The sun used to shine while we two walked
Slowly together, paused and started
Again, and sometimes mused, sometimes talked
As either pleased, and cheerfully parted
Each night. We never disagreed
Which gate to rest on. The to be
And the late past we gave small heed.
We turned from men or poetry
To rumours of the war remote
Only till both stood disinclined
For aught but the yellow flavorous coat
Of an apple wasps had undermined;
Or a sentry of dark betonies,
The stateliest of small flowers on earth,
At the forest verge; or crocuses
Pale purple as if they had their birth
In sunless Hades fields. The war
Came back to mind with the moonrise
Which soldiers in the east afar
Beheld then. Nevertheless, our eyes
Could as well imagine the Crusades
Or Caesar’s battles. Everything
To faintness like those rumours fades -
Like the brook’s water glittering
Under the moonlight - like those walks
Now - like us two that took them, and
The fallen apples, all the talks
And silences - like memory’s sand
When the tide covers it late or soon,
And other men through other flowers
In those fields under the same moon
Go talking and have easy hours.
Edward Thomas wrote The sun used to shine in May 1916. He was remembering a time, twenty months before, when he and Robert Frost had been together in Leddington on the Gloucestershire/Herefordshire border. The period must have appeared Eden-like compared to the increasing horrors of war.
In all he visited the Frosts and other Dymock poets - Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfred Gibson - and their families who were staying in houses dotted around the vale of Leadon, on five separate occasions in 1914 from April to November. The main attraction for ET was Robert Frost, their burgeoning friendship and their talks, often about poetry. The longest of these periods was with his whole family in August, just as World War 1 was breaking out. The sun used to shine describes that time, the “easy hours” Thomas and Frost had together on their walks and talks, with the first consciousness of war, however remote.
In fact the original note from which he drew some of the poem is more explicit about the choice he would face and his response to this, which he also addressed more fully in other writings including the essay, This England, and the earlier poem This is no petty case of right or wrong.
He had written in his field notebook on 26th August 1914:
“At end of day that began very wet & turned warm & muggy & then fine tho cloudy: at last a sky of dark rough horizontal manes in NW with a 1/3 moon bright & almost orange low down clear of cloud & I thought of men eastward seeing it at the same moment. It seems foolish to have loved England up to now w’out knowing it could perhaps be ravaged & I could and perhaps would do nothing to prevent it.”
This question was to haunt him for many months and it was only finally resolved when he joined the Royal Artillery as a gunnery officer, a decision which would take him to fight and die in France, shortly after he wrote The sun used to shine.
The elegiac tone that permeates the poem reflected both a time with a foot still in the long years of peace, when war was only just beginning to make its effects felt, and also the period when he was becoming a poet. He had written a letter to Frost remembering this time a year after their stay writing “Ledington & white leaved oak (a village in the Malvern Hills) seem purely paradisal”
The epiphany at the moonrise is more muted in the poem than in his notes or prose piece, reflecting the distance in time and memory. Also by the time of the poem he had already been training as a soldier for nearly a year and was a couple of months away from taking the fateful decision to go out to fight in France. Instead the poem is a celebration of his friendship with Frost and a memory of the crucial period when he was transitioning to become a poet, with this poem a very fine illustration of the poet he had become.
The poem starts by describing walks, most unlike Edward Thomas’s usual walking style. When walking solo or in his family’s company, he would have been faster, more purposeful, intensely observing and exploratory. The approach of start, walking slowly, pause, rest, would have suited Frost better who did not have Thomas’s fondness for long walks. That said over the weeks that Thomas spent here in 1914, they explored further and further afield, covering longer distances, sometimes by bike but mainly walking. As is often the case with Thomas when exploring new country, he started in the immediate vicinity and then gradually travelled further afield, segmenting the land.
So to start in April they kept local, around the brook and fields of Leddington and the Leadon Valley.
Following a holiday in Wales, he and two of his children, Mervyn and Bronwen, had taken rooms from the local farmer, Mr Chandler, at Oldfields. The farm house was a couple of meadows away from Little Iddens where the Frosts were staying.
On the first full day of his first visit in April he walked early probably with Frost over the Leadon brook to Preston Church and Preston Court half a mile away.
“From Oldfields walk over one meadow to cottage 100 yds off North thro a gate there & down big convex meadow alongside hedge past an empty pink washed timbered cottage with wild garden down to a narrow brookside meadow with thorns etc about the brink & over the brook & another narrow mead then up over another meadow towards the plain church next to a brick timbered manor farm house with 3 triple clusters of tall square chimney, & farm buildings then through a stile and a gate (to keep cattle out of church yard) into the church yard.”
It was a beautiful day with soft roundish white detached clouds floating in the blue. (The weather when he was visiting, certainly on his first three stays in April, June and August, was normally pretty good, though not the sun every day he suggested in the poem. Perhaps he was remembering differently!)
It’s clear from the outset that Thomas loved what he saw of the countryside that surrounded him on the borders of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire.
He wrote the following day:
“This is an up & down country of meadows many of them thick with grey leafed wild daffodil (thick as thistles) & its last flowers; & orchards, also often with daffodils, of apple, some cherry & great dark tall and very shapely pears, all in blossom together - the apples often making a perfect umbrella of bloom: elms along the roads above narrow grassy wayside strips & hedges without banks, also some poplars with much mistletoe: several farms (eg Oldfields) have 2 or 3 Lombardy poplars beside them. On both hands are considerable rocky-outlined bare hills as well as the gentle hedged hills westward beyond Preston church.”
The rocky-outlined bare hills were the Malvern Hills, which he and Frost were to explore in August, and the closer softer hill to the west was Marcle Hill. Also to the South was the height of May Hill, a discrete and discreet landmark which they were able to see from many parts of the Leadon Valley, and which was a wide ranging vantage point with views of the hills all around and the Severn Valley below in the south. He was to visit it for the first time in June, and a year later in June 1915 was to begin the first draft of the poem Words on its slopes.
Back in the Leadon Valley in April, he noted “Many biggish swelling or sloping meadows have great pears or apples scattered about them or a solitary one.”
His enthusiasm for their blossom extended to a couple of striking images
“Orchards with little pink pigs almost as fresh as apple blossom over their heads.”
And
“In one orchard the daisies are thick in grass under the pendent cherry blossom like reflections brighter than originals.”
The copses were full of bluebells, the ditch sides thick with stitchworts and in the meadows and orchards cowslips were succeeding the daffodils. He noted very few beeches, unlike Hampshire, and there were many elms, instead of oaks, and some ash even down the middle of some fields, with elms in hedges, “so that the fields being not large the land looks like a large loose wood.” (He had often noticed a similar illusion looking out from the Ashford Hangers in Hampshire over the Rother Vale towards the South Downs.)
This was the countryside he and Frost were walking through in The sun used to shine. In April his local walks included a walk into Ledbury, whose position under and between hills he drew in his notebook:
They also explored around the Abercrombie’s house in the sandy country and larch woods beyond Ryton. On all sides, as in his earlier note, he could see the tempting hills on the horizon which he was to explore on later visits.
In June when visiting for a few days with Helen, having passed through Adlestrop on the way, they went over to May Hill, possibly by train, and walked up it to admire the view. It was clearly a bumper year with comments from the local farmer about “the land being in great heart” with “more than half a crop of hay”.
Up until the first days of August 1914 unsurprisingly in that golden summer, there was no mention in his notebooks of the impending cataclysm of war. On their bike ride from Hampshire to Gloucestershire Mervyn and he had witnessed alarms and excursions at Swindon following the announcement that war had been declared on 4th August; and the following day Helen and the girls had had to take a car late at night from Malvern as no trains were running to Ledbury.
Thereafter, aside from a couple of anecdotes about local war-like characters, the notebooks only touched on the war in passing until the moonlight epiphany at the end of August.
However there was an earlier, minor epiphany with a distinct military overtone. On one of the first days in August he had cycled into Ledbury after dark and had seen:
"Magnificent curved horizon of a new field as I cycled at night to Ledbury & one Lombardy poplar & one smaller tree marked the clear dark line agst the starry sky. A sort of “C’est l’empereur” scene: clearcut, simple, melodramatic."
The picture “C’est l’empereur” by Hugh de Twenebrokes Glazebrook, was a popular print of a French soldier asleep on guard, waking to find Napoleon Bonaparte standing by him. Both this scene and the later visionary revelation under the late August moon, which became the basis for The sun used to shine, were written up in his essay This England that autumn (and later published in the Last Sheaf).
The August explorations of the Malvern Hills by Thomas and Frost were very different in character from their meanderings in the Leadon valley. They explored the hills in sections by bike or walking, covering all the main prominences and the footpaths either side. They spent a day each round British Camp and Herefordshire Beacon; on Holly Bush and Gypsy Camp; at White Leafed Oak; and above West Malvern, exploring different approaches and ways back, often returning to Ledington late in the evening . He described the main sights and views - from the top they could see Bredon Hill to East, May Hill to South, the Hereford Hills to North West and Eastnor below in West. He described the Malvern ridge behind them going south as being “like a hunted dragon’s back; but the carved ridge ahead towards Malvern had a curved back like that of the Sphinx.”
“All the time there was generally a kestrel hovering now high now low or cutting across: & once 8 carrier pigeons - go straight, business like over” (possibly on war business.)
In between these expeditions Thomas spent a day sightseeing with Abercrombie in Tewkesbury, on the other side of the Malverns, which he liked very much. Coming back they stopped at Pendock “at the 5th mile stone” to take in the view of the Malvern Hills and he noted “views of the long range of Malvern peaks with various foreshortenings, the nearer with wooded skirts clear: if you had to make a mountain range to show anyone what a mountain range was you could invent nothing better.”
As well as these adventures, the local walks continued with their families. On the evening of 19th August he heard for the first time “Voices of the children shouting & laughing over at Little Iddens very clear - we have never heard them there before”. He continued to note down his daily observations of the natural world. Several of these he used later to furnish the poem, as he had done for previous poems drawing on disparate notebook observations.
So the betonys that stand sentry he had noted earlier in August. There were a proliferation of them in the immediate neighbourhood of Oldfield in the hedges of Chandler’s orchard - and along the edge of the wood past Hallwood Green, along the Gloucestershire and Herefordshire border, a couple of miles west.
The autumn crocuses he had noted the day before his moonlit epiphany
“Purple crocus with white stem & a sharp division between it & the pale but not unwholesome purple of the mostly folded bloom among short grass just up to flower base.”
He had previously used the image of autumn crocuses in the South Country - "the tenderest green and palest purple of a thick cluster....that have broken out of the dark earth and stand surprised, amidst their own weak light as of the underworld from which they have come."
And the apples he had seen in the orchards of little cottages dotted around the hillside below White Leaved Oak. He described: “beautiful rosy-gilded flattish apples lying on dry sandy ground among turnip rows, some wasp-hollowed; the tree loaded; another tree with a later streaked apple ripening.”
Although the fallen apples would have been seen on all hands - as had been the apple blossoms when he first saw the countryside in April - he only noted them specifically on their walk up the old track to White Leafed Oak
He had identified these apples when remembering that time as “paradisal” in the letter to Frost a year later. He had added “with Beauty of Bath apples Hesperedian lying with thunder dew on the warm ground.” Separately in his notebook he also identified other apples, that they had been given to eat on their bike ride up to White Leafed Oak, as a “Princess - “ but he could not remember the other part of its name. It seems likely it was the Princess Pippin, a local Gloucestershire species of apple. As this has a more yellowish skin and tint than the pink Beauty of Bath, perhaps this was the one he was describing in the poem with the allure of its “yellow flavorous coat”.
The sun used to shine was the only poem that specifically summoned back this idyllic period of his stays in Gloucestershire during 1914. Other poems drew partially on the stay- A Dream, November and Up in the wind (to a lesser extent) - and of course Adlestrop on his journeying there in June. To an extent all of Thomas’s poems originated from these weeks spent with Frost and The sun used to shine acknowledges this debt - showing both the embryonic and soldier poet he had become.
A walk
The shape and scale of the countryside round Leddington and Dymock remains the same as ET would have known. The sleepy, muddy Leadon river still winds slowly between its tree bound banks through fields. In ET's days there were many more orchards, nowadays much more arable. May Hill, the Malvern hills and Marcle Hill are still discreet though always noticeable presences on the horizon at different points of the compass.
The walks that Thomas and Frost may have done in the Leadon Valley have been recreated by the Friends of the Dymock Poets as a series of interlacing footpaths. They provide a fine way to walk through the local countryside. More on these footpaths and walks in the area can be found on the two links below.
As well as walking the poets paths, I would suggest extending a walk west from Oldfields via Preston Church and Preston Court, across the main road to the woods above Hallswood Green and Green Farm and spending time in these lovely woods where ET saw the betonies in such profusion (sadly no longer evident). You can continue on to Much Marcle under Marcle Hill, returning the same way. ET on his return missed the footpath towards Great Netherton in ''a tangled rough hollow ferny triangular field at edge of wood" but in compensation found a deserted cottage (not a rare occurrence in those days.)
The walks on the Malvern Hills can best be approached from the various car parks at the bottom of each of the main summits. A good starting point is the car park below Hangman's Hill - Swinyard car park - from where you can walk up Swinyard Hill with good views north to Herefordshire Beacon and beyond to Worcestershire Beacon and the hills above Malvern and south to Hollybush and towards White Leaved Oak; east to Castlemorton Common and west to Eastnor Park.
Acknowledgements
Field note books copyright Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York.
Transcriptions of the Edward Thomas Field Note Books quoted in the blog are available at the Edward Thomas Study Centre at the Petersfield Museum.
I have also drawn on Edward Thomas's letters to Robert Frost and The South Country.
