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 edna longley

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this

Isto open the breech, as you see. We can slide it

Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this

Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards

The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:

They call it easing the Spring.^11

In ‘Judging Distances’ too, Reed reverses expectations that the language of war will
be more ‘real’ than the language of pastoral. The poem begins:

Not only how far away, but the way that you say it

Is very important. Perhaps you may never get

The knack of judging a distance, but at least you know

How to report on a landscape.^12

The military version of pastoral—‘report on a landscape’—requires ‘three kinds
of tree, three only, the fir and the poplar,|And those which have bushy tops too’.
Anditcorrects‘undertheswayingelmsamanandawoman|Lie gently together’
to: ‘under some poplars a pair of what appear to be humans|Appear to be loving’.
When the speaker concludes that ‘between me and the apparent lovers...is roughly
adistance|Of about one year and a half’, the poem’s spatial dynamics disclose their
temporal axis.
In Thomas’s ‘As the team’s head brass’, history meshes more intricately with the
pastoral fabric. The speaker, presumably inuniform to invite the question ‘Have
you been out?’, is ‘Watching the plough narrowing a yellow square|Of charlock’.^13
This places—perhaps criticizes—him as a spectator of rural England, unlike the
ploughman, who leans ‘Upon the handles to say or ask a word,|About the weather,
next about the war’. But he, too, is distanced from the absent figure who connects
and haunts ploughman and implied soldier-poet: the former’s dead ‘mate’:

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest

I sat in, by a woodpecker’s round hole,

The ploughman said. ‘When will they take it away?’

‘When the war’s over.’ So the talk began—

One minute and an interval of ten,

Aminutemoreandthesameinterval.

‘Have you been out?’ ‘No.’ ‘And don’t want to, perhaps?’

‘If I could only come back again, I should.

I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose

A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,

(^11) Henry Reed, ‘Naming of Parts’, inCollected Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 49. 12
Reed, ‘Judging Distances’, ibid. 50.
(^13) Edward Thomas, ‘As the team’s head brass’, inCollected Poems, ed. R. George Thomas (London:
Faber, 2004), 115–16.