134 PA RT T W O
For Thomas, no poems at all were possible in France. In March 1917, though,
an anthology appeared in London with poems of his from 1915–16. When the
Times Literary Supplement called his naturalism absurd vis-à-vis “the tremen-
dous life of the last three years,” Thomas wrote a friend: “Must I only use [my
eyes] as field-glasses and must I see only Huns in these beautiful hills east-
ward... ?” Anyway, he really had registered that dire life. Poems such as “The
Owl” are
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird ’s voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.Yeats too sampled nature in wartime, but for Thomas, birds and plantlife were
his day-in day-out life. In “Rain,” a wild midnight downfall put him in mind
of others lying alone
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff.Amid shells going out and coming in, he writes to Frost: “I should like to be
a poet, just as I should like to live, but I know as much about my chances in
either case, and I don’t really trouble about either. Only I want to come back
more or less complete.”
April 1917 saw Thomas, now a second lieutenant, preparing for the major
British offensive at Arras, peering out through a hedge where “larks hover above
the dry grass just in front.” Twenty years earlier he ’d sent his wife letters delin-
eating weather, hills, rivers, hedgerows, birds, and flowers. Now from an obser-
vation post he writes, “I simply watched the shells changing the landscape.” A
nearby village “is now just ruins among violated stark tree trunks. But the sun
shone and larks and partridge and magpies and hedgesparrows made love and
the trench was being made passable for the wounded that will be harvested in
a day or two.” April—too early a harvest.
The next day, Easter Sunday April 8, a German shell fell two yards from
him, a dud. About that time, Thomas’s wife Helen wrote Frost describing his
battlefield behavior: “In a pause in the shooting he turns his wonderful field
glasses on to a hovering kestrel & sees him descend & pounce & bring up a
mouse.” Weeks later, when the letter came back from a censor because she ’d
included photos, she adds a postscript: “He was killed on Easter Monday by a
shell.” A few hours before that moment, his last diary note says, “The light of
the new moon and every star / And no more singing for the bird.” A copy of
Frost ’s 1916 Mountain Interval was found in Thomas’s kit-bag.
Still stinging from this loss, Frost wrote (but never published) “War Thoughts
at Home.” Behind a weathered house, blue jays are squabbling with crows. In-