"No one so much as you"

Edward Thomas in 1911

No one so much as you
loves this my clay,
or would lament as you
its dying day.

You know me through and through
though I have not told,
and though with what you know
you are not bold.

None ever was so fair
as I thought you:
not a word can I bear
spoken against you.

All that I ever did
for you seemed coarse
compared with what I hid
nor put in force.

Scarce my eyes dare meet you
lest they should prove
I but respond to you
and do not love.

We look and understand,
we cannot speak
except in trifles and
words the most weak.

I at the most accept
your love, regretting
that is all: I have kept
a helpless fretting

that could not return
all that you gave
and could not ever burn
with the love you have,

till sometimes it did seem
better it were
never to see you more
than linger here

with only gratitude
instead of love--
a pine in solitude
cradling a dove.

Edward Thomas, February 1916

Edward Thomas is often grouped with the "war poets", and that seems unfair. Few of his poems are about war. Many more are about the solitude of a human life and the struggle to feel worthy of another person's affection. They are some of the most heart-breaking poems I've ever read, yet painstakingly composed formally.

I always assumed this one was about Thomas's relationship with his wife Helen, but she told his biographer, R. George Thomas, that the poem was about his mother, Mary Elizabeth Thomas. In a letter to Helen dated February 24, 1916, the poet wrote, "As to the other verses about love [the implication is that the poem above is one of these], you know that my usual belief is that I don't and can't love and haven't done for something near 20 years. You know too that you don't think my nature really compatible with love, being so clear and critical."

Thomas's feeling of being unable to love was likely rooted in his profound doubts about his own worth and identity, but the fact is that, from 1913 until his death in April 1917, Thomas had a very close--and apparently loving--friendship with Robert Frost. Twenty days after Thomas was killed at the front, Frost wrote: "Edward Thomas was the only brother I ever had." Their letters to one another, published by Handsel Books in 2003, provide important insights into both poets and their work.

• AUDIO: Richard Pasco reads "No one so much as you"

• AUDIO: Helen Thomas reads "Adlestrop"

• AUDIO: Vernon Watkins discusses Thomas's poetry
  

• Overview of Edward Thomas's work from the Poetry Foundation

• VIDEO: Interview with Thomas scholar Matthew Hollis

• Review of the Thomas biography by Jean Moorcroft Wilson

Edward Thomas had this photograph of his wife Helen in his pocket when he was killed by an artillery shell in the Battle of Arras on Easter Monday (April 16), 1916. (Photo from the BBC)

 

"The Voice"

Thomas Hardy in 1914 (Photo by E.O. Hoppe)

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But, as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Traveling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I: faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

December 1912

A writer in a Spanish newspaper once quipped that Thomas Hardy had the amazing good fortune to be "one of the finest novelists of the 19th century, and one of the finest poets of the 20th." It's true: Hardy gave up writing fiction after 1895, partly because of the hostility he faced after publishing Jude the Obscure. Hardy had been writing poetry since his teenaged years, and he released Wessex Poems, his first collection, in 1898, at the age of 58.

Over the next 30 years, Hardy published more than a thousand poems. They are among the best English verse ever written and are especially loved by other poets. Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin are among the diverse group of writers who championed--and learned from--Hardy's mastery of English verse.

"The Voice," written after the death of Hardy's wife Emma in 1912, is a prime example of Hardy's ability to take up the English poetic tradition and put it to his own passionate, personal use. It is musical and intricately patterned, but all is at the service of the speaker's profound disquiet--as we might expect from the man who described poetry as "emotion put into measure".

Composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten have found Hardy's verse appealing, too. Some of the best settings are by British composer Gerald Finzi; I've included a recording of one of his songs below.

• AUDIO: Richard Burton reading "The Voice"
• VIDEO: "Far from the Madding Crowd" on YouTube
• An overview of Hardy's verse from the Poetry Foundation
• AUDIO: Roderick Williams sings Finzi's setting of "To Lizbie Browne"
• Max Gate: the Hardys' home in Dorchester

Like his novels, Hardy's poems celebrate the Dorset countryside he loved. (Photo by Richard Tulloch)

"Whoever he is"

Anne Carson

Whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing--oh, it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment,
no speaking is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead--or almost
I seem to be.

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty . . .

Fragment 31
Sappho; translation by Anne Carson
from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2003)

Scholars know this poem of Sappho's as Fragment 31. When Sappho had already been dead for centuries, Catullus adopted it in Latin (Poem 51 in his collected works), and his poem, like hers, circulated throughout the Mediterranean world.

Many writers have tried their hand at bringing this into English, but none has succeeded like Anne Carson, and she did it by cleaving closely to Sappho's original. In particular, by refusing to add possessive pronouns where Sappho has none, she recreates the swift immediacy of the lines in Greek.

Carson lets us hear Sappho's urgent, graceful voice, and the millennia between us and the poet of Lesbos drop like mist.

• Sappho's Greek, with a literal translation
• Thomas McEvilley reads Fragment 31 in Greek

• Poem 51 by Catullus with English translation

• 2011 interview with Anne Carson by Eleanor Wachtel

• Another evocative fragment from Sappho

• Edith Hall's review of Diane Rayor's Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works, which includes newly discovered poems