habit continued throughout his writing life. His topographical or ‘travel’ books were regularly preceded by periods of walking the ground to be covered, accompanied by copious note-taking. As the eighty preserved notebooks that he used on his walks indicate, it became Thomas’s constant practice to write his prose works from such notes, so much so that his early mature poetry was created out of prose versions of the same material as if these prose versions too were notes, sources of creative material. R. George Thomas’s edition of Thomas’s poems cites the first lines of one source of ‘Old Man’ as a prose piece, ‘Old Man’s Beard’:
Just as she is turning in to the house or leaving it, the baby plucks a feather of old man’s beard. The bush grows just across the path from the door. Sometimes she stands by it squeezing off tip after tip from the branches and shrivelling them between her fingers on to the path in grey-green shreds.10
In her Annotated Collected Poems, Longley notes that ‘“Old Man’s Beard” sounds like a prose poem or prose from which poetry is trying to get out.’11 She instances ‘Up in the Wind’ and ‘March’ as poems worked up from previous prose sources, and ‘November’ and ‘After Rain’ as poems worked up from notebooks.
Thomas admitted to a heavy reliance on notes as a writer, ‘I go about the world with a worried heart & a notebook’, and instructed his wife to file or return his letters for use as notes, ‘I hope you won’t mind if I make this a notebook as well as a letter’.12 When burning his correspondence prior to setting out for the front, he chose to retain these notebooks.
He received authoritative confirmation of the value of notes early in his writing career. At the suggestion of the publisher Blackwood, his first book The Woodland Life concluded with a selection of in situ field notes, ‘A diary in English fields and woods’. Blackwood therefore set Thomas’s notes on an equal footing with his more worked creative pieces.13 Subsequently, in 1907, Thomas made use of ‘open-air’ diaries when editing The Book of the Open Air.
After his death, Thomas’s editors continue to recognize the importance of notes in his creative oeuvre. In Edward Thomas: Selected Poems and Prose, David Wright separates Thomas’s war diary from other prose items, placing it next to the poems. R. G. Thomas included the same diary as an appendix to his edition of Edward Thomas’s Collected Poems, observing that it ‘is carefully phrased and Thomas corrects words and phrases as in all his working drafts’.14 R. G. Thomas also wrote that the diary
seems to contain the germs of ideas, books, and poems that were never to be written but that were surely present in his mind. Even more clearly it reveals the consistency of the poet’s entire writing life grounded as that was upon his powerful sensuous response to the world of living and natural things.15
In the preface to The Icknield Way, Edward Thomas makes clear that his notes, taken while travelling along the Icknield Way, are not merely preparatory but integral to the composition process. He observes how, in the course of writing the book, both the ancient road and his physical journey along it become images of the book’s composition process. The Icknield Way is ‘in some ways a fitting book for me to write. For it is about a road which begins many miles before I could come on its traces and ends miles beyond where I had to stop.’16 His composing process starts, literally as well as metaphorically, ‘many miles’ before he actually begins to write the book, initiating with his travels along the road; the notes he takes during this journey; and the ways in which the subject matter and style of those notes are affected by the journey. The environment and the composing process are closely entwined. Thomas’s awareness of this comes to fruition in A Literary Pilgrim in England, written in 1914 although not published until 1917. This book observes the close relation between the composing activity of a disparate number of poets and their environment. They include, among others, Matthew Arnold, Hilaire Belloc, William Blake, George Borrow, Emily Brontë, Robert Burns, William Cobbett, S. T. Coleridge, Thomas Hardy, William Hazlitt, Robert Herrick, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, William Morris, P. B. Shelley, A. C. Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson and William Wordsworth.
Thomas’s poems also relate closely to the environment. They refer to journeys, roads and the dark, conditions in which many were drafted. He told Frost that ‘I sometimes write in [sic] the train going home late’, and described to Farjeon the ‘long slow’ train journeys from military camp.17 The length of these journeys is mirrored in the winding, clause-ridden sentence constructions of poems such as ‘The Owl’, ‘Good-night’, ‘It rains’, ‘It was upon’ and ‘I never saw that land before’. The rapidly changing perspectives in ‘The Barn and the Down’ also suggest a train journey:
Then the great down in the west
Grew into sight,
A barn stored full to the ridge
With black of night;
And the barn fell to a barn
Or even less
Before critical eyes and its own
Late mightiness. (pp. 68–9)
Similarly, Thomas wrote ‘Roads’, an exploration of roads, while travelling home.
R. G. Thomas recognized the connection in Edward Thomas’s work between physical environment and poem when he observed that the ‘train journey home [from military camp] was long and roundabout and two poems at least, “The Child in the Orchard” and “Lights Out”, were worked on in semi-darkness’.18 As Thomas told Farjeon, he began writing ‘Lights Out’ while ‘coming down in the train on a long dark journey when people were talking and I wasn’t’.19 Lack of light is present not only in the poem’s title, but in the sense of blurred vision and silent isolation in stanzas that describe entering a dark forest,
the unknown
I must enter and leave alone, (p. 136)
The almost mnemonic repeated lines and nursery-rhyme-like echoes of ‘The Child in the Orchard’ also reflect external writing conditions. The darkness of a train journey forces the composing poet to depend more on memory than on the written page.
Thomas’s habit of composing poems on train journeys from military camp to his home resulted in work that refers constantly to the search for a home. The word ‘home’ forms the title of three poems, and references to buildings occur in at least eleven other titles. The poems allude frequently to lost, present, ideal or fleeting senses of home. The opening and ending lines of ‘The Ash Grove’ run:
Half the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made Little more
than the dead ones made of shade.
If they led to a house, long before had they seen its fall:
But they welcomed me;
At the end of the poem, a snatch of song signals a brief rediscovery of a paradoxically fleeting sense of rootedness:
The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,
And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,
But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die
And I had what I most desired, without search or desert or cost. (p. 108)
Thomas’s care in noting the conditions of composition of eleven of the poems in the fair handwritten copy of sixty-seven poems
