ENGLAND THANKS TO EDWARD THOMAS 133Without its team; it seemed it never would
Move from the shadow of that single yew.A peaceable “morning time” poised against change like that “long waggon”:
The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin,
But still. And all were silent.On Keats’s Grecian Urn—the “calmest... stillest” ode, Thomas thought—
lovers are “still” and “silent,” they “cannot fade” and never “can those leaves
be bare.” In “To Autumn” the sleeping reaper’s hook “Spares the next swath.”
Thomas ends “Haymaking” on such a note: “All of us gone out of the reach of
change.” But change was still to come.
“The sun used to shine,” from 1916, recalls his forest walks with Frost, prospect-
ing for flowers and talking of everything. “We turned from men or poetry”
To rumours of the war remote
Only till both stood disinclined
For aught but the yellow flavorous coat
Of an apple wasps had undermined.They couldn’t help speaking of war, and then savoring the present moment
they spotted that perished apple, with undertones from Frost ’s “After Apple-
Picking.” “Edward ’s poems do not directly discuss the war,” said his wife Helen,
“but they do mention it and the war gave point to what he was describing.” The
point is, Thomas cannot suppress his outdoors gusto or inward concern. They
interact, sparely.
The war
Came back to mind with the moonrise
Which soldiers in the east afar
Beheld then.No escapism here. War wedges its terse irony into a summer evening saunter.
Thomas volunteered to serve overseas and on January 30, 1917, at 4 A.M.
disembarked in France with an artillery unit. For three months at Arras near the
Belgian border he kept a diary: cold, raw days, shelling at night, letters to and
from home, strafing, reading Shakespeare ten minutes per night, weather, land-
scape, owls, moles, hares, foxes, and throughout, the birds—partridge, black-
bird, thrush, magpie, sparrow, “Black-headed buntings talk, rooks caw,” “Lin-
nets and chaffinches sing in waste trenched ground,” “Larks singing over No
Man’s Land.” Of course nature persists in time of war, and above all birdsong.
Thomas took on that bittersweet persistence, much as Isaac Rosenberg not far
away heard “night ringing with unseen larks” though “Death could drop from
the dark / As easily as song.” A year later Rosenberg was killed.