Edward Thomas and 'The Other'

On the 100th Anniversary of Edward Thomas's death, 

it seems worth re-publishing this post from a few years ago:

Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas' poem 'The Other' is often taken by critics as an internal debate between the poet and himself. This, of course, is true in the sense that the poem is a literary production in which that debate is articulated. But I want to consider if we can also take it as enacting a debate with something outside himself. Not that there was another human being going before him or from whom he needed to escape, as the poem's conceit would have it, but in the sense that - apart from the psychotic dimension of split personality - we are all in a relationship with another version of ourself who has an existence in another way of perceiving the world and therefore in another dimension of the world itself.

'The Other' was one of Edward Thomas' earliest poems. His period of life as a practising poet was short, growing out of his career as a writer of prose and cut short by his death in the First World War. The 110 lines of the poem develop the idea that another, looking just like the poet, has preceded him in inns and such places, or that the figure accompanies him on his many long walking expeditions. Set alongside this idea is the perception of two worlds of experience:

" ..... I had come
To an end of the forest, and because
Here was both road and inn, the sum
Of what's not forest. "

Identified at the inn as someone who has been there already, he is fearful:

"I travelled fast, in the hopes I should
Outrun that other. What to do
When caught, I planned not. I pursued
To prove the likeness, and, if true,
To watch until myself I knew."

The 'other man' was introduced by Thomas in an earlier prose work In Pursuit of Spring. The title's 'pursuit' is interesting in suggesting the idea that something elusive is being sought. The 'other' here is someone he keeps catching a glimpse of on his journey until he meets him in a public bar. Though not fully worked out in the prose work, the 'other man' seems to correlate with the 'other thing', that which Thomas is pursuing, but also that which he must escape to find it. Or has the poem has it:

"I sought then in solitude.
The wind had fallen with the night; as still
The roads lay in the ploughland rude,
Dark and naked, on the hill.

Listening to the last sounds of the day fade into night, he is alone:

" ..... I stood serene,
And with a solemn quiet mirth,
An old inhabitant of earth.

Has he escaped 'the Other' or found him and become one with him, in his whole, integrated, self?

But the poem does not end there. Such "moments of everlastingness" are brief. Back in the "tap room din" the other man is asking for him again, accusing him of following in his footsteps:

" ..... What had I got to say?
I said nothing. I slipped away."

The poem ends as it began, with the poet stealing out of a wood to the light of an inn and acknowledging that the pursuit will go on until each of them cease to be. Like many of Thomas' poems about paths which lead to inconclusive ends, this does not resolve the matter, but leaves the mystery of it as a pregnant reality. The quest goes on. But what is different here is that it is not the mundane self seeking a deeper significance, but the reverse of this as the one who holds the key to that significance is constantly drawn back to the tap room and the company of one who is content to be there, but is haunted by the other man who knows a different reality.

The Other

Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas' poem 'The Other' is often taken by critics as an internal debate between the poet and himself. This, of course, is true in the sense that the poem is a literary production in which that debate is articulated. But I want to consider if we can also take it as enacting a debate with something outside himself. Not that there was another human being going before him or from whom he needed to escape, as the poem's conceit would have it, but in the sense that - apart from the psychotic dimension of split personality - we are all in a relationship with another version of ourself who has an existence in another way of perceiving the world and therefore in another dimension of the world itself.

'The Other' was one of Edward Thomas' earliest poems. His period of life as a practising poet was short, growing out of his career as a writer of prose and cut short by his death in the First World War. The 110 lines of the poem develop the idea that another, looking just like the poet, has preceded him in inns and such places, or that the figure accompanies him on his many long walking expeditions. Set alongside this idea is the perception of two worlds of experience:

" ..... I had come
To an end of the forest, and because
Here was both road and inn, the sum
Of what's not forest. "

Identified at the inn as someone who has been there already, he is fearful:

"I travelled fast, in the hopes I should
Outrun that other. What to do
When caught, I planned not. I pursued
To prove the likeness, and, if true,
To watch until myself I knew."

The 'other man' was introduced by Thomas in an earlier prose work In Pursuit of Spring. The title's 'pursuit' is interesting in suggesting the idea that something elusive is being sought. The 'other' here is someone he keeps catching a glimpse of on his journey until he meets him in a public bar. Though not fully worked out in the prose work, the 'other man' seems to correlate with the 'other thing', that which Thomas is pursuing, but also that which he must escape to find it. Or has the poem has it:

"I sought then in solitude.
The wind had fallen with the night; as still
The roads lay in the ploughland rude,
Dark and naked, on the hill.

Listening to the last sounds of the day fade into night, he is alone:

" ..... I stood serene,
And with a solemn quiet mirth,
An old inhabitant of earth.

Has he escaped 'the Other' or found him and become one with him, in his whole, integrated, self?

But the poem does not end there. Such "moments of everlastingness" are brief. Back in the "tap room din" the other man is asking for him again, accusing him of following in his footsteps:

" ..... What had I got to say?
I said nothing. I slipped away."

The poem ends as it began, with the poet stealing out of a wood to the light of an inn and acknowledging that the pursuit will go on until each of them cease to be. Like many of Thomas' poems about paths which lead to inconclusive ends, this does not resolve the matter, but leaves the mystery of it as a pregnant reality. The quest goes on. But what is different here is that it is not the mundane self seeking a deeper significance, but the reverse of this as the one who holds the key to that significance is constantly drawn back to the tap room and the company of one who is content to be there, but is haunted by the other man who knows a different reality.

Ways Through The Woods

"….. the path that looks
As if it led on to some legendary
Or fancied place where men have wished to go
Or stay; till, sudden, it ends where the wood ends."
Edward Thomas from The Path

"As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods …
But there is no road through the woods"
Rudyard Kipling from The Road Through the Woods

Leaving the new road behind, the tarmac and the woosh of passing cars, we took the track, clear enough at first, then less so, but always there even when indistinct.

Ways through woodland are like that, running into mud, leaf drifts, shadow, then found again along a stream or through an open glade. But always the old, lost ways are there too, but unseen. Clear but unclear. A track not taken because there is no track to take, though sometimes we were sure we were on it, or that it ran off to the side and away somewhere, uncertain but there in the shade or through the glistening sunlight falling through gaps in the leaves.

Until … that familiar woosh, in the distance as we neared the tarmac again running level through the trees over there, and the line of path running down to it, quite distinct and plain.

-*- "Why go straight? There is nothing at the end of any road better than may be found beside it"

Edward Thomas from The Icknield Way

A Language Not To Be Betrayed

Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

Commenting on Adam Sargant's blog ANIMYSTIC on the adequacy of language to capture 'reality', I was reminded of a line from a poem by Edward Thomas and have since been moved to go back and read it again. Thomas endorses the view that things are hidden from us but suggests that it is sometimes possible to transcend the barrier and see things as they are. In one sense this is a classic piece of nature mysticism. He is suddenly blessed with the feeling that he is part of everything and can tap in to all the other life forms and share the world with them in language as well as in fact. That is, relationship becomes possible. 

Here is the poem:

I Never Saw That Land Before

I never saw that land before, 

And now can never see it again; 

Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar 

Endeared, by gladness and by pain, 

Great was the affection that I bore 

To the valley and the river small, 

The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees, 

The chickens from the farmsteads, all 

Elm-hidden, and the tributaries

Descending at equal interval; 

The blackthorns down along the brook 

With wounds yellow as crocuses 

Where yesterday the labourer's hook 

Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze 

That hinted all and nothing spoke. 

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.

I love the way this poem evokes a very specific, though not idealised, landscape as the poet walks through it noticing every detail and sets this down using the rhymed stanzas not to constrain but to capture the intricacies of his thoughts as he goes on. And that last verse, the second line of which I had remembered and quoted, culminating in those whispers which only "those like me" respond to. He is not, I think, claiming any superiority here so much as the willingness to reply to the whispers, which is certain to be rarer even than hearing them.