his dazed state of mind with this simple
but puzzling remark: “I shall be here some day again.” What does he mean by
this? Where is “here”? What does the “mighty motion” of the abyss stand for?
Did it remind him of the sacred river of “Kubla Khan,” in whose tumult Kubla
hears “Ancestral voices prophesying war” (30)?
“The sun used to shine,” written while Thomas was in Hare Hall Camp in
Essex, looks back at the summer of 1914, when the war had just started. The
poem is characterised by its slow rhythm. The parallel syntax, repetitive words
and sounds, and alternate rhymes make a swaying cadence as if to emulate the
leisurely walking and talking of Thomas and Robert Frost, inducing a meditative
mood:

The sun used to shine while we two walked

Slowly together, paused and started
Again, and sometimes mused, sometimes talked
As either pleased, and cheerfully parted (1–4)
16 SAEKO YOSHIKAWA

Their conversation being desultory, they are more inclined to musing. They
contemplate a yellow apple bruised and giving off sweet smell, sentry-like blue
betonies, and pale crocuses suggestive of sunless Hades’ fields—these may hint
at injury, war and death, although the war remains unmentioned until moonrise,
which reminds them of those who look at the same moon from the battle field.9
Still, they cannot concentrate their thoughts on war’s actuality—what is really
happening, what it means to them, and what they should do about it: “our eyes /
Could as well imagine the Crusades / Or Caesar’s battles” (20–22).
In the sixth stanza, looking back to these walks, the poet remarks that
“Everything / To faintness like those rumours fades” (22–23). From then on he
uses a series of repetitive “like” phrases:

Like the brook’s water glittering

Under the moonlight—like those walks

Now—like us two that took them, and
The fallen apples, all the talks
And silences—like memory’s sand

When the tide covers it late or soon (24–29, italics mine)

He glimpses fragments of memories, as they retreat from him; the repetitive

“like” rings like echoes; but what they echo, what these similes stand for, is
obscured. It is as if what they talked and thought were not so important as the fact
that they had such ruminative hours. And Thomas satisfies himself by imagining
a future when other men will walk and talk like Frost and himself:

And other men through other flowers

In those fields under the same moon
Go talking and have easy hours. (30–32)

What Thomas and Frost contemplated—what they saw and thought—will

fade away, but he expects that such reflective hours will be repeated by future
generations “through other flowers” (33).
In the prefatory note to the anthology This England Thomas states: “I wished
to make a book as full of English character and country as an egg is of meat. If I
have reminded others, as I did myself continually, of some of the echoes called up
by the name of England, I am satisfied.” It could be said that what Thomas tried
COLERIDGE, EDWARD THOMAS AND ENGLISHNESS 17

to do in many of his poems was to suggest what these “echoes” or shadows of

England might mean to him, rather than to articulate any clear or definitive idea
of it. England, for Thomas, remained an elusive possibility—like “the brook’s
water glittering, / Under the moonlight,” like the magical image of icicles “qui-
etly shining to the quiet moon” with which Coleridge left his poem “Frost at
Midnight” beyond words.

Notes

1 A sight of luxuriant golden gorse developed Thomas’s literary reflection further:

“Coleridge loved equally mildness and wildness, as I saw them on the one hand in the
warm red fields, the gorse smouldering with bloom, the soft delicious greenery of the
banks; and on the other hand in the stag’s home, the dark, bleak ridges of heather or pine,
the deep-carved coombs” (In Pursuit of Spring 275).
2 Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State 12–13. I am grateful to Peter
Cheyne for this suggestion.
3 Robert Frost, “To E. T.” 8.
4 On a similar experience of floating on the still water, Thomas recounts as follows:
“The morning was already hot.…At the river I took a dinghy and sculled for nearly two
hours.…Hardly a thought or memory shaped itself. Nevertheless, I was conscious of that
blest lucidity, that physical well-being of the brain, ‘like the head of a mountain in blue air
and sunshine,’ which is so rarely achieved except in youth” (“On the Evenlode,” Horae
Solitariae 166, quoted in Longley 235–36).
5 Maurice Maeterlinck 20, quoted in Monks 16.
6 “One of the effects of the war,” a bookseller commented in the spring of 1916, “was
an increased sale of poetry” (Baily 183).
7 For instance, Thomas traced the features of the Quantock topography in the
following lines of “Christabel”: “naught was green upon the oak / But moss and rarest
mistletoe” (33–34) and “the jugged shadows / Of mossy leafless boughs” (282–83); in
the following lines of “The Ancient Mariner”: “The wood / Which slopes down to the
sea” (ii, 514–15) and “A cushion plump / It is the moss that wholly hides / The rotted old
oak-stump” (vii, 520–22); and in such a description: “That deep romantic chasm which
slanted / Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover” (“Kubla Khan”). From Osorio
Thomas quotes lines from Act 5, scene 3. See Literary Pilgrim 177–78, In Pursuit of
Spring 280–81.
8 Cuthbertson 127–28. Wordsworth’s phrase is from The Prelude (1805), Bk.10, 727.
9 On this moon-rise, Thomas wrote in an article “This England” as follows: “Then
one evening the new moon made a difference.…At one stroke, I thought, like many other
people, what things that same new moon sees eastward about the Meuse in France. Of
those who could see it there, not blinded by smoke, pain, or excitement, how many saw
it and heeded? I was deluged, in a second stroke, by another thought, or something that
overpowered thought. All I can tell is, it seemed to me, that either I had never loved
England, or I had loved it foolishly, aesthetically, like a slave, not having realized that it
was not mine unless I were willing and prepared to die rather than leave it.…Something,
I felt, had to be done before I could look again composedly at English landscape”
(Cuthbertson and Newlyn 575–76). He also wrote in his letter to Frost dated 19 September
18 SAEKO YOSHIKAWA

1914: “an article on the new moon of August 26 and you and me strolling about in the
sun while our brave soldiers die. I doubt if I shall get nearer soldiering than I did then”
(Cardiff University MS ETC A93, 19/9/14, quoted in Cuthbertson ii. 571). From these
writings, we may see how crucial this experience of watching the moon was for Thomas’s
decision about enlistment, but when he looks back after enlistment, he recalls it in a more
tranquil and casual way.

Works Cited

Baily, John. The Continuity of Letters. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed.
Kathleen Coburn, Merton Christensen, and Anthony John Harding. 5
vols. London: Routledge, 1957–2002.
—. On the Constitution of the Church and State. Ed. By John Colmer.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.
Cuthbertson, Guy, ed. Edward Thomas: Prose Writings. Volume I: Autobiographies.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
—, and Lucy Newlyn, eds. Edward Thomas: Prose Writings. Volume II:
England and Wales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Longley, Edna, ed. Edward Thomas. The Annotated Collected Poems. Tarset:
Bloodaxe, 2008.
Monks, John. “‘If I could live long enough’: Edward Thomas, 1915 and war
poetry.” The Edward Thomas Fellowship Newsletter 74 (August 2015):
13– 23.
Oguro, Kazuko. “From Sight to Insight: Coleridge’s Quest for Symbol in Nature.”
The Coleridge Bulletin NS 29 (Summer 2007): 74–80.
Spencer, Matthew. Elected Friends: Robert Frost and Edward Thomas to One
Another. New York: Handsel Books, 2003.
Thomas, Edward. “England.” Cuthbertson and Newlyn 526–38.
—. Horae Solitariae. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1902.
—. In Pursuit of Spring. London: Thomas Nelson & Son, 1914.
—. A Literary Pilgrim in England. 1917. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1980.
—. Maurice Maeterlinck. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1911.
—, ed. This England: An Anthology from Her Writers. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1915.
Wordsworth, William. The Thirteen-book Prelude. Ed. Mark Reed. 2 vols. Ithaca:
COLERIDGE, EDWARD THOMAS AND ENGLISHNESS 19

Cornell University Press, 1992.

Yoshikawa, Saeko. “The Abounding Honeysuckle: Edward Thomas, S. T.
Coleridge, and the Quantock Hills.” The Coleridge Bulletin NS 32
(Winter 2008): 32–40.