Monday, May 13, 2013

More Thomas Trees.


The soldier's poems, after enlistment. These have trees of significance and perhaps portent. The associations seem to have more of death in them.

Aspens:  The Cherry Trees:Cock Crow: October: The Ash Grove: The Wind's Song: The Team's Headbrass: The Gallows:  and later the Forest Poems - The Green Roads:   The Dark Forest: Light's Out.


Elderly ash trees.       wordpress.com



The Ash Grove is a poem I don't remember having read before. The long lines are unfamiliar and perhaps rather uncomfortable at first. Then I remembered  the song and it read better.  Better still after listening to Laura Wright Songs, YouTube, The Ash Grove.

folksongcollector.com



Edward Thomas loved these old English and Welsh songs and sung beautifully himself - at least Helen thought so. The  Ash Grove tune is a traditional Welsh harp melody to which English and Welsh words have been set. The ash was his favourite tree.

 The Ash Grove

Half of the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made
Little more than the dead ones made of shade.
If they led to a house, long before they had seen its fall:
But they welcomed me; I was glad without cause and delayed.

Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the interval -
Paces each sweeter than the sweetest miles - but nothing at all,
Not even the spirits of memory and fear with restless wing,
Could climb down in to molest me over the wall

That I passed through at either end without noticing.
And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring
The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost
With a ghostly gladness, as if I heard a girl sing

The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,
And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,
But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die
And I had what I most desired, without search or desert or cost.
                                                         *
The intervals of a hundred paces  between the trees bring tranquillity, space and rhythm, and it is as Edna Longley points out 'tranquillity recollected in tranquillity' and made poetry.

Someone could set Thomas's  'Ash Grove' to music, perhaps.

By contrast, the short, one or two beat lines of  'Bright Clouds',  (The Pond) which Longley describes as a 'metrical sorbet' after three poems 'weighted with war.' But the 'Nothing to be done' she believes, suggests his impatience for action, and the scum of may-blossom has a darkness to it.

It's a May poem all the same.


naturalistsnotebook.com

 Most people including the Oxford University digitalisation project call the poem The Pond. Longley being a scholar says there is no justification for that except for a letter to Eleanor Farjeon asking if she'd received his 'poem about the pond?' I think she's losing that particular argument.
  
  
 'The Pond' notecard
 Original wood engraving by Yvonne Skargon.
From the Edward Thomas Fellowship notecards . Do see the edwardthomasfellowship website to order these  and eleven more lovely notecards.
 
      

  

5 comments:

  1. You have just taken me back 50 years or more, to when we used to sing The Ash Tree in Junior School. The poem is one of his not so familiar to me but I wonder if he was thinking of somewhere in Wales when he wrote it, as Carmarthenshire in particular, where I live, and he visited often, has a high ratio of Ash trees to others. Our spring seems to come later as the Ash trees are usually the last to get their leaves (neck and neck with the Oak this year).

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  2. Thank you Bovey Belle - and I think you are right. Edna Longley gives a draft of four stanzas that preceded the existing ones. They begin:

    'In an ash grove among the mountains once, I was glad
    Exceedingly, walking under the trees, notwithstanding I had
    Naught that I knew to be glad of'
    and later
    'From where I saw the first stony roots clasp the stone
    And I forgot the past and future,...'.


    I knew the Ash Grove song too, especially the tune, but can't specifically remember how or from when.
    Really good to have your comment.

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  3. Thank you so much for this blog, which I just discovered. I love Thomas's poetry. I appreciate your commentary and photos, which show a lot about his life and work.

    I blog myself about war, my new book and (sometimes) poetry. Here are two links that might interest your readers. One discusses the new Thomas biography; the other is about my friend Donald Hall, the well-known New Hampshire poet:

    http://ourwarmikepride.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-tale-of-two-wars-and-two-poets.html

    http://ourwarmikepride.blogspot.com/2013/01/poetry-break.html

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  4. Excellent and very exciting site. Love to watch. Keep Rocking.
    Green Roads

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