The Childhood of Edward Thomas

Abstract

Towards the end of 1913 Edward Thomas wrote this: ‘When I penetrate backward into my childhood I come perhaps sooner than many people to impassable night. A sweet darkness enfolds with a faint blessing my life up to the age of about four. The task of attempting stubbornly to break up that darkness is one I have never proposed to myself, but I have many times gone up to the edge of it, peering, listening, stretching out my hands…’ These curious sentences make up the opening of the autobiographical fragment which now bears the title The Childhood of Edward Thomas. It was not published until 1938 — twenty-one years after Thomas was killed at Arras:

With regard to his actual death you have probably heard the details. It should be of some comfort to you to know that he died at a moment of victory from a direct hit by a shell, which must have killed him outright without giving him a chance to realise anything, — a gallant death for a very true and gallant gentleman.

‘Only I can’t help wishing he could have saved his life without so wholly losing it…’¹

‘I could also enjoy kinds of fighting where it was impossible to think of poetry.’²