SOURCE: Kirkham, Michael. “The ‘Desert Places’ in Edward Thomas's Poetry.” University of Toronto Quarterly 48, no. 4 (summer 1979): 283-302.

In the following essay, Kirkham provides close readings of such poems as “Beauty,” “Melancholy,” “Ambition,” and “Wind and Mist,” among others, to explore how Thomas uses landscapes and nature to express depression and melancholic sentiment.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs. All animals are smothered in their lairs. I am too absent-spirited to count; The loneliness includes me unawares. 

And lonely as it is, that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less— A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express. 

—Robert Frost, Desert Places

I

What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease, No man, woman, or child alive could please Me now. 

(‘Beauty’)¹

This is a characteristic mood—some would say the characteristic mood—of Edward Thomas's poetry...