On the Cusp

David Ferry is best known as a translator – Horace, Virgil, Gilgamesh – but is also a fine poet. Yesterday morning I was rereading one of my favorites among his deceptively casual poems, “In the Garden,” in his collection Of No Country I Know. The situation is simple, a version of suburban pastoral: Ferry is seated in his sunlit backyard, surrounded by flowers, reading Edward Thomas; his daughter, nearby, is reading The Mayor of Casterbridge. Some writers would intend for us to draw portentous conclusions from the choice of reading matter, but Ferry makes no fuss about the books. It’s as though he were cataloging the contents of a photograph and just happens to observe the titles. It is a convincing poem of happiness and serenity – very un-Hardy-like, but its timing late in the summer, on the cusp of autumn in the north, lends it a subtley bittersweet quality. Here are four lovely lines from near the middle of the 55-line poem:

“There is something springlike and free about the littleness,
Oddness, and lightness of this combination of things,
Observed here at the very tag end of summer,
In my good fortune.”

The mood of the poem and its attention to details of wind, sunlight, grass and flowers sent me back to Edward Thomas, whom I have not read in a long time and have probably read with insufficient attentiveness. He always seemed a little soft to me, romantically pre-Modernist in his diction and his frequent choice of melancholy themes. He lacked the flinty edge of his friend, Robert Frost. When I think of a Thomas poem – the quintessential Thomas poem – a young man, a vagabond, is walking alone through the English or Welsh countryside.

Thomas was a rarity – he didn’t start writing poems until he was 36. All of his 143 poems were written between December 1914 and January 1917, when he shipped to France as part of the Royal Garrison Artillery. On April 9, 1917, the day after Easter, the first day of the Battle of Arras, Thomas was killed when a German artillery shell exploded nearby. Few poets so memorable have had so little time to write.

I pulled down The Poems of Edward Thomas, published by Handsel Books in 2003, with a useful introduction by Peter Sacks. I suspect I have underestimated Thomas. I have tried to filter out what I know of his life and death and not let that soften my reading. Here is a beautiful and characteristic poem, “October”:

“The green elm with one great bough of gold
Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one. –
The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,
Harebell and scabious and tormentil,
The blackberry and gorse, in des and sun,
Bow down to; and the wind travels too light
To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern;
The gossamers wander at their own will.
At heavier steps than birds’ the squirrels scold.

“The late year has grown fresh again and new
As Spring, and to the touch is not more cool
Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might
As happy be as earth is beautiful,
Were I some other or with earth could turn
In alternation of violet and rose,
Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due,
And gorse that has no time not to be gay.
But if this be not happiness, who knows?
Some day I shall think this a happy day,
And this mood by the name of melancholy
Shall no more blackened and obscured be.”

The poem was written in October 1915, a year and a half before Thomas’ death. It is difficult not to let the shadow of this knowledge fall across the poem, especially its final lines. Ferry’s poem seems to distantly echo “October”: the careful naming of flowers (see the listing for the memorably named tormentil at botanical.com); the suggestion of spring in late summer or autumn; the similarity of Ferry’s ``In my good fortune” and Thomas’ “But if this be not happiness, who knows?” It’s less a matter of influence than a sharing of a perennial mood, of gentle sadness. Don’t be put off, as I was, by the poeticisms, especially the inversions. This is beautiful work.