Publishing my Edward Thomas

Happy New Year.

A hundred years ago Edward Thomas was in full flow, writing poetry but keeping it  quiet.

After Christmas with Edward's parents in London, the family came back to Steep on the 2nd, and Edward headed for the study, surely to work on his New Year poem, written on the 1st January.  Sprinting back down the Shoulder of Mutton hill for lunch he sprained his ankle badly, an injury which was not entirely healed for four months. He was confined to bed for some time, then confined to the cottage.

Yew Tree Cottage, Steep

Here is an extract from the novel: .

So much taken from him, denied him, because of one unlucky step as he ran down the hill – his foot landed on a stone and twisted sideways. He fell headlong onto the short turf as the sheep scattered.

He was confined to bed, quite immobile. Helen had to do everything for him. A fine beginning to the New Year! A last visit to the Frosts at Ryton had to be cancelled; no one came to see him, not even Eleanor or his mother. The most he could do was crawl from his bed and sit in a deck-chair in the bedroom, where the east window looked out on the wintry garden. There he could write; he wrote about a ploughman he knew who’d been killed in France, and about the time last June when their train to Ledbury stopped at a station with an odd name – Adlestrop.

Memory must be his source – his memory and his field notebooks, which he had Helen fetch from the Cockshott Lane study. He had always kept a notebook, everywhere he went, and the detail, the thoughts he’d had, the conversations with solitary strangers on the road, fed him with ideas. Often he told himself that if he stopped using notebooks, if he only looked, allowed himself to experience what he encountered, it would be better. It might free him from that sense he often had that he was nothing but a remote observer, a ghost invisible to other people. Perhaps, too, without a notebook, he would remember only the poignant, vital aspects of what he encountered instead of losing that significance in a mass of detail. But he could not break the habit now – it was part of who he was.

He was longing to be out of the house, and further, to be over the hills, beyond the horizon. He was tired of the view from the window, tired of the cottage and his own limitation, and of Steep – he needed the sky over high hills, where he could look down on the last house, even on the last of the trees, from a plateau of gorse and furze. To be so tied to the earth, even though he loved it – it was as though he were a fish confined to living among mud and weeds.

 

The Poem:

A Wordsworthian narrative of meeting an old man in a lonely place.

 

HE was the one man I met up in the woods
That stormy New Year's morning; and at first sight,
Fifty yards off, I could not tell how much
Of the strange tripod was a man. His body,
Bowed horizontal, was supported equally
By legs at one end, by a rake at the other:
Thus he rested, far less like a man than
His wheel-barrow in profile was like a pig.
But when I saw it was an old man bent,
At the same moment came into my mind
The games at which boys bend thus, High-Cockalorum,
Or Fly-the-garter, and Leap-frog. At the sound
Of footsteps he began to straighten himself;
His head rolled under his cape like a tortoise's;
He took an unlit pipe out of his mouth
Politely ere I wished him "A Happy New Year,"
And with his head cast upward sideways Muttered--
So far as I could hear through the trees' roar--
"Happy New Year, and may it come fastish, too,"
While I strode by and he turned to raking leaves.

By contrast, here's Eleanor Farjeon New Year poem.