Lots of great ‘T’ poets available this week - R.S. Thomas, Dylan Thomas, James Tate, Marina Tsvetaeva, Sarah Teasdale. But I suppose it was always going to be Edward Thomas really – he’s another poet, like Elizabeth Bishop, that I feel close to as a reader rather than consider to be an influence as a writer. I feel like he’s one of the handful of poets whose work I ‘know’, whatever that really means. Part of my warmth to him comes from Matthew Hollis’ biography “Now All Roads Lead To France” which is one of my favourite non-fiction books ever – I’d recommend it as a brilliant read and I don’t even think you really have to know Edward Thomas’ poetry well in order to enjoy it.
Thomas’ place in British poetry is interesting – he was mainly known as a critic in his lifetime, and most of his reputation as a poet lies on an extremely creative period of three years in his mid-thirties. I see him as a bit of an outlier to the World War I poets like Sassoon and Owen, partly because he’s older than them but also in the sense that much of his work was not written on or about the front lines, but instead about a sense of England and even a sense of self that he seems to feel slipping away from him because of the war. He joined up for the war late, when he didn’t have to, out of a sense of duty (some people blame his friend Robert Frost for encouraging him to sign up with the poem The Road Not Taken, but that seems harsh to me) – and he was killed in action almost as soon as his arrived.
Today’s poem was written in 1916, after Thomas had enlisted in the army but before he was sent to France – he would be dead by April 1917. You can read it here: As the Team's Head Brass | The Poetry Foundation
As The Team’s Head-Brass
As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed an angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock.
Something I love about Edward Thomas’ work is how quiet and still it is. His most famous poem is probably ‘Adlestrop’, which works because it’s a finely-observed snapshot of a moment and a feeling. We’ve got the same here in these opening lines. The ‘team’ is a team of horses dragging a plough, and I like the beautiful way this is rendered through the flash of light on brass. With that first word ‘as’, it’s almost like the world of the poem itself appears fully-formed from this flash of creative light, ensuing inevitably from it – the lovers disappearing, the speaker sitting on the fallen elm, the quiet movement of the plough.
What’s being built here? We have a speaker sitting to the side of the action, on a ‘fallen’ elm in the ‘fallow’ land (i.e. the land not to be ploughed). He’s watching the plough and he also sees the lovers disappearing into the wood, but he’s not involved in either of those two activities. It’s hard not to bring biography in here, isn’t it – a speaker (and writer) who is positioning himself outside of the action, in a kind of limbo, as Thomas must’ve felt having agonised over enlistment. Look at what he’s setting up as worthy of note, and therefore valuable – the traditional pastoral (in the team and its brass) and the romantic (the two lovers). The war is off elsewhere, but this speaker doesn’t *exactly* belong in the place where the war isn’t happening.
Every time the horses turned Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned Upon the handles to say or ask a word, About the weather, next about the war. Scraping the share he faced towards the wood, And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed Once more.
So the speaker is sitting on the fallen tree and the plough is ebbing and flowing towards and away from him. I’m struck here again by how slow and peaceful the scene is – the lazy conversation between the farmer and the speaker that is slowed down, interrupted and thus extended by the rhythms of the ploughing. But look at that second line – ‘every time the horses turned/instead of treading me down’ – that’s a strange way to put it, surely? Is there a realistic danger that the farmer and his plough team would do something so violent for no reason? It doesn’t seem so, so why has he put it that way? I wonder again if it’s a way of underlaying the ghost of war and violence beneath the peaceful pastoral scene. The word ‘war’ itself is mentioned, too, as a topic of conversation so ordinary and normalised that it’s placed on equal footing with that perennial small-talk topic, the weather.
It's worth also looking then at the central focus of the poem, the plough, and another word that feels very deliberately deployed, the ‘share’ that the farmer scrapes. Thomas must be alluding to that Biblical metaphor of peace about ‘beating swords into ploughshares’ – i.e. turning away from the military towards the pastoral. The farmer (and those lovers too) are being turned into embodiments of the important forces that stand as alternatives to war and violence.
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, A minute more and the same interval.
I like how Thomas is again deploying these lovely little details about the pastoral setting, while at the same time also reinforcing the idea of the speaker as a neutral, non-active force in a world full of activity – the tree where he’s sitting has been the focus of (again violent) action from the forces of nature in the blizzard that felled the tree and the woodpecker that made the whole.
It’s also interesting how the war is introduced, in the context of this pastoral small talk, as firstly an inconvenience. In some ways, the fact that the tree hasn’t been moved ‘because of the war’ is a clever indicator of how the war both does and doesn’t impact upon life at home.
“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, I should want nothing more. . . . Have many gone From here?” “Yes.” “Many lost?” “Yes, a good few. Only two teams work on the farm this year. One of my mates is dead. The second day In France they killed him. It was back in March, The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.” “And I should not have sat here. Everything Would have been different. For it would have been Another world.” “Ay, and a better, though If we could see all all might seem good.”
There’s something almost darkly comic about the start of the conversation, and the matter-of-fact way in which the speaker speculates about sacrificing an arm, but ideally not a leg, for the cause – although of course it becomes much more poignant if you think of Thomas’ own fate the following year. The gag ‘If I should lose my head, why, so/I should want nothing more’ reminds me tonally of something Hamlet might say – there’s a serious engagement here with mortality, but it has to be done through dark, off-hand wit, otherwise things will become too serious.
The farmer, too, appears sanguine and philosophical about the loss of his friend. His friend’s death is almost presented as a thought experiment – the death of the friend means there was nobody to help move the tree, which means the speaker was able to sit down and have this conversation. The death of this one farmhand has changed the world. Is the farmer’s verbal shrug convincing? I think it’s sad when the farmer says ‘Ay, and a better’ (i.e. the different world with his friend in it would’ve been a better one than this one), but then he almost undermines that with a kind of lazy piece of theodicy: “If we could see all all might seem good.” Can the farmer really be satisfied with this dismissal of his friend’s life – ‘ah well, maybe the world *is* a good place, just in a way that I’m too small to see’? Or is it a way to end the conversation with this stranger before things get too personal? There’s something stiff-upper-lip about it, for sure.
Then The lovers came out of the wood again: The horses started and for the last time I watched the clods crumble and topple over After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.
The farmer’s verbal shrug kind of breaks the spell of this long, slow conversation, and the world comes back in. What do we think the significance of the lovers coming out of the wood might be? The meat of this poem takes place for roughly the same amount of time it takes for the lovers to go into the wood and come back out again. Are we saying this conversation between the farmer and the speaker, or this moment where the speaker is able to participate in the world, is akin to an act of love? And is this, then, the opposite of war?
Also, something has changed in the observation of the team. The beginning of the poem was efficient, mechanical – the flashing brass, the scraping ploughshare, even the threatening power of the horses that could so easily have trampled him. Now the team is ‘stumbling’ and the clods of earth themselves are fragile – they ‘crumble’ and ‘topple’. In the light of this, that phrase ‘for the last time/I watched’ feels significant too.
Is there a tacit admission here on the part of the speaker that this small slice of pastoral and romantic life is no longer going to be available to him? He’s deeply aware, even if he’s expressed it with a very English kind of nonchalant bravado, that this war can rend him violently, and that a man can be killed ‘the second day in France’. So if the world of this poem was created as an antidote to war by the flash of the head-brass in the first line, then it is now falling away from the speaker’s grasp. Slowness, small-talk, amiability, natural cycles, the peace of the ploughshare, the safe space for the lover, England itself in those crumbling clods of earth – all being touched for the last time. A beautiful, subtle, clever war poem, that contains no booming guns or hissing shells, but which quietly delineates what war takes from us.
Read the poem in full again here: As the Team's Head Brass | The Poetry Foundation
In his poetry Thomas has the ability to stop me and experience the scene, and the feeling it evokes in me even if I don’t fully understand the words. It’s soul food produced by a man whose own soul was often vastly troubled.
Thomas's poetry, I suppose, is part of that rich treasury of English literature about a golden pastoral past whose passing the Great War marked. It wouldn't be correct to say the war ended it. Society changed, the world changed, attitudes and expectations changed, and it's hard to decide which were good changes and which were the wrong turns. What's certain though, these moments of peace and stillness, when there was still countryside and people who loved it, have gone forever, and I for one think that is worth writing poetry about.