’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 lack
  Of her is more to me
  Than other’s presence,
  Whether life splendid be
  Or utter black.

  ’I have not seen,
  I have no news of her;
  I can tell only
  She is not here, but there
  She might have been.

  ’She is to be kissed
  Only perhaps by me;
  She may be seeking
  Me and no other; she
  May not exist.’

That search lies nearer to the norm of poetry.  We might register its wistfulness, praise the appealing nakedness of its diction and pass on.  If that were indeed the culmination of Edward Thomas’s poetical quest, he would stand securely enough with others of his time.  But he reaches further.  In the verses on his ‘home,’ which we have already quoted, he passes beyond these limits.  He has still more to tell of the experience of the soul fronting its own infinity:—­