british poetry in the age of modernism

This weather, marching after the enemy.’

‘And so I hope. Good luck.’ And there I nodded

‘Good-night. You keep straight on.’ Stiffly he plodded;

At his heels the crisp leaves scurried fast,

And the leaf-coloured robin watched. They passed,

The robin till next day, the man for good,

Together in the twilight of the wood.

Lob, Thomas’s rather overripe English anyman, is also ‘one of the lords
of No-Man’s Land’ both because he is a vagrant (no-man’s land originally
meant the verge of grass by the roadside tramps and gypsies would camp
on) and because he is out in the trenches. As his encounter with the gypsy
indicates, ecstasy is always to do with the incalculable and unsecured; if it
is theleitmotifof Thomas’s poetic, then it is also characteristic of the way
he faced death in the coming war.

war and ecstasy

Robert Frost certainly saw Thomas’s decision to enlist and his decision to
become a poet as inseparable. ‘The decision he made in going to the army
helped him make the other decision in form’ he wrote in 1921 , which is
both a simple material explanation (a regular wage freed Thomas from
hack-work) and also perhaps a piece of soul-searching.^71 For it was Frost
himself who did most to help Thomas make the decision ‘in form’, and
the implications give an edge to the very famous poem Frost wrote to
tease Thomas gently for his indecision over whether to write poems or
stick to prose, ‘The Road Not Taken’. The poem’s applicability extends
far beyond the personal circumstances of Edward Thomas, of course, but
when Frost first sent it without comment in 1915 , Thomas knew that the
sigh in the last verse was meant as his own:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I –

I took the road less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.^72

But his reply maintains that Frost has missed the point entirely:

It’s all very well for you poets in a yellow wood to say you choose, but you don’t.
If you do, ergo I am no poet. I didn’t choose my sex yet I was simpler then. And
so I can’t leave off going in after myself tho’ some day I may. I didn’t know after
I left you at Newent I was going to begin to write poetry.^73

Edward Thomas in ecstasy 99