ws his beauty is not beautiful, and his
home no home at all.

'This is my grief. That land,
My home, I have never seen.
No traveller tells of it,
However far he has been.

'And could I discover it
I fear my happiness there,
Or my pain, might be dreams of return
To the things that were.'

Great poetry stands in this, that it expresses man's allegiance to his
destiny. In every age the great poet triumphs in all that he knows of
necessity; thus he is the world made vocal. Other generations of men may
know more, but their increased knowledge will not diminish from the
magnificence of the music which he has made for the spheres. The known
truth alters from age to age; but the thrill of the recognition of the
truth stands fast for all our human eternity. Year by year the universe
grows vaster, and man, by virtue of the growing brightness of his little
lamp, sees himself more and more as a child born in the midst of a dark
forest, and finds himself less able to claim the obeisance of the all.
Yet if he would be a poet, and not a harper of threadbare tunes, he must
at each step in the downward passing from his sovereignty, recognise
what is and celebrate it as what must be. Thus he regains, by another
path, the supremacy which he has forsaken.

Edward Thomas's poetry has the virtue of this recognition. It may be
said that his universe was not vaster but smaller than the universe of
the past, for its bounds were largely those of his own self. It is, even
in material fact, but half true. None more closely than he regarded the
living things of earth in all their quarters. 'After Rain' is, for
instance, a very catalogue of the texture of nature's visible garment,
freshly put on, down to the little ash-leaves

'... thinly spread
In the road, like little black fish, inlaid
As if they played.'

But it is true that these objects of vision were but the occasion of the
more profound discoveries within the region of his own soul. There he
discovered vastness and illimitable vistas; found himself to be an eddy
in the universal flux, driven whence and whither he knew not, conscious
of perpetual instability, the meeting place of mighty impacts of which
only the farthest ripple agitates the steady moonbeam of the waking
mind. In a sense he did no more than to state what he found, sometimes
in the more familiar language of beauties lost, mourned for lost, and
irrecoverable.

'The simple