shakespeare and the great war is, or how and why she is loved. Far more successful is Thomas’s ‘Lob’.^42 ‘Lob’,
likeKipling’s Puck, has lived through many ages and places; but whereas Kipling
enfranchises Puck from Shakespeare’s plays, Thomas, in a move more suitable to
a poet, puts Lob in dialogue with Shakespeare. The reader is told that once, when
called Tom, Lob spoke ‘with Shakespeare in the hall...when icicles hung by the
wall’. The quotation fromLove’s Labour’s Lostwas important to Thomas; in a
prefatory note to his anthologyThis England, Thomas had given that line and the
song that it began as the particular example of those ‘most English poems’ around
which the rest of the anthology was built. Such poems were to Thomas ‘some of
the echoes called up by the name of England’.^43 ‘Lob’ dramatizes that statement.
From Lob’s Shakespearean conversation onward, the poem asks to be read as a
rewriting ofKing Lear. Lob as Tom becomes Mad Tom on the heath. Shakespeare’s
and Thomas’s Mad Toms have both been many men, of many social stations. They
have been the poor, the socially excluded, and the rebellious, as well as the rich
and the sexually satisfied. They have been the English, in their varieties. And for
Thomas’s Mad Tom the answer to Lear’s question of ‘What hast thou been?’ ends
in a short history of the English wars: ‘good Lob’ is finally ‘One of the lords of No
Man’s Land’, who,
Although he was seen dying at Waterloo,
Hastings, Agincourt, and Sedgmoor, too,—
Lives yet. He never will admit he is dead
Till millers cease to grind men’s bones for bread.Lear’s heath has become a ‘No Man’s Land’, spreading back through history; it is a
rich metaphoric proposition. Thomas celebrates the English resistance to tyrannic
millers at the same time as he laments the lives lived out of sight by the English
poor, only called into history for service in the wars of their kings.
The Damned Spot
Edmund Blunden’s commissioning of Shakespeare as a captain is apt to the facts.
The majority of soldier-poets who are still read were probably captains, as it was
typically the rank to which an officer commissioned at the start of the war rose,
given the necessary longevity and some ability—without which longevity there
tended to be no poetry at all. For all of Osborn’s praise of the classlessness of his
New Elizabethans, it is still the classlessness of an officer class: of his twenty-four
examples, eleven turn out to have been captains, and ten, Lieutenants. Moreover,
the soldier-poets who were not commissioned were hardly typical privates: Gurney,
for instance, had left a scholarship at the Royal College of Music to join the Army;
(^42) Thomas, ‘Lob’, ibid. 57–62.
(^43) Thomas, prefatory note, inidem(ed.),This England: An Anthology from her Writers(London:
Oxford University Press, 1915), p. iii. The note is mentioned in Gervais,Literary Englands, 49.