Nothing Here Needed Saving: Tall Nettles by Edward Thomas

A year before he died at Arras, Edward Thomas wrote "Tall Nettles"—eight lines about some old farm tools going under the nettles. He declined to feel sorry for them. That refusal is the poem.

Faced with something neglected, most of us feel the same reflex. A derelict building, an overgrown garden, machinery going green at the edges. We assume it has fallen from a better state, and that the proper response is to restore it or to mourn it.

Pity Arrives Before Thought Does

Two poems decline the reflex, and one idea is short enough to carry in a pocket: nothing here needed saving. It only needed someone to prefer it.

Tall Nettles by Edward Thomas

Tall nettles cover up, as they have done

These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough

Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:

Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.

This corner of the farmyard I like most:

As well as any bloom upon a flower

I like the dust on the nettles, never lost

Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

What the Poem Refuses

Thomas wrote this in the middle of a war that would kill him. He came to poetry at thirty-six, after a career of grinding out prose reviews, when Robert Frost told him his prose was already poetry and he should set it out in lines. He wrote around a hundred and forty poems in two years, enlisted, and was killed at Arras in April 1917. Almost none of it was published in his lifetime.

He chose a corner of a farmyard where nothing is happening. The first stanza is an inventory. A rusty harrow. A plough long worn out. A roller made of stone. Three real objects, named in order, each no longer doing its job. These many springs tells us the abandonment is old. Then the elm butt, the last thing tall enough to keep its head above the weeds.

A lesser poem stops there, having built a nice wistfulness. Thomas turns instead: This corner of the farmyard I like most. Not this moves me. Not this teaches us about time. Preference, stated flat.

He likes the dust on the nettles as well as any bloom upon a flower. He likes them equally and declines to rank them. The last line turns once more. The dust is never lost except to prove the sweetness of a shower. The only thing that removes it is rain, and rain is sweet. Even losing the thing he likes produces something else he likes. There is no tragedy available anywhere in this poem.

Simonsbath: A Historical Perspective

In 1818, the Royal Forest of Exmoor was sold off. John Knight, a Midlands ironmaster with an enormous fortune and a larger idea, set out to turn a high, wet, acidic moor into farmland. Not a corner of it. All of it. He built a twenty-nine-mile perimeter wall, roads, white farmsteads across the high ground, and a mine at Wheal Eliza that lost money steadily and then spectacularly.

All of it is still visible. All of it is losing. The pasture reverts to sedge and rush wherever attention lapses; the spoil heaps have lost their edges to a century and a half of rain. Nothing has been destroyed. It is being undone.

I could have written that as a tragedy. Standing in the valley, that isn't what I felt, and I didn't want to counterfeit it.

Simonsbath by Alden Carrow

The River Barle cuts a trench through the Devonian rock,

dictating the gradient.

Here is the geometry of John Knight’s nineteenth-century ambition:

a twenty-nine-mile perimeter wall of stone-faced earth,

drawn tight around the wilder logic of the peat.

White homesteads stand as stubborn anchor-points

against the high, wet indifference of the moor.

Upstream, the copper and iron shafts of Wheal Eliza

are a wound closing.

Capital did not dissolve here; it hardened into landscape,

locked in miles of sunken road and tipped spoil

that loses its sharp edges to the rain.

The moor is quietly unmaking his reclamation,

starving the improved pasture back into sedge and mire.

Summer walkers on the Two Moors Way

press a temporary transit into the turf,

lugged soles grinding the mud

in a brief, soft echo of the river’s work below.

When light fails and the tarmac surrenders to the verge,

the Barle resumes its loud, dark labour:

hauling the dissolved weight of the upland south,

a continuous transport of suspended load

grinding the valley floor down to the basement rock.

From Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry.

The Anxious Add-On

This runs against nearly everything else I have argued here this year. Those pieces all shared an assumption: that a poem must earn its subject, that before you may write about something, you owe it historical weight, moral seriousness, emotional stakes, some argument for why this scrap of the world deserved your attention.

Thomas refuses the whole proposition in eight lines about nettles. I call the alternative the anxious add-on, and I know it because I have done it. A writer notices something real. The light on a wall, the sound a gate makes, where the frost sits longest. They render it beautifully for six lines. Then, not quite trusting that the noticing is enough, they bolt on a moral: the frost is like memory, the gate is the sound of childhood.

The poem was alive a moment ago. Now it isn't, because the writer stopped showing us the thing and started arguing for it. Thomas's plough could have stood for a dying agricultural England, a theme he worked at length in his prose. The nettles could have been war overtaking the ordinary world, which in 1916 would have been almost too easy. He gives us the harrow, the roller, the dust and the shower, and one unembarrassed statement of preference.

Simonsbath handed me the same temptation on a plate. Rich man conquers moor, moor undoes him: an Aesop's fable. The version that tuts at Knight's hubris, the version that mourns him, the version about human vanity: all three were available, and all three would have been me explaining the landscape to you.

Thomas keeps the harrow, the plough and the stone roller, exact and named. What he drops is the case for the defence.

Embracing the Landscape

Take something you like for no reason you can name. Write it down as precisely as you can. Resist the urge to say what it means, what it resembles, or what it teaches. Stop when you have finished describing it.

If you have a draft that goes wrong at the end, two checks usually find where:

Cover the last two lines. If the poem stands without them, and they are explaining what the rest meant, they are the add-on.

Watch for the giveaway words. Like memory. Reminds me of. Teaches us. Just as. In a closing line, they mean the poem has stopped looking and started arguing.

You may find, as Thomas did, that the liking was the poem all along. This is the last Somerset piece for a while. A few weeks ago, I set the book's opening poem beside John Clare, looking at a scruffy enclosed heath and saying I love to see. Now Thomas, looking at rust and nettles, says I like most. Two poets, a century apart, facing landscapes that weren't waiting for them, and answering with preference instead of pity.

The floodwater lacks malice. The rock doesn't yearn. Knight's wall is going back into the moor, and nobody needs to be sorry about it.

The Book: Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry

Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry is the fourth volume in British Counties In Verse. The paperback is out now on Amazon; the Kindle edition is on pre-order. A hundred miles, from the heights of Exmoor down to the drowning Levels: a twelve-metre tide, rivers held above the fields they drain, a hill that refuses to be Avalon, and a twenty-nine-mile wall the moor is taking back.

It is harder-edged than Cornwall, Cumbria or North Yorkshire: less mortar of sentiment, the language treated more like masonry. There is no marketing budget behind this series, only readers. An honest review in these first weeks does more than anything I could pay for, because early reviews are what persuade Amazon to show a book to strangers. Pre-order the Kindle if an eBook suits you better. And tell one person: the friend who walks, the colleague who used to read poetry and stopped. That single handover is how nearly every reader I have arrived.

If you aren't in a position to buy a book, put it out of your mind. You are here, reading about a corner of nettles. The reading is the thing. It always was.

Suggest a guest poem for the podcast (a classic, something modern, a favourite you have carried for years) at aldencarrow78@gmail.com. Every suggestion goes into the draw for a signed copy, sent by hand.

Nothing here needed saving. It only needed someone to prefer it.

Somerset In Verse - Exmoor To Levels In Poetry America

Somerset In Verse - Exmoor To Levels In Poetry United Kingdom