In Memoriam Poetarum

 RIP - may they rest in poetry.....

Someone once said to me that, 'Poets are at the forefront of language.....'  And that does make sense, in a way, though who is to define a poet?  Or who can really define poetry?  From Homer to Chaucer to Byron to John Cooper Clarke, via William McGonagall, and via every child who has made up a rhyme, there are poets everywhere, in every language.....

But then there are those whose poetry resonates, whose words remain, and whose words make a difference to others.  For me, the greats include W B Yeats, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas, but then the list goes on and on, and I want to remember Keats, and Causley, Hughes and Heaney, Montale and Mayakovsky, Brecht and Blake.....

There is an extraordinary richness out there, some stored in people's memories, some stored in libraries and bookshops, on private shelves and in dusty attics. 

And the lives of poets come and go, passing time as time passes us all.  And just this week, we have lost two more voices of our age.  On September 29th, Brian Patten (1946-2025), and three days earlier Tony Harrison (1937-2025).  

And as the great survivor, Roger McGough, says:

Let me die an oldman's death

a clean and in between the sheets holy water death

famous last words?  You must be joking death

been there, done it, seen it all before, death

Corruption, greed, can't take any more, death

It will be our turn soon.....

All those years ago Brian wrote to me (I was proposing a book) about his friend, Roger:  He has priests hands, don't you think?  (Adrian has childs hands.  I'm looking at mine now. But we can never see ourselves.  That's one reason to distrust primary sources.) Another reason is that the primary sources might not like the sauce.....

In memoriam Brian Patten, a man of love, a man of playful, deeply felt words.  As he wrote, in One another's light,

But it's hard to guess

How one thing on another

Works an influence.

We pass - 

And lit briefly by one another's light

Think the way we go is right.

I met R S Thomas (1913-2000) in Cambridge, when he had just driven himself from the wilds of Wales to read at a conference.  He was a craggy, austere man, but his observations were clear and gentle:

A poem that always went down well with my students was Poetry for Supper, which has two old poets, Hunched at their beer in the low haze/Of an inn parlour, discussing poetry, while the talk ran/Noisily by them, glib with prose.....

                                     'You speak as though

No sunlight ever surprised the mind

Groping on its cloudy path.'

'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window

Before it enters a dark room

Windows don't happen.'

Adrian Henri (1932-2000), and his girlfriend Catherine, stayed with us in Italy when I persuaded him to visit in the wake of his pal, Roger McGough.  Adrian was a larger than life character, an artist, playwright and poet, and he thoroughly enjoyed performing for my school, enlisting the support of a bluegrass group of friends to perform a talking blues, among other highlights. 

As a painter, his poetry is more visual than his Liverpudlian mates, but this one, Poet in School, appropriate in the context of his visit to my school, tells a painful story:

'Write about

something that's happened to you

or someone you know.'  Half an hour

to go, and still nothing written.

Just sitting, face blank as the empty sheet,

shuffling his feet.  'Come on, son,

you must know something that's happened

to someone.'  'No, Sir.'

'Your family, your friends?'

'Sir, my brother's best mate died.'

'How?'  'Sir, electrocuted.  A train...'

'Was he on the track?'  'Sir...'

The empty eyes fill with tears.

Somehow the years between us

aren't enough to take the words back.

Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008) first came into my life when he performed, with, among others, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Christopher Logue, in Wholly Communion at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965.  His poem, To Whom It May Concern, with the refrain Stick my legs in plaster/Tell me lies about Vietnam, made him famous, perhaps, as it combined incisive rhythm with arresting images spoken in his gentle but insistent voice.

Later I encountered him at Lancaster University, where he was friends with my mentor David Craig.  And then I met him again in 1992 at Lerici, with others including Dannie Abse (1923-2014) and the Italian poet Paolo Bertolani (1931-2007), to celebrate the bicentenary of Shelley's birth, and I took the opportunity to invite him and his wife, Celia, to Rome.  

Adrian read at my school (St George's - at the time it was St George's English School, Rome.....  now it is changed - utterly changed.....) In the morning he read a poem (I am not sure, but I think it might have been Victor Jara of Chile - look it up - ) and my then Headmaster said he thought that Adrian should not read it that evening.  I mentioned this, dutifully, to Adrian, who read it very clearly that evening.....

But, in memoriam, after all, this is the poem to remember Adrian by:

Beattie Is Three

At the top of the stairs

I ask for her hand. O.K.

She give it to me.

how her fist fits my palm,

A bunch of consolation.

We take our time

Dow the steep carpet way

As I wish silently

That the stairs were endless.

At a tangent, perhaps, Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) was a very different poet. He was a professor (prior to early retirement in 1980) at Glasgow University. He also had connections with David Craig, and I met him when I lived in Lancaster. His poetry was tense, acerbic, and inventive in an ultimately modern way. Some of his writings belonged to the school of concrete poetry, where shape was the prime issue; but he also translated poetry from Russian, Hungarian, French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and other languages.  A poem that affected my students particularly was In the Snack-Bar, which tells of an old man with disability seeking help to go to the toilet in a cafe and then taking a bus.  Another that inspired young listeners was, The First Men on Mercury, where invasive beings exchange greetings with indigenes, and then leave changed.

Glasgow 5 March 1971, one of his "Instamatic" poems, clicks like a photograph, an instant in the life of a city, a moment in life's timeline that shocks and makes us pause, and think, and wonder about outcomes:

With a ragged diamond 

of shattered plate-glass

a young man and his girl

are falling backwards into a shop window.

The young man's face

is bristling with fragments of glass

and the girl's leg has caught

on the broken window

and spurts arterial blood

over her wet-look white coat.

Their arms are starfished out

braced for impact,

their faces show surprise, shock,

and the beginning of pain.

the two youths who have pushed them

are about to complete the operation

reaching into the window

to loot what they can smartly.

Their faces show no expression.

It is a sharp clear night

in Sauchiehall Street.

In the background two drivers

keep their eyes on the road.

Jonty Driver (1939-2023) was a friend of my parents, and we got to know each other towards the end of his life. He was a South African, and was active in the anti-apartheid movement, became a political prisoner, and latterly a school master and a poet.  Not everyone loved Jonty, and in Private Eye, on February 11th 1978, Auberon Waugh wrote in his diary, GOOD NEWS that C J Driver, whoever he may be, is going away to teach in Hong Kong and will not be reviewing any more novels for the Guardian.....  Although, Waugh goes on, Lorna Sage is undisputed as Lord Gnome Trophyholder for Most Boring Reviewer of All Time, Driver comes second with his record-breaking three-year run of picking dud novels.....

Not for me to make war with a Waugh, but, certainly in my experience and later in his life,. Jonty was an engaging and entertaining observer of life, and, when I last saw him read, at the Sea Fever Festival in Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk, he carried off the persona of poet with grace and clarity.

In his last book, Still Further, there is a poem entitled Sunset & After which, I think, expresses common humanity in a way that all can relate to:

The tide is out, the sand is firm beneath

my feet, the sun about to set.  I'm here

again on Noordhoek Beach.  Another day

is sauntering to its casual end.

I've journeyed back from where I don't belong

to where I also don't belong......

The point of being here is not revealed;

perhaps you'd find it out from time to time

and wander on, pretending that you had

a plan.  Not true, as far as I'm concerned.

If God has worked His purpose out, He's not told me.... 

Of all these gifted and imaginative men, the one I was most in awe of was Tony Harrison (1937-2025) who died just a week ago, aged 88.  Initially approachable, and affable, Tony concealed a cauldron of thoughts and ideas, and attempts at light-heartedness seemed brittle. He read his poems as if they were wrought from hard material - carved, as it were, from blocks of words.  Marked with D. (where D stood both for Dad and Death) a poem about the cremation of his father, who had been a baker, begins:

When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven

Not unlike those he fuelled all his life,

I thought of his cataracts ablaze with heaven

and radiant with the sight of his dead wife.....

I listened, and tried to note his intonation, and any changes between my text and his recital, and was swirled in a sea of words and images.  Poetry has potential, a power that perhaps no longer works against the competition of electronic wizardry.

At the end of his reading, Harrison turned to A Kumquat for John Keats, a relatively long poem about what happens if you don't die young, about what it feels like to live in a world that has the possibility of total extinction.  That febrile state where we know not what will become of us while we still should be alive:

I find I can't, as if one couldn't say

exactly where the night became the day,

which makes for me the kumquat taken whole

best fruit, and metaphor, to fit the soul

of one in Florida at 42 with Keats

crunching kumquats, thinking, as he eats

the flesh, the juice, the pith, the pips, the peel,

that this is how a full life ought to feel,

its perishable relish prick the tongue,

when the man who savours life's no longer young,

the fruits that were his futures far behind.

Then it's the kumquat fruit expresses best

how days have darkness round them like a rind,

life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.

It is sad that those we love pass away before us.  We mourn the silence that fills our lives where conversations and laughters once shone like silver and gold.  But we know that this is life, and we know we have our memories.  With poetry we are blessed by the remaining words, on paper or in our minds.  And, for those who remain it is good to rehearse the life of others as it is good to love the life that we still hold.

Some thirty years ago I was attempting to write a book about Roger McGough, and I sent a draft of the first part to Brian Patten.  I asked him to be honest, and he was.  I found it interesting but now and then it sounds a bit chummy, he typed....  Perhaps there could be a bit more background colour....  I suppose in any biog the background against which a life is lived is hugely important and maybe more of that is needed.

Brian then hand-wrote a footnote:  I really hope you don't find my comments dispiriting at all,

Very Best

Brian

And the very best to you, Brian, and all in the afterlife.  

Where would we be without you?

The Gulf of Lerici - 1992

....and the scent to winged flowers,

and the coolness of the hours

of dew, and sweet warmth left by day,

were scattered o'er the twinkling bay...

P B Shelley

Lines written in the bay of Lerici

[for 02/11]

North Wales - Y Moelwyn, and other stories

Poetry for Supper.....

Y Moelwyn

Ever cold, and rough its brows - where the flocks

Roam its heathery furrows;

An organ, as the high wind blows

Howling in rocky hollows.

Ellis Humphrey Evans was born on January 13th, 1887 at Penlan, Trawsfynydd and moved with his family to Yr Ysgwrn, a farm on Cwm Prysor in North Wales, at the age of four months.  He was the first of fourteen children.  Later he became known as Hedd Wyn, which means Blessed Place.  He is also known as The Shepherd War Poet.

In January 1917, despite being an agricultural worker, Hedd Wyn enlisted in the army, at Blaenau Ffestiniog. Early on the morning of July 31st, 2017, his battalion, the 15th Royal Welch Fusiliers, went into action on the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele (the third battle of Ypres), at Pilkem Ridge, in rain, and dark and fog. Hedd was caught by an exploding shell and died being transported to hospital.

In 2012, Yr Ysgwrn, the farm, was acquired by the Snowdonia National Park Authority and in 2017 the house was opened as a museum and memorial, the centrepiece of which is the Black Chair, Y Gadair Ddu, which was posthumously awarded (draped in a black cloth) to Hedd Wyn, who had won under the non-de-plume of Fleur-de-Lis with his poem Yr Arwr (The Hero) on September 6th, 1917, at the National Eisteddfod at Birkenhead Park. The empty chair came to symbolise all the empty chairs in millions of homes as a result of the First World War.

My years of weeping, deep and stricken,

And my anguish were heard where rocks lie barren,

For I was the Storm Maiden - and of old

I cried in the tempest and the cold ocean.

Ardently I wept, for lack of seeing
The prince of the land of youth, my darling,
When our days knew no suffering - and we
Into its ruby summers went strolling.....

Yr Arwr (The Hero) 

Hedd Wyn

[In September 2017, at Birkenhead Park, a Black Chair Festival was held in commemoration of the Royal National Eisteddfod of September 1917.]

After Yr Ysgwrn I make a detour to explore the remains of Tomen Y Mur, a Roman settlement from the first century AD where four or five hundred soldiers shivered in sight of Y Moelwyn.... Later, according to the Mabinogion, this became Mur Castell, the court of Llew Llaw Gyffen, a character who became King of Gwynedd, having overcome a series of terrible curses and the treacherous behaviour of his wife, Blodeuwedd (who had been magically created from flowers)....

And then I drive to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where shattered slates litter the hillsides. JRR Tolkein was inspired by this grim landscape, and as I trek my way up towards the heights of Y Moelwyn, I fear I see Orcs dribbling at me from up on the screes, while Golum scrabbles up a splashing gully.

This is a hard landscape, and it becomes colder and less hospitable as I climb skywards.

I first came here with my family on a damp summer holiday, when I was a child, and find myself dogged by shadowy memories.  

We stayed in a tiny old caravan, parked in a puddle hard by Penrhyndeudraeth.  The caravan belonged to an Aunt, Auntie Frankie, who had a small shop at nearby Portmeirion (more of which another day). Penrhyndeudraeth was the home of Bertrand Russell at the time (until his death, from influenza, in 1970) but, I am sorry to say, he did not come to visit us for tea.  Instead we took the Ffestiniog railway, and wandered on the slippery hillsides of Cnicht, and wondered if our father really did know Lloyd George, who had earlier practised law in Portmadoc.

It is extraordinary how rich in stories this area proves to be.  The village of Tremadoc was created in the shape of a T on reclaimed land by William Alexander Madocks, who also built the Cob at Portmadoc. {Portmadoc, Tremadoc, W A Madocks.....} [Madocks, incidentally, is thought to have been the original for Squire Headlong, in his friend Thomas Love Peacock's novel Headlong Hall.....]

Anyway, Tremadoc currently has two pubs, opposite each other in the spacious square at the head of the T: The Union and The Fleece.  One of these, I believe, was once known as the Madoc Arms, and it was here, in September 1812, that Percy Bysshe and Mrs Shelley took lodging, with a view to renting William Alexander's cottage, Tan-yr-allt on the hillside above his creation....

The story is a bit convoluted and I won't go into details, but, with absolutely no connection at all the village is also famous for being the birthplace, in 1888, of the son of an Anglo-Irish, drink-disposed landowner from Westmeath, by the name of Thomas Chapman (later, in 1914, Sir Thomas Chapman, 7th Baronet) and an illegitimate Scottish nanny known as Sarah Junner.  The son, as you might well have guessed (?) grew up to be T E Lawrence [aka T E Shaw, or John Hume Ross, or   Lawrence of Arabia.....]

You can understand why readers of the Sun flock here, what with bara brith, the Purple Moose Brewery Tap, and all this literary and political history.....

And why not indeed?  Except that I forgot to mention that Penrhyndeudraeth is said to be one of the most Welsh place in Wales, with 79% of the primary school pupils coming from Welsh-speaking homes.  Apparently, in 2011, English people took over the Royal Oak pub, but caused a riot by threatening customers who ordered their drinks in Welsh with an air rifle.  {Said landlords did not tarry long....}

Criccieth is very Welsh, too, despite its Edwardian good looks, and despite its being acquired by force by Edward I as part of his collection of Welsh Castles.....

A mile or so on the road from Criccieth to Portmadoc (Cricieth to Porthmadog) is the village of Pentrefelin. It was here that 87 year old poet R S (the Rev Ron) Thomas died in 2000, having retired from full time church ministry in 1978. I met him in 1986, when I was on a course in Cambridge. He had driven all the way (in a Mini Clubman) from his unheated home on the Llŷn Peninsula to give a reading.  He was tall, and grey haired, and his face was weathered and etched with lichen - an impressive presence, something like a granite sheep.  He read his words quietly, as if to himself, but every word was heard.

Thomas learned Welsh too late in his life to write poetry in the language, so he had no Bardic Chair.  But he wrote for Wales, and he understood writing.  A favourite poem is:

Poetry for Supper

'Listen now, verse should be as natural

As the small tuber that feeds on muck

And grows slowly from obtuse soil

To the white flower of immortal beauty.'

'Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer

Said once about the long toil

That goes like blood to the poem's making?

Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,

Limp as bindweed, if it break at all

Life's iron crust.  Man, you must sweat

And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build

Your verse a ladder.'

'You speak as though

No sunlight ever surprised the mind

Groping on its cloudy path.'

'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window

Before it enter a dark room.

Windows don't happen.' 

So two old poets,

Hunched at their beer in the low haze

Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran

Noisily by them, glib with prose.

R S Thomas's ashes are buried by the entrance to St John's Church, Portmadoc.

I make my way back down the coast, past mighty Harlech Castle, past the caravan parks and tall boarding houses of Barmouth, and up the Mawddach  estuary to my friend Hilary's house, for a delicious supper of ravioli with rhythm and rhyme, with caesura sauce and run-on wine.....  On the way I stop to admire the reflections of the ridge of Cader Idris in the tidal waters, and another traveller comes to mind.  Daniel Defoe passed this way on his Tour Through the Whole Island Of Great Britain (1724 - 26).  Here among innumerable summits, and rising peaks of nameless hills, we saw the famous Kader-Idricks, which some are of opinion, is the highest mountain in Britain.....

The sun on the mountain

By sweet streams I went walking - as the shy

Moorland breeze was playing;

And pale sunshine's arm did cling

To the old hills, embracing.

Hedd Wynn

For more information on Hedd Wyn and his home at Yr Ysgwrn please see:

http://www.yrysgwrn.com/

Edward Thomas

In Pursuit of Spring

At breakfast I notice that the intensity of light has increased. My reclusion guards me from the world, but I cannot ignore the sun.  It is the equinox, officially the first day of Spring.  This is the day when, in 1913, the writer Edward Thomas left London to walk and cycle to the Quantocks, a journey he recorded in In Pursuit of Spring, first published in 1914.

He would have passed very near to where I am staying, as he came down through Guilford, over the Hog's Back, through Chawton, barely nodding at Jane Austen, then Ropley to Old Alresford to Winchester, and thence to Salisbury Plain. He passed through thatched villages, a landscape dotted with long-since disappeared pubs, on by-roads with little traffic. In the garden I think of what it means to be free.  I think of the marvellous glow of the sun.....

I see some flowers, lovely tender things just opening to the morning sun.  In another of his books, The South Country, first published in 1909, Thomas wrote about a spring morning in Hampshire. We shall presently set out and sail into the undiscovered seas and find new islands of the free, the beautiful, the young.  As is the dimly glimmering changeless brook twittering over the pebbles, so is life.  It is but just leaving the fount.  All things are possible in the windings between fount and sea....

I admire the signs of spring, that, after this warmest ever of Februaries, is surely earlier than that of 1913.  Inspired, I set out to trace something of Edward Thomas in the neighbourhood where he and his family lived for some time before he was killed by the blast of a shell at 7.36am on April 9th 1917, at Arras.

In  December 1906 Edward and Helen Thomas moved into Berryfield Cottage, Ashfold, with their son Merfyn and daughter Bronwen.  The cottage was close to All Saints Church, Steep, which is in the grounds of Bedales School, founded by John Badley in 1893. The Thomas children, including Myfanwy (born in 1910), went to the school, and the family all attended services in All Saints.

It is quiet in the church.  The light filters in through stained and plain glass windows.....

And also illuminates two small windows in the south wall, designed and engraved by Laurence Whistler in 1978, and dedicated by R S Thomas in that year to commemorate the centenary of the writer's birth.  It is difficult to photograph the glass against the light, but the left hand window shows a green road across hills, such as Thomas loved to explore, bordered by yew trees and May blossom; his jacket is seen hanging on a branch, with his pipe and stick, as if he is about to return.

On the right hand window is engraved one of Thomas's poems, The New House, which he wrote about the house they lived in above the beech hanger overlooking Steep.

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;

Sad days when the sun

Shone in vain: old griefs, and griefs

Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught

Could I foresee;

But I learnt how the wind would sound

After these things should be.

Below this is depicted a sequence of doors, opening or shut, which end with a scene of the sun rising over a Flanders battlefield.

On the north wall there is a war memorial to the men of the parish who gave their lives, including....

At the age of 38 Thomas had no need to enlist. His wife, Helen, wrote later that his nature was meditative, austere, and reserved. He could have offered his services as a map-reading instructor for example, but he joined the Artists' Rifles and volunteered for the front line.  In November 1916 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant with the Royal Garrison Artillery.

..... I hate not Germans, nor grow hot

With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.....

But with the best and meanest Englishmen

I am one in crying, God save England, lest

We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed....

Poem 93

The Collected Poems

Edited by R. George Thomas

The family occupied three houses in Steep, though Thomas still spent time in London, as well as travelling extensively around England and Wales. His health was precarious and he suffered from depression from time to time.  In 1913 he was introduced to Robert Frost and in 1914 he began to write poetry. When he died only twenty-seven of his poems had been published, all of them under the pseudonym of Edward Eastaway. In total he wrote one hundred and forty four poems in two and a half years, and the first collection of these was published by his friend Walter de la Mare in 1920.

He loved the area, and wrote in detail about places and people he observed, both in prose and verse. On Shoulder of Mutton hill, high above the village, but below the ridge where he lived in the Red House, a sarsen stone from Glastonbury was placed in his memory in 1937.

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.

Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn, and briar;

And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk

By beech and yew and perishing juniper

Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots

And rabbit holes for steps.....

The Combe

'..... Then the hills of the horizon - 

That is how I should make hills had I to show

One who would never see them what hills were like.'

'Yes. Sixty miles of South Downs at one glance.....'

Wind and Mist

Running along a bank, a parapet

That saves from the precipitous wood below

The level road, there is a path.  It serves

Children for looking down the long smooth steep,

Between the legs of beech and yew.....

The Path

Lichen, ivy, and moss

Keep evergreen the trees

That stand half-flayed and dying.

And the dead trees on their knees

In dog's-mercury, ivy, and moss:

And the bright twit of the goldfinch drops

Down there as he flits on thistle-tops.

The Hollow Wood

As I explore these walks and ways, the delicate colours of early spring rise out of the leaf litter and the dead grass.  Birdsong, something that Thomas frequently references in his poems, cannot be captured in photographs, so please imagine the liquid fluency of territorial blackbirds, and the evening joy of thrushes....

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard

If others sang;

The Unknown Bird

But these things also are Spring's - 

On banks by the roadside the grass

Long-dead that is greyer now

Than all the Winter it was;

The shell of a little snail bleached

In the grass: chip of flint, and mite

Of chalk, and the small birds' dung

In splashes of purest white;

But these things also

Edward Thomas's reputation is associated with the the First World War, inevitably, I suppose, but his poems really bring to life a world of nature.  His close observation and clear diction mark him out as an exceptional writer.  Ted Hughes called him The father of us all.... Robert Frost may have sent The Road Not Taken with a sense of irony when Thomas enlisted, but Thomas himself knew very well the irony of choice:

I read the sign.  Which way shall I go?

A voice says: You would not have doubted so

At Twenty.  Another voice gentle with scorn

Says: At twenty you wished you had never been born.....

And if there be a flaw in that heaven

'Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may be

To be here or anywhere talking to me,

No matter what the weather, on earth,

At any age between death and birth,

To see what day or night can be,

The sun and the frost, the land and the sea,

Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring,

With a poor man of any sort, down to a king,

Standing upright out in the air

Wondering where he shall journey, O where?

The Signpost

The day is coming to a close.  I trace the roads that Thomas would have known. The landscape must have changed, with the development of tractors and harvesters that have replaced the horses and the blacksmiths, the ploughmen and the hedgerows.  But, in this small area at least, there is still a landscape, marked by signs that tell their stories.....

I love roads:

The goddesses that dwell

Far along invisible

Are my favourite gods.

Roads go on

While we forget, and are

Forgotten like a star

That shoots and is gone.....

Now all roads lead to France

And heavy is the tread

Of the living; but the dead

Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring

To me or take from me,

They keep me company

With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude

Of the loops over the downs,

Hushing the roar of towns

And their brief multitude.

Roads

I follow one road in particular to an inn with no sign.  The White Horse, or, as it is known locally, The Pub With No Name, has changed little since Edward Thomas visited (quite frequently, I believe). The sign was, apparently, stolen and never replaced, or so the story goes. In what was once the smithy a niche contains memorabilia of the poet, and displays a mounted copy of his first ever poem, Up in the Wind, which was written about the inn....

Two roads cross, and not a house in sight

Except the 'White Horse' in this clump of beeches.

It hides from either road, a field's breadth back;

And it's the trees you see, and not the house,

Both near and far, when the clump's the highest thing

And homely too upon a far horizon

To one who knows there is an inn within.....

'.... Did you ever see

Our signboard?'  No.  The post and empty frame

I knew. Without them I could not have guessed

The low grey house and its one stack under trees

Was not a hermitage but a public house....

It is remarkable that this remote pub, with neither name nor sign, survives, but fortunately local people, and Thomas enthusiasts alike, appreciate its charm, and corporate intrusion has not (yet) eaten its heart.  It is a fine memorial to the England that Thomas died for.

The Past is a strange land, most strange.

Wind blows not there, nor does rain fall:

If they do, they cannot hurt at all.

Men of all kinds as equals range

The soundless fields and streets of it.

Pleasure and pain there have no sting,

The perished self not suffering

That lacks all blood and nerve and wit,

And is in shadow-land a shade....

Parting

I have to go.  I could happily have stayed, immersed in dreams (and I hope one day to return,) but:

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

In Memoriam [Easter 1915]

Ninety-nine years ago Edward Thomas wrote in his diary that it was A beautiful day, sunny with pale cloudless sky and W. wind, but cold in O.P.  Clear nightfall with curled, cinereous cloud and then a cloudless night with pale stains in sky over where Bosh is burning a village or something.....

It has been a lovely spring day, and I return to my lodging grateful that the world that Edward Thomas introduced me to is still a beautiful place....

Edward Thomas's diary was found in his pocket, strangely creased by shell blast.  His last entry read, - the beauty of this silent empty scene of no inhabitants and hid troops, but don't know why I could have cried and didn't.

Inside the diary was a photograph of Helen, his wife, and a slip of paper, on one side of which was pencilled:

Where any turn may lead to Heaven

Or any corner may hide Hell

Roads shining like river up hill after rain.

But greater sorrow from less love has been
That can mistake lack and despair for hope
And knows not tempest and the perfect scope
Of summer, but a frozen  drizzle perpetual
Of drops that from remorse and pity fall
And cannot ever shine in the sun or thaw,
Removed eternally from the sun's law.


Poem 144
13/01/1917