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     Edward Thomas’s death on the morning of the 1917 Arras offensive, when he was killed by the blast of a nearby shell, has become inextricably tangled in the myth of his poetry. Since all his poems were written in the last three years of his life, critics have tended to read them as the chronological account of a writer’s journey into oblivion. Pained by self-consciousness, Thomas appears to find release in the purposeful anonymity of the trenches. In effect, his poems have been interpreted as an elaborate suicide note.

     In one of his last “forest” poems, ‘Lights Out’, Thomas pauses at the edge of the trees and half whispers, half declares:

There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter, and leave, alone,
I know not how.

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf by shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.

Thomas stands on the borders of consciousness, and yet despite the apparent hopelessness of his journey he continues to express his precise feelings and thoughts. For a man who was plagued by literary hackwork, the “shelf upon shelf” of foliage is hardly a comforting prospect. But the poem’s resolution, reinforced by the repeated active pronoun “I”, the immediacy of the present tense “now”, and the paradox that Thomas actually listens to the forest’s silence, all remind us that the poet is determined to negotiate this as yet unmapped region: “I must enter, and leave, alone”.

     In a letter to Robert Frost from the front line, Thomas admitted:

I have mingled satisfaction with dissatisfaction in about the usual proportion, comfort and discomfort... I think I get surer of some primitive things that one has to get sure of, about myself and other people, and I think this is not due simply to being older. In short, I am glad I came out and I think less about return than I thought I should - partly no doubt I inhibit the idea of return... I doubt if anybody here thinks less of home than I do and yet I doubt if anybody loves it more.

During his three months in the trenches Thomas continued to fluctuate between “satisfaction” and “dissatisfaction”. A diary entry for 13 February 1917 begins:

Awoke tired and cold though it is thawing and cloudy with a breeze. No work this morning, but I pore over map and think how I may enjoy doing it when all this is over, which is not a good feeling, I suspect.

Second Lieutenant P.E. Thomas poring over the map of the battlefield is not far from the speaker in ‘Old Man’, poring over the leaves of a favourite herb in the garden:

I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
Always in vain.

The speaker fails to remember, but prefers this bitter herb to any other because of its rich, elusive meaning. The garden, like the forest in ‘Lights Out’, is deep, ancient and tantalising. But whereas Thomas speaks from the edge of the forest, in ‘Old Man’ he is discovered in the middle of the garden and poem. Studying the location through the eyes of a small child who is picking curiously at the herb, the narrative lens swings onto the poet himself, standing in the doorway:

And I can only wonder how much hereafter
She will remember, with that bitter scent,
Of garden rows, and ancient damson trees
Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door,
A low thick bush beside the door, and me
Forbidding her to pick.

Thomas explores a maze as unfathomable as the dark forests of the later poems - “an avenue, dark, nameless, without end” - and arrives at himself by imagining the mnemonic processes of the child.

     The “bent path” of the garden is, of course, the labyrinthine pattern of memory itself, implicit in the poem’s twisting rhythm and syntax. And although the path is bent and narrow, it does at least offer the poet a route, or road, to the centre of the imaginative experience. As Edna Longley comments, “[the poem] has explored and illuminated as much of the avenue as is humanly and imaginatively possible”. The difficulty for the reader is that Thomas is evolving a quiet creative voice in his poems; a voice which excavates scrupulously, but whispers what it loses and finds in the dark.

     Whispering trees and birds are persistent sources of communication in Thomas’s poems. Indeed, it can be argued that they are the linguistic models on which Thomas bases his own poetic voice. In ‘Words’, Thomas invites his native language to choose him as its mouthpiece. Addressing words as “Tough as oak” and “Sweet as our birds/ To the ear”, he appeals as much to the English countryside as its language. ‘The Word’, written the following day, recalls “an empty, thingless name” which Thomas has never forgotten, despite forgetting “names of the mighty men/ That fought and lost or won in the old wars”. The word that remains so insistent in his memory is the instinctive and untranslatable utterance of a spring thrush, which startles him while he is lost in woody scents:

While perhaps I am thinking of the elder scent
That is like food; or while I am content
With the wild rose scent that is like memory,
This name suddenly is cried out to me
From somewhere in the bushes by a bird
Over and over again, a pure thrush word.

Just as the focus shifts to the speaker in ‘Old Man’, so the thrush turns its voice on the poet. The word of the invisible bird is direct and personal, penetrating the bushes of the surrounding landscape, and the thickets of elder and rose in the poet’s head.

     The sounds that Thomas gleaned from the countryside became eloquent to him of a folk identity that he was searching  for in his imaginative exploration of war-time England. The name of Adlestrop, for example, is remembered because a blackbird sings from within the willows and willow-herb, “and round him, mistier,/...all the birds/ Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire”. The blackbird’s voice breaks open the surrounding country and becomes a nexus of voices from further afield. But Thomas can recall “only the name”, just as “only the name I hear” from the thrush in ‘The Word’, and “the name alone survives” in ‘Women He Liked’, where the stormcock sings ebulliently from the “slough/ And gloom” of Bob’s lane. Like the pit in ‘The Combe’, “Its mouth stopped with bramble, thorn and briar”, Thomas’s England does not yield all its “ancient and dark” secrets.

     The voices that appeal from within the landscape of Thomas’s poetry are rarely sentimental or nostalgic. The thrushes in ‘March’ are raucous and violent in their effort to transform the silence: “they cared not what they sang or screamed”. An owl’s long, ghostly cry disturbs the poet’s temporary refuge in the inn, reminding him of “soldiers and poor” still outdoors at night (‘The Owl’). Instead of the cuckoo his children can hear, Thomas catches only the haunting “Ho! Ho!” of a dead shepherd he once knew (‘The Cuckoo’). Occasionally birds’ voices even prove deceptive: “the starlings wheeze/ And nibble like ducks” in ironic imitation at the end of ‘The Other’, and “birds swim like fish -/ Fish that laugh and shriek -” through decaying trees in ‘The Hollow Wood’. The aerial voices are incessant, and populate Thomas’s landscape with ghosts.

     Thomas’s England, however, is not a death-ridden country. The crucial point made in ‘Aspens’, as Thomas identifies his own poetry explicitly with the language of the trees, is that there are many who will reject their song as relentless, senseless morbidity. But the ghosts of ‘Roads’ possess a strange vitality, like the laughter of the goddess Helen merging with the “Bright irrelevant things” that the thrush cock sings. In ‘Aspens’ the trees whisper the lonely crossroads into “the clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing” of a busy village, as the ghosts of old smithies and inns are called “from their abode”. Thomas presents the dark crossroads as a busy place; the whisper of the aspens as a resilient and creative sound. Others, he warns, will misunderstand the voice that is persistent but quiet:

Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,
Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear
But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves
We cannot other than an aspen be
That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,
Or so men think who like a different tree.

     In ‘I Never Saw That Land Before’, the poet passes through an unfamiliar valley which he seems to recognise, “as if by acquaintance hoar/ Endeared, by gladness and by pain”. Like a storyteller, he points out the features of the place, setting the scene of his momentary endearment - “the river small,/ The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees,/ The chickens from the farmsteads” - but then conceals them again around the corner of a new line: “all/ Elm-hidden”. It is a beautifully-crafted poem, in which Thomas whispers a simple, elusive landscape into life, like “the breeze/ That hinted all and nothing spoke”. He discovers an image of unexpected hope and renewal in the valley, the blackthorn’s “wounds” from the hedge-cutter’s hook gleaming “as yellow as crocuses”. But it is what Thomas hears there which prompts him to reflect on his own voice:

I neither expected anything
Nor yet remembered: but some goal
I touched then; and if I could sing
What would not even whisper my soul
As I went on my journeying,

I should use, as the trees and birds did,
A language not to be betrayed;
And what was hid should still be hid
Excepting from those like me made
Who answer when such whispers bid.

Thomas defines this language of whispers as a continuous, scrupulous song which resists conceit and exhibitionism, yet remains supple and insistent, bidding and demanding a response. Whispers convey a desire to be heard by “those like me made” who will not reject the idiosyncratic voice, but sift and answer it. In ‘I Never Saw’ Thomas articulates most clearly his fear of self-exposure, and his desire for an audience. Even as he formulates his aspiration to speak in the language of whispers, Thomas is beginning to whisper.