Today’s Poem: February Afternoon

Edward Thomas and the failure of memory's consolation

Starlings on a late-winter sky (via craiyon.com)

We might consider Edward Thomas (1878–1917), like Chidiock Tichborne, to be a tragic one-hit wonder. Unlike Tichborne, Thomas wrote more than one poem. But poetry was, for him, a late-life development after a career as a literary critic, and his output remained relatively small. In his case, “late-life” means “beginning at the age of thirty-six and lasting only three years.” Though he was married with three children and old enough not to have been called up for the First World War, Thomas had enlisted with the Artists Rifles in July 1915, surviving nearly two years of battlefield carnage before his death at Arras, in France, on Easter Monday 1917.

His slim 1917 collection, simply entitled Poems, is dedicated to his friend Robert Frost. Frost’s own famous poem, “The Road Not Taken,” was reportedly inspired by the two poets’ walks together during the American’s 1914 sojourn in England. Frost had intended the poem as a gentle poke at indecision generally, but also at Thomas in particular, as the latter debated within himself whether or not to enlist as a soldier. Frost, whose urging had prompted Thomas to write poetry in the first place, surely cannot have intended that his poem should make his friend’s mind up for him in the way that it appears to have done. It’s a sad irony that Thomas’s Poems became, for this influential friend, both an honorific and a farewell. 

Edward Thomas, 1917, frontispiece to Poems (Wikimedia Commons)

The book also contains the poem which we most associate with Thomas: the beautiful “Adlestrop,” commemorating a stop at a country railway station just before the outbreak of the war. As a look back at a moment of utter peace and stillness, from the vantage point of battlefield chaos, “Adlestrop” is perhaps the most famous war poem not actually about war. If, as the American poet Brad Leithauser has written, “there’s something especially moving about those poets who . . . have effectively created one poem,” “Adlestrop” is that poem for Edward Thomas, a heartbreaking glimpse of a halcyon England its author would never see again.

But today’s poem is not that poem. Edward Thomas might effectively have written only one poem, but in fact, in the time granted him, he wrote any number of poems worth knowing and remembering. As it happens, “February Afternoon,” which appeared in Thomas’s posthumous 1918 collection, Last Poems, makes a poignant companion piece for “Adlestrop.” Where “Adlestrop” dwells on a single moment in time, a space set apart, to which the mind returns for refreshment, “February Afternoon” thinks in terms of millennia: the perpetual “roar of parleying starlings,” the scavenging birds following the plow as it turns the springtime earth, sights and sounds that seem suspended in time as men live and die seeing and hearing them.

The form of the octet, or opening eight-line stanza, which sketches this scene, underscores the sense of time’s simultaneous movement and stasis. The rhymes in this stanza follow the standard pattern of the Petrarchan sonnet: abbaabba. Yet the a- and b- rhymes are slant rhymes of each other, giving the whole octet a feeling of cycling in place, the similar sound repeated over and over, even as it moves forward and opens out into the sestet, or the six lines that traditionally carry the poem to its conclusion.

In this sestet, a vivid and terrible present disrupts the settled cycles of the millennia, where even the circling of the birds suggests a larger stasis: the truth of the gospel and the goodness of God taken for granted, as immutable and instinctive as the behaviors of the starlings, rooks, and gulls. A new end-rhyme intervenes in the sestet’s first line, and although the next two lines seem to echo the settledness of the octet, what actually happens in those lines is a shift which replaces the unchanging farm fields with an equally changeless field of battle.

The sestet also marks a shift in that larger vision, replacing the unthinkingly sacramental birds, whose movements chant “the first are last . . . the last are first again,” with a manmade God, arrayed for battle but motionless as a stone idol, blind and deaf to the slaughter at his feet. In this later poem, memory has ceased to refresh the mind battered and jaded by the assault that war makes on it daily through all the senses. There is no mental rest now in the peaceful countryside. For the poet-soldier, even the thought of that roaring bird-filled quietness is spoiled. 

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February Afternoon

by Edward Thomas

Men heard this roar of parleying starlings, saw
A thousand years ago, even as now,
Black rooks with white gulls following the plough
So that the first are last, until a caw
Commands that last are first again, — a law
Which was of old when one, like me, dreamed how
A thousand years might dust lie on his brow
Yet thus would birds do between hedge and shaw. 

Time swims before me, making as a day
A thousand years, while the broad ploughland oak
Roars mill-like and men strike and bear the stroke
Of war as ever, audacious or resigned. 
And God still sits aloft in the array
That we have wrought Him, stone-deaf and stone-blind. 

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Edward Thomas memorial stone (Wikimedia Commons)