St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, assures fellow believers that there is eternal life beyond and this promise was made possible through the resurrection of Christ following His crucifixion. “Now if Christ is preached,” he writes, “that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty.” This would make them false witnesses, he continues, before finishing this section with “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.” With this theme, many poets have attempted to say as much and John Donne (Death Be Not Proud) and Dylan Thomas (And Death Shall Have No Dominion) are two significant examples. However, Edward Thomas seems to dismiss such belief with his very short poem, a tragedy in four lines really, In Memoriam (Easter 1916):
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.
The poem is one sentence long, in fact, and though it does not outrightly banish the belief in resurrection, the promise of Easter, it at least holds off on such hope.
Thomas wrote the poem in the midst of World War I, the first great and modern war the world had ever experienced, and meditates on the sorrow that the war has caused many girlfriends back in England who were waiting and hoping for their loved soldiers to return. He begins the poem with the descriptive image of flowers that have not been picked and are left to grow in the wood and the sound of the line echoes the imagery with its heavy consonants and words of fl, ft, thick and the f in nightfall. The line breaks with wood, which serves as a fence or border that encloses the unpicked flowers within its boundary.
In the next line, Thomas does bring the men back from the dead, in a manner of speaking, resurrecting them through the power of his imagination and he knows that the sweethearts who are left to remember their dearly departed have memories that will not let them forget the dead, and will certainly resurrect them through the act of memory, which is the act of the mind. The promise of Easter serves not to reflect on Christ’s resurrection, but on the imaginative resurrection of the dead soldiers. It is Eastertide that serves as the springboard to call back the men into memory. As well, like the flowers that were left unpicked in the wood and are still living, these soldiers whose lives were picked away by bullets and general warfare are still ‘living’. With the break of second line at men and the blankness of the white page that follows, this is effective, as the reader sees the eternity of the blankness of/on the page.
But the men were not killed in England, Thomas goes on to tell us, but they were killed far from home and their bodies are still there. Now far from home tells us of the ongoing killing and not too distant scything of life that is prevalent; Now does not let us forget the killing and in fact makes it live on in the mind. Distance and death have literally separated and forever the soldiers and their sweethearts. Had this not been so, the beautiful and romantic excursion of going into the wood at night to pick flowers would have occurred and those flowers that are now left alive would have been plucked and would have died, but for the war, they are alive. The most operative word in the poem comes at the break of the third line – should. This simple word is full of grief, for it tells of all that should have been, the romance between the once alive soldiers and their sweethearts, the picking of flowers (an everyday, simple but lovely thing to do), the promise of future bliss, an ideal that cut short by war. Again, the effect of the page’s whiteness comes into play and brings and emphasizes the heartbreak and loss experienced, as one reflects on what should have been, but all there is after the word is nothing and all the picking of the flowers that should have occurred is absent, picked off at the end of the line.
The fourth and last line then explains what should have occurred after the flowers were picked – the soldiers and their sweethearts would [h]ave gathered them in bunches and would have been saved as memorial to this excursion and a symbol of the love between them. Halfway through the line, however, Thomas tells us that this will never be done, and will never do again. This comes halfway through the line in a manner that makes the reader think of the young age at which these men were cut down in life by war. There is no hope for life eternal for these men, but they live on in the memories of their sweethearts and in the imaginative act of the poet whose poem resurrects them. It is more heartbreaking because Thomas himself enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles, a volunteer regiment of the British Army, in 1915 at the age of 37, long past the age of enlistment and with a family of his own. Two years later he was killed at the Battle of Arras in France. Whatever flowers he would have picked with his wife Helen were left unpicked in the wood around East Hampshire where they lived.
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