The writer and, in his later life before his death in the First World War, poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917) was born in Lambeth, London, to a family whose ancestry came from Wales. This connection was one he stressed in his work. After school in London, he went to Lincoln College, Oxford. Soon after graduating, he started to write literary criticism, essays and biography. In this way, he managed to eek out a living, marrying in 1900 and moving with his wife, Helen, and son to Bearsted, a village near Maidstone.
His first home there was Rose Acre, about a mile from the village centre green and only ten minutes walk from the station, which went directly to London (today the house no longer stands, its location occupied by a new housing estate). In his biography by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, (`Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras,’ Bloomsbury, London, 2015, 103) she writes of how because of financial constraints Thomas had to take on what he came to call `an ugly little house’. Part of the problem was the high expectations of the young couple before they went to their lodging. Despite their initial disappointment, however, they set about taming the garden, and making at least some good of the building. Thomas was also, through exploring and learning about the nearby Pilgrim’s Way, to develop an interest in rural life, landscapes and the inscription of ancient history on them (see entry for Hilaire Beloc). While living at the cottage, he penned `Bearsted Notes’ and, from that, `Hengest: A Kentish Study’ which testify to some of this new development in his work.
Thomas was to suffer bouts of severe depression throughout his life, and often wrote about these. While living in Bearsted, in October 1901, he referred to feeling `a sort of nervousness, a continuous palpitation and a sense of something approaching that never comes’ (ibid 106). This feeling would be very familiar to many people today. Money worries and his own emotional mood were exacerbated by his wife’s second, unexpected pregnancy. In Bearsted, he had some respite by working on the proofs of his second book, `Horae Solitairiae’ , which contained, in addition to the `Hengest’ work referred to above , and `Isoud of the White Hands.’ In these, he wrote of the `unique geniality’ of the Kent landscape (Ibid 111). In 1902, his daughter Bronwen was born. In July 1903 t0 May 1904 the family moved to the more congenial `Ivy Cottage’ (now Ivy House) beside the Green in the same village. `We are to move to a pretty, hold house on the village green with a pair of lime trees on the two strips of lawn in the front,’ he wrote to a friend on 17th April 1903. `It is covered with ivy and has shuttered windows and a dormer in the roof’ (Ibid, 117). Such prettiness did not prevent the family suffering because of the dampness and cold there, causing them, after a brief hiatus, to move to Elses Farm near Sevenoaks, their home from 1904 to 1906, located between Tonbridge and Penshurst. Here he wrote works such as `The Heart of England’ and absorbed more of the atmosphere, and rhythm of rural life.
From 1906 to his death, Thomas was based outside of Kent, in Hampshire and then, for the final two years, from 1915 in France. He died there, after having been promoted to a Corporal, in action on Easter Monday 1917. Thomas’s few years in Kent were significant because they exposed him to rural life, to nature, and to the themes drawn from these that were to characterise his poetry. His life, his relationships with his wife and friends, were uneasy and restless ones. His battles with what he described as `melancholy’ and which were, while he was in Bearsted, diagnosed as `neuralgia’ , but which in contemporary parlance would be characterised as forms of depression, give his work a modern appeal, as does the constant search for orientation and healing from the landscape around him. This links him to with the earlier work of poets like John Clare.
`The Ash Grove’ from 1916, while not written during his Kent years, refers back to the flora of that era, and to the link he enjoyed with the landscape then. This gives a flavour of his very distinctive work, work which shows his relationship with the physical landscapes he had lived in, and emotionally responded to, even as he tended to his inner traumas:
“Half of the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made
Little more than the dead ones made of shade.
If they led to a house, long before they had seen its fall:
But they welcomed me; I was glad without cause and delayed.
Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the interval –
Paces each sweeter than the sweetest miles – but nothing at all,
Not even the spirits of memory and fear with restless wing,
Could climb down in to molest me over the wall
That I passed through at either end without noticing.
And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring
The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost
With a ghostly gladness, as if I heard a girl sing
The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,
And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,
But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die
And I had what I most desired, without search or desert or cost.”