war pastorals and poplars about the houses, at the purple-headed wood-betony.’^27 Ina mostly
dismissive essay on ‘war poetry’, he praises Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude’ as ‘one
of the noblest of patriotic poems’ because written by ‘a solitary man who, if at all,
only felt the national emotions weakly or spasmodically’.^28 Coleridge’s declaration
that ‘There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul|Unborrowed from my country!’^29
influenced Thomas’s most directly patriotic poem, ‘This is no case of petty right
or wrong’. Having said, ‘Beside my hate for one fat patriot,|My hatred of the
Kaiser is love true’, the speaker calls England ‘all we know and live by’.^30 Thomas,
with his superior credentials, surely sought to reclaim ‘England’ from Brooke,
whose sonnets he thought self-publicizing.^31 His anthologyThis England(1915),
into which he inserted ‘Haymaking’ and ‘The Manor Farm’, ‘excludes professedly
patriotic writing because it is generally bad’.^32 But there was already a gap between
‘The Manor Farm’ (December 1914), which affirms an English ‘season of bliss
unchangeable’,^33 and the shakier time frame of ‘Haymaking’.
One difference between Thomas and Ivor Gurney is Thomas’s pastoral
eclecticism, and the extent to which his poems take shape as an unsettled journey.
Thomas’s ‘summer of 1914’ poem is ‘The sun used to shine’ (May 1916), an
eclogue in which conversations with Frost are both proleptically and retrospectively
shadowed by war: ‘We turned from men or poetry||To rumours of the war
remote.’^34 The poem’s setting matters less than its complex historical locus between
‘the to be|And the late past’. Thomas’s ‘localism’ is generally a function of structure
rather than theme. It becomes theme or concept in ‘Home’ (April 1915), where the
speaker, who has ‘come back’ to an unnamed place ‘somehow from somewhere far’,
recognizes: ‘’Twas home; one nationality|We had, I and the birds that sang,|One
memory.’^35 The dynamics between poet-speaker, birds, and a passing ‘labourer’
pioneer a local and ecological model of ‘nationality’ as ‘home’. For Gurney, ‘home’ is
Gloucestershire and the Cotswolds: ‘I praised Gloucester city as never before—and
lay|By Tilleloy keeping spirit in soul with the way|Cooper’s comes over from
Eastward, sees Rome all the way’ (‘The Poets of My Country’).^36 This is borne out
(^27) Thomas, ‘This England’, inThe Last Sheaf(London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 221.
(^28) Thomas, ‘War Poetry’, inA language not to be betrayed: Selected Prose, ed. Edna Longley
(Ashington and Manchester: MidNag/Carcanet, 1981), 132.
(^29) Coleridge, ‘Fears in Solitude’, inSamuel Taylor Coleridge, 97.
(^30) Thomas, ‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’, inCollected Poems, 92.
(^31) Thomas to Robert Frost, 13 June 1915, inSelected Letters, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 111: ‘[T]hose sonnets about him enlisting are probably not very personal but
a nervous attempt to connect with himself the very widespread idea that self sacrifice is the highest self
indulgence’.
(^32) Thomas, prefatory note, inidem(ed.),This England: An Anthology from her Writers(London:
Oxford University Press, 1915), p. iii.
(^33) Thomas, ‘The Manor Farm’, inCollected Poems, 20.
(^34) Thomas, ‘The sun used to shine’, ibid. 114. (^35) Thomas, ‘Home’, ibid. 64.
(^36) Ivor Gurney, ‘The Poets of My Country’, inCollected Poems,ed.P.J.Kavanagh(Manchester:
Carcanet, 2004), 257.