132 PA RT T W O
poems to write, drawn from passages such as this about pewits on Salisbury
Plain near Stonehenge:
His Winter and twilight cry expresses for most men both the sadness and the
wildness of these solitudes. When his Spring cry breaks every now and then,
as it does to-day, through the songs of the larks, when the rooks caw in low
flight or perched on their elm tops, and the lambs bleat, and the sun shines,
and the couch [grassy weed] fires burn well, and the wind blows their smoke
about, the plain is genial.... But let the rain fall and the wind whirl it, or let
the sun shine too mightily,and the Plain becomes “a sublime, inhospitable wilderness. It makes us feel the
age of the earth.” Thoreau had called English poetry “tame and civilized,” but
Thomas’s wintry plain proves otherwise, that “the earth does not belong to
man, but man to the earth.”
Frost heard what he liked, a lyric spirit in natural speech. When North of
Bostoncame out in 1914, their kinship led Thomas to review it not twice but
three times. “This is one of the most revolutionary books of modern times...
It speaks, and it is poetry.” Now he began finding verse rhythms in his own
countryside prose. “I am in it now & no mistake,” he wrote Frost, and in De-
cember sent him his first poems.
With the European war only miles away, Thomas, aged thirty-six with three
children, debated whether to enlist or accept Frost ’s invitation to come farm
and write in New England. “Something, I felt, had to be done before I could
look again composedly at English landscape, at the elms and poplars about the
houses.” Seeing a moonrise and wondering about “those who could see it” in
France if they were “not blinded by smoke, pain, or excitement,” he ’s pierced
by willingness to die for England. When asked what he was fighting for, “He
stooped, and picked up a pinch of earth. ‘Literally, for this.’ He crumbled it be-
tween finger and thumb, and let it fall.” Thomas enlisted in July 1915, training
and teaching map-reading in the south of England until January 1917. By then
he ’d written the 143 poems upon which his reputation rests.
But what could wartime poems do if “Literature,” as Thomas said, “sends
us to Nature principally for Joy”? In “Haymaking,” written when he enlisted,
“night ’s thunder far away” yields to a cold sweet morning of “perfect blue.”
Ease and harmony seldom come simply for Thomas, but through paradox or
balancing. (No wonder Frost ’s “The Wood-Pile” struck him, its cordwood left
“To warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning
of decay.”) “Haymaking” settles into a scene, as from Breughel or Constable,
of laborers at rest after mowing:
The tosser lay forsook
Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood