The one advantage of waiting a week to write to you is that Joan appears to have escaped the water bailiff. Of course if I could have done anything I would. But witty replies to water bailiffs are not my long suit.
Baby is grizzling upstairs. The Frosts are all over the house seeing Mr Chandler off. Peter’s chair creaks as he reads the Baroness Orczy and Mervyn sounds completely satisfied with the old Strand Magazines. But it is a very fine hot day. God is in His heaven all right, obviously and ostentatiously. Mr Chandler will be in his in Hereford. Goodbye. I am sorry this letter turns out so. Please remember me to Clifford or is he serving our country?
Yours ever
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Helen
Swansea
9 October 1914
Are these letters boring and tiring you? I admit I leave out (unintentionally) what I can’t put down in a note-taking spirit. Still it is better than notes — I make practically none these days. I remember the best things afterwards. I remember for instance how yesterday the cloudy day stilled and cooled and misted more then so that as early as 4.30 beyond Bath the starlings were concentrated all whistling in a tree as if it were evening and winter. I remember too how beautiful the hills round Swansea looked as my train was coming in — very black and velvety and the innumerable variously spaced lights all of them very crystalline: of course I could not see the buildings to which the lights belonged nor the trees or stones on the hill, just black and crystal.
Two days later, at Ryton
I was meditating a poem about the gypsies by the roadside, their gramophone and cosy lighted tent so near wind and stars, the children searching for coal in the refuse of the old mine, and me faintly enjoying them. I thought how feeble and aesthetic my admiration of the mountain was, when I knew nothing of life on them, shepherds and stonequarrymen and ministers etc which I can only faintly imagine with a bellyful of ham. However I missed my tea and was very glad of broth cheese and damson tart at this house at 8 when I got in and then I wrote all this. I have been considering all the roads over the mountain to Brecon and can’t decide yet. Perhaps the weather will decide.
I am to do the War Poetry article for Monro. That is all the news. Frost is better and expecting to be home soon and the Abercrombies are gone. Goodnight. It is 10.30
Index of Letters
To Helen
Ryton Dymock
17 October 1914
Saturday now, my boil has decreased, so that I am fairly well content except that I want to be home — yet would be content to wait — would enjoy the waiting as a sort of luxury of expectation, only I should like to be doing my share of the work while you are not so fit. Don’t try to do the garden. Let me finish it, there’s a dear. And if you feel at all hurt by my postponing return, forgive me, and forgive me saying how I enjoy these quiet soft still days. No rain this morning, but a low soft dark and pale sky and the thresher going. I went out first thing, having lit the fires, and picked apples from under a bent old apple tree on a sort of natural wall (perhaps a path went under it once, or they dug sand there) over in the corner of the greenfodder field where the cottage is with ihe walnut one side and the dead cherry tree the other. Rather a nice corner with this steep grassy wall, where the field runs up into a pasture above it. The tree has dropped heaps of apples as big as a child’s fist, some nearly all rosy dark, the best streaked with blood red dots and dashes. The path doesn’t go there, but the cottage people don’t touch the apples, wonder at our eating them. Over the rising field above the path takes you up and you see the valley of the Leadon flowing under the strangest low hill covered with small crooked bushy trenches that look so pretty cutting across the road here at right angles to it and to the firry hill. The river is followed by willows that are now lovely silver fountains among the yellow and ruddy trees. The elms are dark green mixed with bright yellow insertions. We went over yesterday to Dymock that way and got your letter with The Times.
We will go to the Luptons, but I don’t think we had better have that bureau, do you think?
Will you make note of any country people’s war remarks that might be useful for my article? Please. Mrs Farmer (Lesley was there yesterday) says its the Kayser’s ‘hambition’ to eat his Xmas dinner in London; but ‘if the Germans try to beat us the United States will join us.’
Frost is not very well, very nervous and not wanting to eat. Mrs Frost is tired. But the children are well. She doesn’t intend to come to us now, I believe.
There’s still lavender and borage blossoming in this garden and lots of evening primrose over the neglected parts where the children light bonfires that smoke eastwards over the stubble and pheasants. Rooks are always going over with jackdaws shouting among them like boys among men. They are ploughing in the mustard in one field, turning the light brown soil over the plants in their prime of greenness with yellow flowers just coming. Yesterday they killed a pig while we were at dinner. Soon he went by wagging and quaking still warm in a barrow. Later we saw his corpse pale cold and hairless as an egg like Julia’s leg, stretched full length belly upwards for further operations. All the time the thresher goes.
I expect I shall be back on Monday. I post this on Saturday afternoon.
Edwy
Index of Letters
To Robert Frost
Steep
31 October 1914
My dear Frost,
I would rather have had a bad ear than that letter. But now I have the bad ear, too. ‘I cannot pipe to skies so dull and grey’. I only hope that you wrote immediately after Gibson’s call and in the worst pangs of it. When I wrote like that you replied that you wished I was near enough to be kicked. Well, I wish I were near enough to kick you, but have no faith in that kind of school. Did you want or expect a letter sooner? I should only have told you I was surprised to find you again like me, and I was inclined to write anything. But I find that when I write a moan people keep silent for a fortnight or so either because they think you will by then have forgotten or because they don’t think it ‘requires an answer’. It is no use telling you I could feel the same about a book (tho I don’t know how it feels to have written ‘North of Boston’) and with as little reasonable ground. I imagine that few writers so early become assured of the understanding and admiration of such a variety of readers. But also I don’t imagine that because a man has reasonable ground for some contentment at times, therefore he ought to be content at times, though he probably will be.
I didn’t suspect all this wisdom when I began to write or I would have waited. What I really wrote for was to ask you to send me the M.S. of the Proverbs c/o Clifford Bax
1 Bishop’s Avenue
East Finchley
London N.W.
I am to meet an artist there on Wednesday who wants to try illustrating them. But if you don’t send it off on Tuesday or Wednesday address it to Steep.
I have now got the 4th volume (since September) of M.S. poems to read and pronounce on for fond unknown bard. Would this bring the warm blood to your cheek? In each case I have written hostile unanswered opinions without the least belief they are right or useful.
My only fun out of reading has been from Wilfrid Blunt’s Collected Poems. There is a man in them very easy to disengage. Do you know him?
I have just made myself almost ill with thinking hard for an hour, — going up to my study and sitting there, — that I ought to enlist next week in town. Now I am so weak I wouldn’t show anything but my ear to any doctor. I am just going to do that.
I go on writing, unlike all the patriots, or rather as the patriots feel they oughtn’t to.
What about the poems you wrote after we left? Send them if you feel inclined.
There is something wrong and artificial about this letter without more than one dot at a time. I am sorry. I shall be glad to have one from you with or without dots.
Our love to you all
Yours ever
E.T.
Index of
Letters
To W. H. Hudson
c/o Robert Frost
Ryton
Dymock
Gloucester
26 November 1914
My dear Hudson,
I came over here yesterday morning with your letter fresh in my pocket. I was very glad to have it and especially to hear you had been working in spite of everything. But I am extremely sorry to hear Mrs. Hudson is suffering so. I hope it is a transient attack. How beautiful the sea must be these frosty mornings after a wet night, such as we had yesterday. I walked in to Alton by Colemore and East Tisted while the frost was melting and was lucky to get a lift with a farmer going to Basingstoke Market, such a neat fine man of 72 who came from near Ryde which he pronounced Hryde. He talked of getting a small motor but said his wife wouldn’t ride in it if he drove. The wood-pigeons are just getting thick about us.
About Garnett — I have no idea what he went for, but heard he looked ill. David, I heard him say earlier, had been dissuaded from enlisting. I must write to Mrs. Garnett. I have now got the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee’s form to fill in or not and hesitate because I would sooner enlist in London with a friend (if possible) than be pitchforked anywhere suddenly. It is an insoluble problem till one has some really strong impulse one way and one doesn’t get that by thinking about it. But a young soldier I was talking to in the train agreed that no man could face the war if he could foresee his own part in the fighting. The difference between people is that they try or do not try in various degrees — often against their will — to foresee it. He was bringing home 2 canaries from Pekin for his mother. Yet he had in his pocket the reply form of a telegram which she had sent inquiring about him.
It is odd that Wilfrid Blunt should bother to think which is his best poem. I thought better of a bull-fighter than that. But, however good it may not be, it does show a man of a particular kind and so do all his few real poems. He is a kind of miniature Byron who will perhaps never have the luck to get his personality and other activities added on to his poems so that you can’t distinguish them.
I haven’t any work now. That is why I have travelled over here. But I don’t find the war shuts me up. In fact it has given me time to please myself with some unprofitable writing, and up to now I have not been hard hit as many are. Davies was with us last weekend. He complains a little about the reduced lighting in London and even grumbled at the dark in country roads, forgetting they never were lit. Otherwise the war hasn’t much touched him. I hear he (like everyone else) wrote a bad war poem. I wish someone would send me Hardy’s new poems. By the way, I should like you to see ‘The Stonechat’ in a volume of poems by Geoffrey Young. I thought one of the best of all pure bird poems, the bird on a wet stone pure and simple up on a heath. I will try to remember to type it for you.
With kindest regards to Mrs. Hudson
Yours ever
E. Thomas
Index of Letters
To C. F. Cazenove
Steep
Petersfield
2 December 1914
Dear Cazenove,
Do you think there is a publisher for a book, I thought of a short one, on the idea of England from earliest times, as shown in writers of all kinds, kings, statesman, poets, private persons down to our own day, as popular as I can make it? And in any case, wouldn’t Harrison perhaps like either an article on the subject or on what England means to a man to-day, drawing both on my own experience and on what I have heard said by a variety of people since the war began? I should like to do both and could begin at once.
Yours sincerely
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Robert Forst
Steep 15 December 1914
Dear Frost,
I am glad you spotted ‘wings’ light word’. I knew it was wrong and also that many would like it: also ‘odd men’ — a touch nearing facetiousness in it. I’ve got rid of both now. But I am in it and no mistake. I have an idea and am full enough but that my bad habits and customs and duties of writing will make it rather easy to write when I’ve no business to. At the same time I find myself engrossed and conscious of a possible perfection as I never was in prose. Also I’m very impatient of my prose, and of reviews and of review books. And yet I have been uncommonly cheerful mostly. I have been rather pleased with some of the pieces, of course, but it’s not wholly that. Still, I won’t begin thanking you just yet, the if you like I will put it down now that you are the only begetter right enough.
I should like to see the man who was upset by you rhyming ‘come’ and ‘dumb’. I should also like to write about you in the ‘Forum’. But they wouldn’t want me to, I feel quite sure. Only I will write to them just to see.
You speak of your ‘few remaining weeks here’. But that doesn’t mean any early move, does it, whether you only leave Ryton or go back home. Scott sails tomorrow. He was willing to take Mervyn out and tutor him. He was to be learning blacksmithery and would teach Mervyn (if Mervyn would learn). But Mervyn hasn’t gone, didn’t much want to, while the proposal was a little too sudden the I had the feeling it might be God’s idea to get Mervyn away from me for ever that way.
Mervyn is to have Peter for company this Christmas probably. We are expecting him instead of the Dutch boy.
My works come pouring in on you now. Tell me all you dare about them. I have been shy of blank verse the (or because) I like it best. But the rhymes have dictated themselves decidedly except in one case.
I gather that Marsh is more or less engrossed now and reckoned not to be approachable, but I don’t know whether to believe it. In town I saw de la Mare and that is what he said. But he and I have withdrawn from one another I fancy. At least I know I am never myself so long as I am with him. Now I have put it to Monro that he might show ‘North of Boston’ to E.M. We’ll see.
I wish you were a day’s walk away or were really at anchor.
Yours ever
E.T.
Index of Letters
To Harold Monro
Steep
Tuesday after 15 December 1914
My dear Monro,
Many thanks for saying it. I am sorry because I feel utterly sure they are me. I expect obstacles and I get them. It was chiefly to save myself what I think unnecessary pain that I asked for no explanations. One blow was better. I assume the verses expressed nothing clearly that you cared about, as that is the only ground for not liking written work. But don’t let us talk about it. I have to be at the Museum next week, far too busy for my liking. If I have time I will suggest an evening.
Yours ever
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Margaret Townsend
Steep
Petersfield
14 February 1915
My dear Auntie,
Thank you for Kenneth Morris’s book. I am very fond of the Mabinogion, and it is obvious that he is too. But I can’t help thinking it is a mistake to retell the stories with the colouring of an interpretation which he cannot think adequate or final. I should have thought so had I been merely told of his method. On reading the result I think so still more. As they stand the old stories are works of art in which, as in every work of art, the writer accepts many things he could not explain and feels no need of explaining. If he did feel the need he would make a work of philosophy or natural history, not a work of art. And I think K. Morris has just made the compromise which is neither one thing nor the other. I feel sorry to say this about a friend of yours who likes my books.
I have been thinking to write many times since the New Year, because I have had a great deal of leisure, owing to a bad sprained ankle which isn’t well yet after 6 weeks. It has kept me mostly in this small house and made me rather a burden to others as well as myself. It was none the better that I had very little work to do. Tonight I am thinking of you because Mervyn sailed for New York yesterday with American friends in the ‘Saint Paul’. He is going to make a long stay with an English friend —
formerly headmaster of the preparatory school here — Mr. Russell Scott, at East Alstead, near Keene, in New Hampshire. There he is to have lessons and to try his hand at a forge which Mr. Scott is learning to use. But it was chiefly to get him away from the easy, sheltered and wearying life of home and school, where he was dependent and irresponsible to excess. We hope he may develope more freely there and perhaps get clearer as to what he is going to do. He might stay some years: the plan at present is for six months.
I am going to London on Tuesday to work at the Museum. I shall stay with Mother. Father, I think, is still away on a round of visits in Wales. Mother had a bad cough when I saw her a fortnight ago. She spent a day or two here. I wish she lived in the country and could see more people that she liked. At this moment Helen and the Baby are there. Helen went to Liverpool with Mervyn and is off for a fortnight’s holiday with friends tomorrow. Bronwen and I are at home keeping house for one another. She is very good company, so cheerful and careful and willing. Nothing comes amiss to her, and she is very happy at school and at home. She is not at all clever. Nor is Mervyn. Baby seems to be much cleverer than either and more independent, but I suppose the youngest often seems so: she is very short-sighted, by the way, and has to wear spectacles: it makes her very timid of heights, at least I think it is that, she does not know what is below when she walks on a bank above a steep wooded slope.
I don’t know what to say about things in England now, except as they concern me. Naturally my work is gone and what I write is of less interest than ever. If the war should end before summer is over and I should feel it was fair to Helen and the children, I think of going to New Hampshire myself. My American friends, the Frosts, are taking a farm and want me to come and try farm life. They actually think I might be able to farm myself. Goodbye. I hope you are well.
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 41