Today’s Poem: Digging

A soldier in his garden

Camille Pissarro, Landscape at Louveciennes (Autumn), 1870 (Getty Museum)

---

---

Digging (1)

by Edward Thomas

Today I think
Only with scents, — scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot’s seed,
And the square mustard field;

Odors that rise
When the spade wounds the roots of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,
Rhubarb or celery;

The smoke’s smell, too,
Flowing from where a bonfire burns
The dead, the waste, the dangerous,
And all to sweetness turns.

It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth.
════════════════════

“It is enough,” writes Edward Thomas (1878–1917) — enough “To smell, to crumble the dark earth, / While the robin sings.” And the resignation, the acceptance, the joy of small work preparing the autumn soil for winter, is heartbreaking and fitting, when we know that Thomas will shortly die, killed in France on Easter Monday in the last full year of World War I.

Thomas might have taken the poem in the direction that, say, W.H. Auden did in his 1940 “Quest” sonnet, “The Hero”:

The only difference that could be seen
From those who’d never risked their lives at all
Was his delight in details and routine:

For he was always glad to mow the grass,
Pour liquids from large bottles into small,
Or look at clouds through bits of colored glass.

This has the delight in small things that Thomas notes, but it lacks something that “Digging” reaches for, down among the root of things. Maybe it’s just that (with “mow the grass”) Auden sets his figure in summer, while Thomas places his speaker in fall. Or that Thomas actually was a soldier in World War I, while Auden was much pilloried for remaining in America during the Blitz of World War II. Or maybe its just that Auden’s poem is third person, while Thomas’s is first person.

Regardless, Thomas takes the poem in a different, less easy direction. Here in October — in an autumnal mood, the crisp air redolent with fallen leaves, the shortened days of angled light — one could be forgiven for thinking that fall is the proper subject of lyric poetry: the only real subject, from whose melancholy of ending and metaphor of dying we cobble up spring poems of beginnings and birth to try to convince ourselves that the world can be bright.

It’s not true, of course, that fall is poetry’s central concern. But once we start to read our way through Keats’s “To Autumn,” and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”), and even James Whitcomb Riley’s “When the Frost is on the Punkin” — along with all the rest — it’s hard not to feel that fall offers the richest soil for lyric verse.

Edward Thomas, c. 1905 (Wikimedia Commons)

Something about Edward Thomas draws us back to him again and again, here at Poems Ancient and Modern. We’ve already looked at his “February Afternoon” and “Adelstrop.” And here in “Digging” (the first written of his two poems with that title) we find a nature poem driven by fall’s scents: the odor of dead leaves, the waft of the earth overturned by a garden spade, the smoke of the dead growth cut away and burned in the fall.

The poem has a nonce meter — two-foot first lines, four-foot second and third lines, and three-foot fourth lines: four stanzas of 2-4-4-3 beats — with rhymes on the second and fourth lines. That short first line is almost the inversion of a sapphic stanza, which slips into a dying fall with its shortened last line. But the sweet melancholy of the poem, the paradox of the robin’s “Sad songs of Autumn mirth,” is accentuated by the poem’s curt first lines: “Today I think / Only with scents . . . ”

John Sutherland once suggested (in a note about what made Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray seem strange to its readers in 1891) that English literature contained very little about the sense of smell and the odor of things. But in “Digging,” Thomas asks us to consider the scents of fall: the plants, the tree roots wounded by the narrator’s digging, the smoke of the fires that burn the cleared plant waste. This is a war poem that never mentions war or the stench of the trenches, a nature poem elevated to poignancy by the soldier’s knowledge of what likely awaits him.

And not just his knowledge, but his acceptance. It is enough.

---

---