April

The sweetest thing, I thought 

At one time, between earth and heaven 

Was the first smile

When mist has been forgiven 

And the sun has stolen out,

Peered, and resolved to shine at seven

On dabbled lengthening grasses,

Thick primroses and early leaves uneven,

When earth’s breath, warm and humid, far surpasses 

The richest oven’s, and loudly sings ‘cuckoo’

And sharply the nightingale’s “tsoo, troo, troo, troo.”

To say “God bless it” was all that I could do.

But now I know one sweeter

By far since the day Emily 

Turned weeping back

To me, still happy me,

To ask forgiveness, -

Yet smiled with half a certainty 

To be forgiven, - for what 

She had never done; I knew not what it might be,

Nor could she tell me, having now forgot,

By rapture carried with me past all care

As to an isle in April lovelier 

Than April’s self. “God bless you” I said to her. 

Edward Thomas wrote April on 2nd May 1915. We know a lot more about its initial inspiration than most of his other poems. Not only did he write up an extensive note in his field note book encompassing an early draft of the poem, but he also wrote a letter to Robert Frost the following day. The letter gives details of his experience the day before when coming back over the field, almost certainly from his study to their home at Yew Tree Cottage for lunch. So the poem, like The Glory and The Chalk Pit, written a few days later, was contemporaneous with the experience, with preliminary notes for each jotted down in his current field book (FNB80). In contrast many preceding poems had been drawn from field note books from years before. 

The beautiful days of April and early May 1915 evidently inspired Thomas at a time when the spate from older memories had begun to diminish. He declared in a letter to Eleanor Farjeon, when sending April and other poems for comment and typing, that April would be the last because of the stress of working on the commissioned biography of The Duke of Marlborough, which he bitterly begrudged. In fact he wrote The Glory a couple of days later and The Chalk Pit on 8th May and kept on writing poems from his immediate experience until Sedgewarblers (following a bike ride with his daughter, Bronwen, to Warnford) on 23rd May. 

In the letter to Frost,  after bemoaning his Marlborough task, he wrote “But we have one piece of luck. Two pairs of nightingales have come to us. One sings in our back hedge nearly all day & night. My only regret when I first heard it was that you hadn’t stayed another Spring & heard it too. I hope the gods don’t think I’m the sort of poet who will be content with a nightingale, though. You don’t think they could have made a mistake do you? What does it mean? - I get quite annoyed with people complaining about the weather as soon as it greys a little. Am I really ripe for being all round content, or what?…”

He finishes “Are the children at school now? Or are you still ‘neglecting’ them? God bless them all. By the way, there was a beautiful return of sun yesterday after a misty moisty morning, & everything smelt wet & warm & cuckoos called, & I found myself with nothing to say but “God bless it.” I laughed a little as I came over the field, thinking about the “it” in “God bless it.”

In his field note books he elucidates further this expression of frustration he felt and expressed elsewhere at not being able to find words for the beauty in nature he saw all around:.”’God bless it’ was all I c(oul)d say & I laughed that I c(oul)d find no other words.”

The note includes a draft of much of the poem, jotted very shortly after the experience,  rather than an actual field note. It has much of the first verse of the poem although blackbirds get missed out of the finished version while “early leaves uneven” is added. The earth “smells hot and wet” in the note which in the poem memorably “far surpasses the richest oven”. 

In the note “the sweetest thing in the world was/April pretending to be cross & the sun coming through hot..” while In the poem this marginally shifts forward to “the first smile/When mist has been forgiven”. In the poem the cuckoo that "loudly rings" is an echo of one of ET's favourite medieval lyrics with which he ended The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air (as Edna Longley has pointed out).

The second verse is only cursorily covered in the jotted note. 

“Now it is when Kate comes to me

“God bless her”

coming to ask forgiveness for

something I had not noticed 

Smiling w(ith) a half certainty to be forgot/forgiven?

Nightingales tsoo tsoo tsoo tsoo 

Turned w(ith) tears back”

Kate became Emily in the finished poem, probably for scansion. Kate had also appeared in the immediate preceding poem, Tonight, written on 30th April. There is no trace of an Emily in his life but an Emily had appeared in Milking, one of his pieces in his book of stories, Rest & Unrest, published over 4 years before in 1910. It describes a farmer ruminating to himself about his life while milking one early morning in late April. 

The farmer was remembering in particular his courtship of another neighbouring farmer’s daughter, Emily, whom he later married and who was now ill following a still birth, her seventh child, twenty years after he first set eyes on her. The recollections of the farmer may also have been drawn from some Thomas’s own memories of his courtship of Helen, at the time of the story some 13 years before in 1897. And Helen at the time of the story was about to give birth to their youngest child, Myfanwy. So when he reached for the name Emily to replace Kate in the poem, he may well have been remembering a shade of his wife Helen as a young girl, when he was “still happy”. 

ET does not just draw the name of Emily from Milking. The personification of April in the poem takes on some of the characteristics attributed to it in the story,  though somewhat more subdued, in which ET described April playing many roles including that of a “merry maid”. 

So April was one day “all eagerness and energy and gave no rest to the wind and the sun, on the earth or in the waters or in the clouds of the sky, and the songs of the birds were a mad medley. Another day it was indolent….a pretty and merry slut, with her sleeves and skirts tucked up and her hair down over her eyes and shoulders, had fallen asleep in the midst of her toil and nothing could waken her but a thunderstorm in the night. The next day she was simply at play with showers and sunlight, sunlight and showers, at play with sky and earth as if they were but coloured silks and now she fluttered the white and blue and green…”

Thomas in a field notebook about the time he wrote Milking had written of April in even more rapturous terms. In early April 1910 he had observed, probably from his study:

“Cloudy late aft(ernoon) of a (bright) warmish N windy day - the vale (of the Rother) 

E ward is smoky dark, but Petersfield & mounded trees nearby catches the soft gold from a blue gilt edged pane in the W - and it seems to dream, be blest & yet is unconscious of it like an angelic blessed sky & blackbirds sing alone calmly & slowly & sweet. In 1/4 hr afterwards the sun was setting huge clear & scarlet in a dulled cloudy sky.”

The personification of April in the poem, may have been less overwhelming than in the earlier story, but still is a striking departure from his other poems. Edna Longley describes the poem as “Thomas’s youthful love poem set in ‘over-sweet’ April”.  It may have been a conscious throw back to his previous prose writings, not just Milking, but also his more youthful writings in This Woodland Life, written at a time he was getting to know Helen. But it may also have been prompted by an event he had just heard about - the death of Rupert Brook, a friend and fellow poet. He had written in the letter to Frost quoted previously “I find I cannot write. Re-reading Rupert Brook & putting a few things together about him (for a piece in The English Review) have rather messed me up & there’s Marlborough behind & Marlborough before.”

Rupert Brook’s poems include many examples of personalisation of nature eg in Heaven, Mary and Gabriel and The Great Lover. It would be interesting to see which poems ET quoted in his piece for The English Review. He may have been influenced by his rereading of them as well as his evident shock at Brook’s death which had occurred on 23rd April. So April may have been a conscious or unconscious tribute to the young man who was one of the first of Thomas’s set to die in World War 1. 

A number of critics have not been kind about April. William Cooke especially thought that the poem was one Thomas “doubtless…would have suppressed” if he had survived the war. There is no question it’s over-sentimental and some of the personification jars on modern sensibilities (though considerably less than Milking!). But if it is a conscious commemoration of his early youthful courting of Helen - fond but also parodic - and a tribute to Rupert Brook’s style of poetry, then these add extra layers of meaning and tone to a poem, which has been too often overlooked.

A walk

The path ET would have taken on occasions to get up or back from his study from Yew Tree Cottage starts on Stoner Hill Road, just to the north of The Cricketers Inn on the right hand side. The path “over the field” now goes through a small housing estate built since World War 2. Thereafter it has been rerouted to the side of the field instead of crossing straight over as in ET’s day. Returning home that day in early May for lunch, one can imagine him taking the short cut from the path across the final field behind Yew Tree Cottage and coming in through a gap in the hedge, rather than than going round by the road, past The Cricketers. 

The views on this walk up to his study and back are wide ranging and impressive. Coming down along the footpath by Island Farm there are good views of the hangers, including Shoulder of Mutton Hill. To the East there are the high ground of Rake ridge and common. The path comes down off the hill in a switchback and when the view opens up again you can see Butser Hill and other downland heights to the south and before them on the ridge of Church Lane, Yew Tree Cottage stands out against the Downs and the sky.

There are now a few more houses that can be seen along this ridge but in ET’s day Yew Tree Cottage would have stood out on its own.

The field in front of the house had an oak tree in its middle which may well have been  there in ET’s day. The fields layout has not changed nor the view of the hangers to the north or the downs to the south.

A walk up and down the path therefore gives a good impression of what ET would have seen on his twice daily walk up and down to his study at the top of the hangers during the last few years of living at Steep. On a fine Spring day, one can imagine the excitement as he turned the corner of the footpath and could see the Downs spread out in front of him (as he described on one of his notes, like a line of elephants) and on the ridge in front his home, perhaps, with a curl of smoke from the chimney, sitting hunched on the ridge above the green fields and hedgerows teeming with life and sound.

Acknowledgements

Edward Thomas Field Note Books copyright Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York.

Transcription of the Edward Thomas Field Note Books quoted in post are available at the Edward Thomas Centre in the Petersfield Museum.

I have drawn on Rest & Unrest, Edna Longley's Edward Thomas, Annotated Collected Poems and Elected Friends Robert Frst & Edward Thomas and Eleanor Farjeon, The Last Four Years.

My thanks to Benedict Mackay for editorial support.