But the problem was not endless as Thomas thought, for a poem of Frost's had arrived by post that would dramatically force Thomas's hand: a poem called "Two Roads", soon to be rechristened "The Road Not Taken". It finished:. Noble, charismatic, wise: in the years since its composition, "The Road Not Taken" has been understood by some as an emblem of individual choice and self-reliance, a moral tale in which the traveller takes responsibility for — and so effects — his own destiny.
But it was never intended to be read in this way by Frost, who was well aware of the playful ironies contained within it, and would warn audiences: "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem — very tricky. Frost knew that reading the poem as a straight morality tale ought to pose a number of difficulties. For one: how can we evaluate the outcome of the road not taken?
For another: had the poet chosen the road more travelled by then that, logically, could also have made all the difference. And in case the subtlety was missed, Frost set traps in the poem intended to explode a more earnest reading.
But the poem carried a more personal message. Many were the walks when Thomas would guide Frost on the promise of rare wild flowers or birds' eggs, only to end in self-reproach when the path he chose revealed no such wonders.
Amused at Thomas's inability to satisfy himself, Frost chided him, "No matter which road you take, you'll always sigh, and wish you'd taken another. To Thomas, it was not the least bit funny.
It pricked at his confidence, at his sense of his own fraudulence, reminding him he was neither a true writer nor a true naturalist, cowardly in his lack of direction. And now the one man who understood his indecisiveness the most astutely — in particular, towards the war — appeared to be mocking him for it. Thomas responded angrily. He did not subscribe to models of self-determination, or the belief that the spirit could triumph over adversity; some things seemed to him ingrained, inevitable.
How free-spirited his friend seemed in comparison. This American who sailed for England on a long-shot, knowing no one and without a place to go, rode his literary fortunes and won his prize, then set sail again to make himself a new home. None of this was Thomas. Frost insisted that Thomas was overreacting, and told his friend that he had failed to see that "the sigh was a mock sigh, hypocritical for the fun of the thing".
But Thomas saw no such fun, and said so bluntly, adding that he doubted anyone would see the fun of the thing without Frost to guide them personally. Frost, in fact, had already discovered as much on reading the poem before a college audience, where it was "taken pretty seriously", he admitted, despite "doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling.
Mea culpa. He broke the news to Frost. But I have altered my mind. I am going to enlist on Wednesday if the doctor will pass me. In walking with Frost, he had written of the urgent need to protect — and if necessary, to fight for — the life and the landscape around him.
Finally, he understood. Thomas was passed fit by the doctor, and the same week, in July , he sat down to lunch with a friend and informed her that he had enlisted in the Artists Rifles, and that he was glad; he did not know why, but he was glad. Thomas brought a unique eye to the English landscape at a moment when it was facing irreversible change. His work seems distinctly modern in its recognition of the interdependence of human beings and the natural world, more closely attuned to our own ecological age than that of the first world war.
But perhaps no poet ever valued him more highly than Robert Frost: "We were greater friends than almost any two ever were practising the same art," he remarked. A war, a gamekeeper and a road not taken came between them, but by then they had altered one another's lives irrevocably. Thomas pulled his friend's work from obscurity into a clearing, from which the American would go on to sell a million poetry books in his lifetime.
Frost, in turn, released the poet within Thomas, and would even find a publisher for his verse in the United States. That book would carry a dedication that Thomas had scribbled on the eve of sailing for France: "To Robert Frost".
Frost responded in kind, writing: "Edward Thomas was the only brother I ever had. At twilight when walking, or at the parting of ways with a friend, Thomas could feel great sadness that his journey must come to an end:.
Things will happen which will trample and pierce, but I shall go on, something that is here and there like the wind, something unconquerable, something not to be separated from the dark earth and the light sky, a strong citizen of infinity and eternity. He was killed on the first day of the battle of Arras, Easter ; he had survived little more than two months in France.
Yet his personal war was never with a military opponent: it had been with his ravaging depression and with his struggle to find a literary expression through poetry that was worthy of his talents.
And on the latter, at least, he won his battle. Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and the road to war. When Thomas and Frost met in London in , neither had yet made his name as a poet. They became close, and each was vital to the other's success. Edward Thomas and Robert Frost He wrote his first real poem in , the blank-verse dialogue "Up in the Wind," which was published, along with much of his later work, under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway.
Thomas himself helped build Frost's reputation by writing a rave review of North of Boston in As the literary market collapsed during the war, Thomas found more time to write poetry. He struggled with the difficult choice between moving with his family to New England, as Frost urged, or enlisting as a soldier. He became a Lance Corporal and instructed his fellow officers, including the poet Wilfred Owen. While at Hare Hall Camp for ten months, Thomas wrote over 40 poems; in just two years, he wrote over poems.
Written during wartime, while serving as a soldier, much of Thomas's work blends and shifts between meditative recollections of his beloved countryside and his experiences in battle.
In a review in The Guardian , Ian Sansom writes: "If anything explains the continuing appeal of his poems, it's probably that Thomas seems to have no clear idea of what he's doing or where's he's going; the effort is all.
Many of the poems feature a first-person narrator who is tramping along, overlooked by others, a visitor in the landscape, passing by beguiling streams and fields, often in the rain, listening to much thrush-song and 'parleying starlings' and 'speculating rooks', and getting absolutely nowhere.
Happiness, life and love all lie just out of reach—a leap, or a walking-stick's length away. He volunteered for service overseas and was sent to northern France, where he was stationed at Le Havre, Mondicourt, Dainville, and finally at Arras. On the first day of the battle at Arras, April 9, , Thomas was killed by a shell blast. He was buried the following day in Agny military cemetery.
National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets.
American Poets Magazine. Poets Search more than 3, biographies of contemporary and classic poets. The material is always interesting, but the inevitable result is that we spend a lot of time waiting.
It was full, too, of the odd repressions we associate with Victorian Britain. He got engaged young, at 19; he went up to Oxford, where he experimented with opium and — more surprisingly— rowing. His son is born; he catches gonorrhoea from a prostitute; he falls into depressions; he attempts suicide. He moves house often, each time apparently thinking that the next one will be better. But most of what he did was work.
To support his family, he became an astonishingly prolific hack-writer, of travel books, history and book reviews. He published five books before he was As are a few cut corners: he was commissioned to write a book about England, and when his publishers complained that the manuscript was a little short, he simply added a chapter about a castle in Wales, leaving out the inconvenient geographical detail and place-names.
0コメント