war pastorals I should want nothing more...Havemany 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.’This poem’s lovers, who ‘disappeared into the wood’, now emerge:
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.If the lovers again signify peace and life, their semi-detached return falls short
of Hardy’s assurance that erotic or agricultural ‘business as usual’ will be
resumed. Thomas leaves the ending ambiguously open to history. He under-
scores the lovers’ reappearance with the poem’s only rhyming couplet; but the
internal rhyme (‘crumble’, ‘stumbling’) hasdisturbing metaphorical nuances,
and the final consonantal rhyme—‘time’/‘team’—hints that the former may
run out for the latter. Thomas thought of calling the poem ‘The Last Team’.^14
‘[F]or the last time’ also shadows the speaker’s future by adding him to the
scene’s absences.
War talk, including proleptic talk of dismemberment, destabilizes the poem’s
blank-verse rhythms. Here Thomas exploits a formal corollary to the symbolism
whereby sword is taking over from ploughshare. The poem begins: ‘As the team’s
head brass flashed out on the turn’. ‘Verse’, as a line of poetry, derives from
the ploughman’s ‘turn’ (versus), an origin that enters the poem’s structures. On
the rhythmic front, as war penetrates pastoral, turns of the line become more
jagged. But the plough itself, like Andrew Marvell’s destructive ‘Mower’, violates
the earth: it ‘flashes’, ‘scrapes’, ‘screws’. At one point the speaker envisages the
ploughman ‘treading me down’. Thomas reminds us that the plough—and, by
analogy, the poem—do not really belong to ‘another world’ from that which killed
the ploughman’s mate:alter egoof both speakers.
(^14) Thomas to Eleanor Farjeon, n.d. [June 1915], quoted in Eleanor Farjeon,Edward Thomas: The
Last Four Years(Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 144: ‘I don’t know about a title for the blank
verse....What about ‘‘The Last Team’’?’ Farjeon misdates the letter.