ENGLAND THANKS TO EDWARD THOMAS 131Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.
This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bloom upon a flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.Like the birds’ nest berries, nuts, and seeds, even the wear of time—rusty harrow,
worn-out plow, overgrown nettles, dust—is given a keen eye and cheering turn.
Thomas was born in London in 1878, of Welsh parents. His early memories
are of “wild unconscious play” in the fields, then “the time of collecting eggs,
flowers and insects,” and later “when we read poetry out of doors.” A school
friend recalls “Talking, and looking at the earth and the sky, we just walked
about until it was dark,” attending to “the general life of the common birds and
animals, and to the appearances of trees and clouds and everything upon the
surface that showed itself to the naked eye.”
An older friend called “Dad,” a sunburned sinewy gamekeeper-poacher who
climbed trees for nests and dug into thorn bushes, could imitate “the hollow
note of the bullfinch... the chiding of a sparrow hawk at its prey... a young
rook’s cry whilst gobbling a worm: it was perfectly true to nature.” Dad knew
the curative power of every herb—a knowledge “fast decaying,” Thomas wrote
in 1895.
Already at nineteen, learning from “my favorite—Thoreau,” he published
The Woodland Life, sketches of southern English countryside. “Still the pewits
move uneasily in the open, always facing the wind and the thin wall of snow
bearing down upon them.” When it came to nature, his love fed his literacy.
They both show a zeal, long before this was in vogue, to respect wildness for
its own sake and ours as well. He went on to write Beautiful Wales, The Heart
of England, The South Country, The Country, andIn Pursuit of Spring.
Shuttling between landscape and literature, Thomas by 1913 had produced
twenty-five books, plus essays and reviews, but no poetry. Then one encounter
released a new voice. Robert Frost, feeling stymied in America, had taken his
family to England. In October the two met and took to each other, Frost feeling
Thomas’s marital and literary anxieties, Thomas deepening Frost ’s botanical
savvy. One night in rural Gloucestershire they hunted rare ferns by matchlight.
Just days before war broke out in August 1914, the friends returning from one
of their long rambles witnessed “A wonder!” that Frost recalled in “Iris by
Night”: a watery moon-made rainbow whose “two mote-swimming many-
colored ends” gathered into a ring, “And we stood in it softly circled round.”
Reading Thomas’s account of a biking journey, Frost saw his friend had