the First World War’s most fateful command in the clods that ‘crumble
andtoppleover’.
It would be possible to allegorise further in this vein – to see in the
‘ploughshare’ of the last line an ironic inversion of Isaiah’s prophecy
about turning swords into ploughshares, to see Thomas’s miserable self-
portrait in the charlock as the useless remainder of what was once fruitful,
and so on. But to make the death-laden meaning the only real one would
be to miss the poem’s point, since contingency means nothing is certain,
including death – as when Thomas picks up a phrase from this poem in a
letter to Frost from the front eight months later: ‘I should like to be a
poet, just as I should like to live, but I know about as much as my chances
in either case, and I don’t really trouble about either. Only I want to come
back more or less complete.’^77
‘As the Team’s Head Brass’ is an ecstatic poem, in the sense that it is
being taken out of one’s self to see the interconnectedness of all things,
but in such a way as to leave them as contingently free as they are. In this
sense it is also a poem with a word to say about poetic form, for the word
‘verse’ comes from the Latinversus, the turn of the plough at the edge of a
field as a model for the way the line turns and begins again. This turn is
the formal marker common to metrical and free verse, and the possibility
it allows for enjambment – the tension between a metrical limit and a
syntactical limit – allows for tension between form and content, interior
and exterior. Here too, the conversation happens on the turn:
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed an angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock.The enjambments’ pull and play between the unique sentence of the
speaker and the regular timing of the ploughman contain in miniature the
poem’s meditation on what belongs to interior choice and what to
exterior forces beyond his control. ‘And / Watched’, for example, breaks
the line carelessly across the sentence, as if the speaker’s words were merely
incidental to the ploughman’s progress, as if the form were slicing up the
sense with the indifference of fate. But it may be read equally as a
momentary hesitation, an intake of breath to settle down to watching
the ploughman, or run over quickly as if noting the elm and ploughman
only in passing, so that the form is part of the interior orientation of the
speaker. The turn of the verse works as a perpetual contingency, touching
word and rhythm, interior and exterior together in a singular coincidence
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 105