Thomas and Frost at Dymock - August 1914

Figure 1 The Malvern Hills from the Ledbury Road

At last the summer has arrived in England. It's late July and I've just made a pilgrimage I've been meaning to get around to for years, to a spectacularly beautiful corner of England west of the Malvern Hills, just thirty miles from where I live. It is an ancient landscape substantially fashioned by Saxon earls over a thousand years ago during a period when the English were consolidating their victories against the Danes. Looking at old maps, you realise that virtually nothing has changed in the landscape although the pattern of agriculture has changed since Robert Frost and Edward Thomas spent a summer there in 1914. At that time, the main produce was fruit, pears for perry and apples for cider, as well as blackberries for dyes, and, rather charmingly, wild daffodils, which were picked by itinerant workers and exported to London by train. Nowadays, it is more conventional arable and dairy farming but though Frost lamented the dire condition of the English agricultural class, he must have felt at home among the cider apples.

In the summer of 1914, on the eve of the declaration of war, Helen Thomas, the future poet's wife, his three children, a dog called Rags and a little Russian boy who was lodging with the Thomases made a long and tedious journey from Hampshire to the hamlet of Leddington, near Dymock in Gloucestershire. It was the day after war broke out and the transport system was chaotic; on the last leg of their journey, an overzealous local policeman in the grip of spy fever challenged the suspicious strangers. When Robert Frost's name was mentioned to allay his fears, things got worse, because Frost himself was already under suspicion. Ledbury was not used to people who stayed up after 10 o'clock, had foreign accents and tramped around the countryside making notes. This, from Helen Thomas's account in World Without End, was the tense beginning to an historic month for English poetry.

Edward Thomas was already there, having made three visits to his friend Robert Frost in the previous few months. Thomas was ground down by over-production and, in a letter to the poet Eleanor Farjeon, can scarcely hide his excitement at the prospect of this holiday; it would last barely a month but would be instrumental in transforming Thomas from a tired hack to a poet of the first order. In the previous fifteen years, he had produced approximately two million words of travel books, biographies, one novel and countless literary reviews. He lived permanently on the edge of a nervous breakdown, a loving and devoted family man who was nevertheless permanently wracked with anxiety about where the next commission was coming from. Apart from some schoolboy efforts and one attempt at pastiche, he had not written a line of poetry, but the events of the next month, particularly the time spent with Robert Frost "in the shade of a tree smoking and talking endlessly of literature and poetry in particular" were instrumental in transforming him into a poet of lasting interest.





This is the way Little Iddens looks today -somewhat gentrified as befits its £300,000 price tag. The beech hedge which Frost admired is still there, as is the slate roof which disappointed Elinor Frost, who desperately wanted to live under thatch. Little Iddens was by no means an idyll for the Frost family. Robert continually complained about the ramshackle nature of the place to the landlord and eventually had to move out in the winter of 1914 to live with the Abercrombies at The Gallows, where Elinor eventually realised her dream.





Already living close by were Lascelles Abercrombie and Wilfrid Gibson, names now hardly known at all, who were the founding members of the Dymock poet's colony; John Drinkwater, playwright, critic and poet was often in evidence; their poetry is now mainly of historical interest, but the other three, Rupert Brooke, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas have a significant place in posterity. From the post office in Dymock, Abercrombie, Gibson, Drinkwater and Brooke (Frost, being American was excluded) posted the poems which made up New Numbers, a poetry magazine only running to four issues, but which made a massive impression on the English literary scene of the day. The poetry itself, self- styled "Georgian", typified by rural themes, sometimes with a dash of social realism, now seems rather conservative to us, but a closer inspection reveals the ache of modernism and a desire to sweep away the aesthetic triviality of late Victorian poetry. It is not the modernism of Pound, Eliot or Yeats, with their strident cultural pronouncements, because it is nearly always personal in nature. Poets like de la Mer and Masefield, both highly influential and successful at this time, delighted in the poetry making aesthetic for its own sake, but the Dymock poets are characterised by an uneasy questing after something more. Superficially, there is something Wordsworthian about them, but you don't have to dig far beneath the surface to discover a typically 20th century preoccupations with self, identity, and uncertainty. It has a lot in common with the poetry of Hardy who was often anthologised alongside them. While it never attains the monumental qualities of Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, it is arguable that its personal lyricism is more in keeping with our tastes today. The Dymock poets may be conservative with a small c, sometimes a little treacly and idealistic, but at least they did not flirt with fascism or fall in line with any other kind of cold political ideology. For a time, at least, the Georgians and the coterie surrounding Ezra Pound shared some of the same aims and sensibilities.

Frost and Thomas had met a few times in London and Leddington (which has, incidentally, three alternative spellings) before Thomas's perceptive and sympathetic reviews of North of Boston -- three in all -- which were published in July and August 1914. Thomas managed intuitively to get to the heart of Frost's great achievement, and in subsequent discussions, the poet and the prose writer discovered that they shared the same ideas about poetics, mainly in the need to eschew "poetic" diction and use the rhythms of ordinary speech. Frost's idea of "the sound of sense" - the idea that natural sentence rhythms are the template for real poetry was one that Thomas shared, even warning Frost to put something in writing on the subject before he did. During the month of August when the Frost and Thomas families lived a few hundred yards from each other across a couple of meadows, Frost took the diffident Thomas in hand, and reading back to him some of his own sentences from his recently published In Pursuit of Spring, showed him that he was already effectively writing poetry. Frost realised that Thomas only needed to pare down his lyrical prose work to uncover the rhythms and themes of real poetry and his contribution was to give focus and direction to Thomas's work. It is clear from the correspondence between the two that Thomas was already anticipating a possible move to poetry, and hoped that Frost could help him. As Thomas's market for travel books and reviews dried up in the early months of the war, he started to produce his first poems, which he tentatively mailed to Frost. He was able to say in December 1914:

"I find myself engrossed and conscious of a possible perfection as I never was in prose…I have been rather pleased with some of the pieces…Still I won't begin thanking you yet, though if you like I will put it down now that you are the only begetter right enough."

An intense correspondence continued between the men until Thomas's death serving as an artillery officer at Arras, where, one or two days before his death, he was able to read the Times'review of his first book of poetry which said "He is a real poet, he has the truth in him." In less than two years, he had produced roughly 140 poems of the highest quality and for once and at last his prolific quality served him well.


In 1914, Frost, aged 38, is in the ascendant at last; his first two books, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, have been published and glowingly reviewed (among others by Thomas) in London; news of his success will shortly cross the Atlantic, and he will return home to some degree of security in his career. He's a good talker, witty and engaging. He is also something of a curmudgeon, who likes the thrill of argument, conflict and even physical danger. In short, he's up for anything, seeing off gamekeepers, remonstrating with his landlord and quoting from Shakespeare over the hopeless dilapidation of Little Iddens, and even threatening to shoot the interfering local bobby who suspected, from his foreign speech, that he was a spy. Like Thomas, however, he inhabits the paradoxical states of family man and loner. He has known his share of tragedy, and, like Thomas has threatened suicide, particularly in the hilarious "dismal swamp" episode. (Both men owned and occasionally produced revolvers and threatened to use them on themselves.) However, Frost has a strong repressed romantic side, which emerges clearly in his Dymock poems -- Iris by Night is a good example. Like the lines on his face, he is clearly defined if not without his contradictions.

Figure 2 The slopes where Frost and Thomas saw the lunar halo in "Iris by Night".

In the foreground is the ancient iron age fort known as The British Camp, and in the distance the highst point of the Malvern Hills, rising to over a thousand feet. Here are the closing lines of "Iris by Night".

"Then a small rainbow like a trellis gate,
A very small moon-made prismatic bow,
Stood closely over us through which to go.
And then we were vouchsafed the miracle
That never yet to other two befell
And I alone of us have lived to tell.
A wonder! Bow and rainbow as it bent,
Instead of moving with us as we went
(To keep the pots of gold from being found),
It lifted from its dewy pediment
Its two mote-swimming many-colored ends
And gathered them together in a ring.
And we stood in it softly circled round
From all division time or foe can bring
In a relation of elected friends."

All contemporary accounts of Thomas stress his charisma. As Abercrombie's wife, Catherine says, "I think Edward was the most beautiful person I have ever seen. It was quite a shock on first meeting him unless one had been warned." Admittedly, the Dymock people were not prone to understatement, but pictures of him at this age, 35, show him tall, well built, with handsome aquiline features and a thick shock of fair hair. He looks a little like the young Richard Burton whose Welsh ancestry he shared. Whereas Frost is on the way up, Thomas is in the mire. For fifteen years he has shown classic symptoms of depression, on at least one occasion taking his revolver out and threatening to shoot himself. He is diffident and, he feels, a physical coward, a conviction that is to continue to haunt him and may have something to do with his unnecessary decision to volunteer for active service in 1916, a decision which leads to his death at Arras. He is also very unsure of himself and his own identity, full of regret when he is decisive, and regretting it when he is not decisive. Thomas is as undefined and as indefinite as Frost is defined and adamant. Yet all accounts of him present him as reserved in speech, yet indisputably charismatic and loveable. He is an excellent listener to Frost's good talker.

However, it is only fair to say that there are striking comparisons between the two men -- their age, for a start and the frustration experienced in their lives as writers. Both have a natural leaning towards landscape and rural themes, with a strong feeling for the inhabitants of those landscapes. They both are family men who experienced difficulties in their marital relationships, both often speaking of a sense of inadequacy in reciprocating love of devoted wives.

One incident that occurred during this period underlines that contrast. While walking one day near Abercrombie's house, Frost and Thomas are challenged by a gamekeeper brandishing a shotgun, who points that they have no right to be walking there. Frost is typically pugnacious, and later goes round to threaten the gamekeeper, an action that nearly leads to his arrest; Thomas is conciliatory and backs down, perhaps through cowardice, perhaps because he knows the rules of the English countryside better. Whatever the reason, it becomes an incident that caused him shame, and it has been suggested that Thomas volunteered for active service to exorcise the specific memory of this incident. In a revealing letter to Frost from The Front, Thomas alludes to the gamekeeper incident when he tells Frost that he had not the nerve to climb an old chimney being used as a look-out post.

Wilfrid (sic.) Gibson is a poet now only to be found lurking in obscure anthologies, but in his poem The Golden Room, (1927) he presents us with an account of a meeting at his house, "The Old Nailshop," just north of Dymock, at which Frost, Thomas, Abercrombie and Brooke were present. On a summer evening, as the lamp sets the room aglow, Frost holds everyone spellbound with his witty talk, as Thomas makes the occasional dry aside and Brooke interjects his own humorous comments.

"We talked and laughed; but, for the most part, listened
While Robert Frost kept on and on and on,
In his slow New England fashion, for our delight
Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips
And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes…

…a quick flash from Abercrombie now,
A murmured half dry aside from Thomas;
Now a clear and laughing word from Brooke; and then
Again Frost's rich and ripe philosophy
That had the body and tang of good draught cider
And poured as clear as a stream."

Figure 3 Wilfrid Gibson's The Old Nailshop -- location of "The Golden Room " -- much as it was. Gibson at the time was a successful and highly anthologised poet on both sides of the Atlantic. His success may have occasioned some of the friction between him and Frost and Thomas, who had him down as something of a misery.

Eleanor Farjeon, childen's writer, poet ("Morning Has Broken") and diarist, also gives us some vivid moments from this summer, when she encamped it somewhat more style next door to Frost at the Glyn Iddens farmhouse. Among these snapshots are the hilarious formal dinner at a local farm where the whole company of poets end up legless on rough cider, Abercrombie's literary barbecues in a gypsy tent at Ryton, and Frost teaching some local schoolchildren to skim stones across the River Leadon or make javelins out of sapling trees. In the first volume of her autobiography, which is entirely dedicated to her relationship with Thomas, she also has a wonderful illustration of Frost's "sound of sense" doctrine: walking in the fields one day, Frost spots a ploughman a few hundred yards away and shouts some greeting to him; the ploughman shouts back, but only the rhythm of the words can be heard; "There you are," says Frost. " That's what I mean by the sound of sense."


The relationship between Frost and Thomas continues in letter form right up to Thomas's death at Arras in 1917. Frost held out the hope that Thomas would come and join him in New England where they would make Frost's farm the base camp for readings and lecture tours. Up to the point in 1915, when Thomas decides to enlist, he is still considering making this move. Frost clings on to the dream, but Thomas's destiny is taking him away in another direction where war will eventually allay the fears and ambiguities in his life. Thomas's death leaves Frost with an unbearable sense of loss, although, strangely Thomas's last two years were those in which he found his greatest personal and artistic fulfilment. The Thomas that Frost gently satirises in The Road Not Taken finally made up his mind in July 1915 when he signed up in The Artist's Rifles. Frost goes on to achieve great success in his career but eternally haunted by the memory of Thomas In 1920, Frost writes to a friend: "Edward Thomas was the closest friend I ever had, and I was the closest friend he ever had; and this was something I didn't wait to realise after he had died." And, to Helen Thomas, immediately after his death in1917 he writes hopelessly, "I want to see him to tell him something. I want to tell him, what I think he liked to hear from me, that he was a poet."

Figure 4 The distant profile of May Hill where Thomas wrote "Words" on his final visit to the area in 1916.

"Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes--
As the winds use
A crack in the wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through--
Choose me,
You English words?"

For anyone trying to get onto Thomas's slightly elusive wavelength, English music of the period gives an unmistakable cue. It is also remarkable that this corner of the country is strongly associated with several notable composers of the period: Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Holst and the tragic Ivor Gurney all hail from the immediate area. And from further afield, Frank Bridge and George Butterworth also combine glorious heat-haze of pastoralism with a disturbingly modern tonality. Like Thomas, they inhabit a world in which the old certainties and myths of Britain stand on the brink of extinction in the horrors of WW1. They make a perfect musical backdrop to Dymock.

Frost revisited Dymock twice, once in 1928 and finally in 1957. Arriving at Little Iddens in a chauffeur driven Bentley and accompanied by a small entourage including his granddaughter and a photographer, he muses on how little and how much things have changed. What exactly happened on that day is not entirely clear, but the picture of the old man with his reminiscences has great emotional resonance.

Figure 5 Frost visits Little Iddens 1957. I apologise for the lens flare which is a result of taking this image from behind glass in St Mary's church, Dymock.

Part of the emotional pull of the Dymock experience is nostalgia for a brief golden age. I suppose that all of us have a "Golden Room" somewhere in our past - a brief interlude of emotional and spiritual perfection. Drinwater in his poem Daffodils, Frost in The Thatch (1928), Gibson in the Golden Room(1927), and Abercrombie in Ryton Firs, all hark back to Dymock with a heavy sense of nostalgia. Brooke dies in 1915 of a mosquito bite that led to septicaemia on his way to Gallipoli; Thomas from the blast of a shell at Arras; Abercrombie and Gibson never again reach the heights they did briefly on the eve of WW1 and go into gentle decline in terms of creativity, health and reputation.

For anyone interested in reading about the Dymock period, there are four books I would recommend: top of the list I would place Eleanor Farjeon's Edward Thomas - The last Four Years which is entirely dedicated to Thomas and contains probably the best collection of anecdotal material; for a very good brief introduction, the second is Linda Hart's Once They lived in Gloucestershire; slightly more detailed and is Keith Clarke's The Muse Colony, which I would strongly recommend. Both of these books offer a degree of critical biography interspersed with the relevant poems. Also available is Sean Street's The Dymock Poets, which offers a fuller historical account, including the literary milieu of the time and much more on the aftermath. I confess that I have not read Andrew Motion's Elected Friends, but this is generally acknowledged as the major single work on Thomas's poetry. Nearly all of Thomas's prose work is out of print, and is fairly difficult to find second hand. His letters to Robert Frost, Eleanor Farjeon and Gordon Bottomley can all be read in separate volumes, although, as with his literary reviews, the output was so prodigious that it would be unreasonable to expect to find it all in one place.

Figure 6 A view from The Malverns towards Ledbury on a suitably hazy English summer's day.Even is a cyclonic period, this view over Gloucestershire and Herefordshire towards Wales has a blue misty quality to it.

Bibliography:

Edward Thomas -War Diaries
Edward Thomas -Collected Poems
Edward Thomas - In Pursuit of Spring
Eleanor Farjeon - Edward Thomas - The last Four Years
Robert Frost - A Boy's Will, North of Boston and A Further Range
Helen Thomas et al. -Under Storm's Wing
Jeffrey Myers - Robert Frost
Linda Hart - Once They Lived In Gloucestershire
Selected Letters of Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley
Keith Clarke- The Muse Colony
Sean Street- The Dymock Poets

§ § §

Born in Nottingham, England, 1950, Andrew studied at Birmingham University under such figures as David Lodge, Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart, Park Honan and Stanley Wells, graduating in English Literature and Language in 1972. He has taught English in Birmingham for twenty-six years, where he currently lives with his wife and three children.

He also has a serious sideline in music, credits including original music for several TV documentaries, as well as the scores for the groundbreaking musicals Love and Spare Parts and Utopia and Beyond.

He has also written one stage play, How Low Can You Go? and dabbles in fiction on the Zoetrope Virtual Studio website, an activity which has led to publication in several Internet magazines.

He is a founder member of the seventies jazz/rock outfit Slender Loris, and has spent the last few months making their music available through mp3.comand constructing a Slender Loris website.

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