Book Review: "Selected Poems and Prose" by Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas is one of the great poets and diarists of the modern age. I had only recently read an entire book of his selected works after having read bits and pieces of poetry here and there and practically none of this wonderful prose in my life. I have honestly been awakened to a new kind of diarist, a new type of person who appreciates something that the realist and modernist tradition had almost lost thanks to its impractical revolt against romanticism. Edward Thomas not only remains in a space between the romantics of nature and the realists of the modern world, but he also supplies the reader with an almost psychological sense of style with his elongated metaphors, his cyclic realities and his massive descriptions on minute detail. Like a piece of art, each word is a stroke of the brush that applied, makes the work one thing, or another thing entirely. The work I have witnessed within these selected works by Edward Thomas are not just great, but not for a very long time have I been so overwhelmed by descriptions, language use or emotion. His prose style is the beauty of his changing times whilst his poetry retains the classical notions whilst pushing towards complex emotions and sufferings such as melancholia and insomnia. Let it just be said that Edward Thomas holds the line that keeps the romanticist in us alive.

There are many quotations within this text that I thought were apt to show you how much I adore Edward Thomas’s selected works. But, the prose verse on rain should do quite nicely as it puts his prosody and his poetic voice into perspective and allows us to view both, almost simultaneously:

“I lay awake listening to the rain and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgement. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain and then at last listening to the words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from the invisible, dark sky, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world.”

I cannot believe how overwhelmed I was when I read this - the emotion of the rain here just kind of washes over you like you are feeling it directly hit your skin and it burns for a few moments before passing out entirely. Edward Thomas’s description of the rain does not just overwhelm the mind, the very passage seems to capture the very soul of the purpose of rain. He takes the rain and makes it almost a blessing - and then it is sinful. It is powerful, and ultimately, we are powerless against it. We can do nothing but sit in the rain, or sit watching the rain. We cannot stop the rain and though this may be a reality we all know - we refuse to acknowledge it as fact. More importantly though, we refuse to recognise the reason that we cannot stop the rain. Every sense must eat it up and wait it out - every person must realise that the rain must mean that the scenes are changing again and this is something that Edward Thomas does again and again in poems such as “Insomnia” where he discusses inevitability. In his poems on sadness, melancholia, in his natural landscapes in his prose, he is constantly haunted by everything that is inevitable - but watches as its beauty unfolds over and over again.