war pastorals round the minute neighbouring points of home’. ‘Home’ exemplifies this idea;
‘‘‘Home’’ ’ (March 1916), the word now hedged by quotation marks, suggests how
Thomas’s army experience has both confirmed and darkened it. In ‘ ‘‘Home’’ ’ the
opposite situation to ‘Crickley Hill’ similarly marks the point at which affiliations
become incommensurable. Three soldiers leave training camp for a country walk:
Fair was the morning, fair our tempers, and
We had seen nothing fairer than that land,
Though strange, and the untrodden snow that made
Wild of the tame, casting out all that was
Not wild and rustic and old; and we were glad.^44Thomas sets the soldiers’ collectivity in the pristine landscape of pastoral, ‘wild
and rustic and old’. But, as they approach ‘the cold roofs where we must spend
the night’, an ironical reference to the camp as ‘home’ introduces history and
geography: ‘Between three counties far apart that lay|We were divided and looked
strangely each|At the other.’ The shared ‘strangeness’ of the land has turned into
estrangement: ‘we knew we were not friends/But fellows in a union that ends|With
the necessity for it, as it ought.’ The poem itself ends with the speaker self-estranged.
Unable to go behind ‘the word...|‘‘Homesick’’ ’, he fears that the war will make
him ‘Another man’. In ‘ ‘‘Home’’ ’ the original pastoral paradigm, together with
‘home’ as a locally precise concept, questions the national ‘union’ imposed by the
‘necessity’, also questionable, of the First World War.
Not only urban-modernist texts manifest the cognitive dislocations produced by
the war. The instability of ‘home’ in ‘interrupted georgic’ dramatizes epistemolo-
gical as well as historical shifts. Only in ‘The Manor Farm’ does Thomas evoke what
Dakers calls ‘an unchanging pastoral landscape’. In ‘Two Houses’, an enlistment
poem, a ‘smiling’, unreachable farmhouse is set against a trench-like tumulus repres-
enting ‘the dead that never|More than half hidden lie’.^45 Between 30 January 1917,
when he arrived in France with the Royal Artillery, and his death at Arras on 9 April,
Thomas wrote no poetry, although his ‘War Diary’ mixes impressions of French
landscape, war reports, and nature notes. ButFrance underlies and defamiliarizes
his England as England underlies France in poems by Gurney and Blunden.
In First World War pastoral, theheimlichandunheimlichare contiguous: often
unresolvably so, as in ‘Two Houses’ or Owen’s ‘Spring Offensive’. Soldier-poets were
disturbed as well as given ‘Balm’ by snowdrops in ruined gardens, by similarities
between northern France or Flanders and southern England. In ‘Vlamertinghe’
Blunden quotes Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, and dwells on the English pastoral
trope of flowers: ‘This must be the floweriest place|That earth allows.’^46 The poem
ends with a soldier’s voice saying of the ‘million’ poppies there: ‘But if you ask
me, mate, the choice of colour|Is scarcely right; this red should have been duller.’
(^44) Thomas, ‘ ‘‘Home’’ ’, inCollected Poems, 104. (^45) Thomas, ‘Two Houses’, ibid. 88.
(^46) Edmund Blunden,Undertones of War(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 256.