Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.’
‘And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.’ ‘Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.’ Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.This is a poem about contingency, in all its multiple, paradoxicalOED
senses – ‘close connection or affinity’, ‘chance, fortuitousness’, being ‘at
the mercy of accidents’, a ‘possible occurrence’, and in its philosophical
sense, ‘dependent.. .onoruponsome prior occurrence’. It is chance and
accident that the elm fell and that the speaker chose to sit on it, but that
chance, and the conversation it leads to, depend on someone else’s death.
The present situation is the contingent conjunction of infinite might-be
worlds, and realising its uniqueness (‘and I should not have sat here’) is
equally realising the intricacy of everything. This sense of contingent,
simultaneous lives is strengthened by the way the lovers reappear oblivious
at the end; perhaps a baby has been conceived while the conversation has
been going on, but the couple will only realise it in retrospect, the
ploughman and walker just figures on the edge of their future memory,
as they are on the edge of the speaker’s. This contingent sense of universal
relation without inevitability is axiomatic of the decision to enlist. If the
speaker goes out like the ploughman’s mate, then everything will be
different. But if he does not, everything will also be different, because
of all the thousands of other decisions and accidents that are already
making up his life, like the ploughman’s death. Contingency evades the
binary division of self and world, fate and freedom: any moment of free
inward decision turns out to be already implicated in and anticipated by
contingent events. The games of chance and fate suffered by trench
soldiers are in fact already being played out back in England, and this
confluence of the circumstantial and the inevitable is what lends the
closing lines their extraordinary ambiguity between neutrality and melan-
choly. ‘And for the last time’ might be simply factual – the ploughman
has finished his square of charlock – or it might indicate the speaker’s
decision to carry on his walk. Or it may be an admission that he is going
where he will never see another autumn, seeing himself stumbling in the
ploughed-up chaos of Flanders, and perhaps hearing the faint accents of
104 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism