edna longley
II Interrupted Georgics
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••‘As the team’s head brass’ proves the capacity of pastoral to take the epistemological
shock of the First World War. It might be a model for ‘interrupted georgic’: that is,
for the poem in which war or latent epic infiltrates an agricultural scenario. Perhaps
‘interrupted georgic’ also applies to Edward Thomas’s life. The war had largely
suspended his occupation as writer of country books (and of reviews, biography,
and criticism). Yet, when he started to write poems in December 1914, after nearly
two decades devoted to prose, the war became a paradoxical Muse of his poetic
pastoral. In ‘As the team’s head brass’ it adds a further dimension to the aesthetic
strategy that Thomas shared with Robert Frost: speech rhythms played against verse
pattern. At every level, the poem has its ear to the ground of wartime upheaval in
rural England, whether war or technology dooms the ‘team’. To quote Caroline
Dakers: ‘teams of plough horses...hadbeentakenforserviceinFrance...in the
wake of the newly invented tank, tractors and steam ploughs belched and rumbled
across English fields....All this was a long way from the vision of an unchanging
pastoral landscape under attack from invading rapacious Germans.’^15
Thomas’s pre-war prose had already absorbed radical changes to the rural
economy and rural society. Since the 1880s, when the government refused to
raise tariff barriers against North American wheat, the scale and power of English
agriculture had diminished (especially in the south). As English people became the
most town-based in Europe, there was a surge of cultural compensation: a back-
to-nature movement; renewed attention to all forms of folk tradition; ideological
investment in country life, ‘village England’,and the vanishing farm-labourer
as bearers of national identity. Thomas belonged to this cultural tendency. His
prose sometimes anatomizes the plight of displaced rural workers; sometimes
idealizes their qualities. Aspects of Thomas’sThe South Country(1909) bear out
Alun Howkins’s observation inThe Death of Rural England: ‘The landscape of
Englishness, in stark contrast to the landscape of Romanticism, was a southern
landscape—the world of village England.’^16 Thomas’s poem ‘Lob’ (1915), at one
level the wartime apotheosis of compensatory ruralism, pivots on an elusive old
Wiltshireman who personifies qualities ‘English as this gate, these flowers, this
mire’.^17
Yet, just as theGeorgicsattach what Virgil values in Roman civilization to the
anachronistic figure of the independent farmer, so ‘Lob’ is more than a nostalgic
backward look. Richly intertextual, as in its neo-Chaucerian couplets, the poem asks
how tradition—the sum of relations between natural environment, cultivation,
(^15) Caroline Dakers,The Countryside at War 1914–1918(London: Constable, 1987), 19.
(^16) Alun Howkins,The Death of Rural England: A Social History of the Countryside since 1900
(London: Routledge, 2003), 26.
(^17) Thomas, ‘Lob’, inCollected Poems, 59.