Under the Dark Clouds of War: The Life and Poetry of Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas (1878-1917) was one of the most enigmatic First World War poets.

Having lived a hand to mouth existence as a jobbing writer for years, he only started writing poetry in his mid-thirties, but churned out more than one hundred and forty poems over the last couple of years of his tragically short life.

Some of his most popular works, like Adlestrop, express his intense love of nature.

Others, such as The Sun Used To Shine,* draw upon core Romantic themes such as blissfulness and impermanence.

The fact that some of Thomas’s poems are imbibed with a sense of anxiety, loss, and foreboding is unsurprising.

He started writing poetry towards the end of 1914 - a few months after the First World War began, and shortly before he signed up to fight.

But, unlike many of the other WWI poets, Thomas never wrote any poems from the trenches.

Having initially been sent to an army base in England - where he worked as a map-reading instructor - he transferred to the Royal Artillery, and wasn’t sent to France until early 1917.

Partly for this reason, Thomas’s war poems are unique.

Rather than focussing on the horrors of conflict, they capture a sense of destiny and fate - of the powerful forces that pulled young men towards the frontlines.

For example, there’s a section of his poem Roads* that reads: “Now all roads lead to France / And heavy is the tread / Of the living; but the dead…”

And his poem Lights Out* is like a vow - one young man’s commitment to break his worldly attachments and sacrifice everything for a greater cause.

Other poems, like As The Team’s Head-Brass,* highlight how the war affected not only soldiers, but the families and friends they left behind.

I particularly love how this poem mimics the rhythms of everyday speech, which - so soon after the Victorian era, and before modernist poets like T. S. Eliot burst onto the scene - was regarded as quite radical at the time.

There’s something so poignant about Thomas’s life and work.

He was a close friend of the American poet Robert Frost, and one of the network of writers (e.g. W.H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, and Rupert Brooke) linked to The Poetry Bookshop in London.

But he suffered from waves of depression, suicidal thoughts, and social anxiety - once describing social intercourse as an intense form of solitude.

Thomas struggled to cope with domestic life, became increasingly estranged from his wife and three young children, and used to spend long periods of time away from home - wandering across the countryside in search of inspiration and solace.

The notion of a solitary figure tortured by mysterious forces is brilliantly captured in one of his most enigmatic poems, The Other.*

In this, the narrator tirelessly pursues his alter-ego - a more empowered version of himself.

Of course, the fact that Thomas’s poems were written beneath the dark clouds of war infuses them with extra poignancy and weight.

And, although he never penned any formal poems on the frontline, some of his war diary entries are intensely poetic.

Edward Thomas died on 9th April 1917 - just two months after being sent to France and on the very first day of the Battle of Arras.

Having stepped out of his dugout to light his pipe, the sudden shock of a passing shell left him otherwise unscathed, but stopped his heart.

James Lee © 2024

*Click on link to read the full poem

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I really enjoyed reading Matthew Hollis’s award-winning biography Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas.

If you’d like to take a look at a range of Edward Thomas’s poems then the selection edited by Matthew Hollis, Edward Thomas: Selected Poems, is wonderful too.

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