war pastorals community, folklore, language, and literature—might survive or metamorphose
inthe conjoined contexts of war and modernity: ‘One of the lords of No Man’s
Land, good Lob...He never will admit he is dead|Till millers cease to grind men’s
bones for bread.’ Steeped in the actuality, traditions, and literature of rural England,
Thomas was the deepest contemporary thinker about these matters, and his thinking
led him to read landscape through historical and ecological (eco-historical) lenses.
He was thus uniquely equipped to internalize the volatile situation on the cusp of
war. In Howkins’s words:
When rural England and Wales went to war in 1914, it still had many traditional social
and cultural parts to its character....There had been changes in agricultural production,
but agriculture’s methods were far behind those of the New Worlds of the USA, Canada
and Australia....Above all, the countryside remained firmly regional in its loyalties just
as much as its dialects, and this was based on real differences in social and geographical
structures.^18
I have argued elsewhere that, partly as a subtle form of cultural defence, Thomas’s
poetry tests historical structures of the English lyric.^19 Given his imaginative world,
this has special implications for the pastoral lyric from folk-song to the Romantics
and beyond. Although overage, Thomas enlisted in July 1915. During that month
he wrote several poems that obliquely ponder his decision in terms of pastoral
tropes, in terms that alter pastoral tropes by historicizing them. In ‘Aspens’ and
‘A Dream’, ‘known’ rural landscapes are permeated by omens from wild nature.
Wind, rain, and other waters often symbolize Thomas’s sense that human beings
do not control their environment, cannot read it, cannot control themselves (the
‘blizzard’ in ‘As the team’s head brass’ spans weather and war). Thus he questions
high-Romantic images of the poet’s relation to nature. In ‘Aspens’, Coleridge’s
‘Aeolian Harp’ and Shelley’s appeal to the west wind to ‘Make me thy lyre, even
as the forest is’^20 become Thomas’s Cassandra-like self-image as ‘aspens’: ‘Above
the inn, the smithy, and the shop,|The aspens at the cross-roads talk together|Of
rain.’^21 In ‘turn[ing] the cross-roads to a ghostly room’, the ‘talk’ projects ‘village
England’ as an emptied landscape. ‘A Dream’, another proleptic ‘interrupted
georgic’, forebodes a landscape emptied of the speaker himself: ‘Over known fields
with an old friend in dream|I walked, but came sudden to a strange stream.|Its
dark waters were bursting out most bright|From a great mountain’s heart into the
light.’^22 This underground stream (whose symbolism seems psychological as well
as historical) recalls the ‘deep romantic chasm’ in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, from
(^18) Howkins,Death of Rural England, 26.
(^19) See my essay ‘The Great War, History and the English Lyric’, in Vincent Sherry (ed.),The
Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 57–84.
(^20) Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, inPoetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 579. 21
Thomas, ‘Aspens’, inCollected Poems, 84.^22 Thomas, ‘A Dream’, ibid. 82.