Edward and Helen Thomas: from Professing Poetry

May 4, 2016 smallersky Life 0

John Wain’s lecture on the story of Edward Thomas and Helen Thomas

Given in 1976 during his tenure of the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford and collected in Professing Poetry (1978)

Read the lecture in full here as a pdf

Extract from A Song About Major Eatherley

(pilot of the plane that dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945)

The wise men passed. The clever men appeared.

They ruled that hell be called a pumpkin face.
They robbed the soul of what it justly feared.

Coal after coal the fires of hell went out.
Their heat no longer warmed the rooms of time...

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Apology for Understatement

Forgive me that I pitch your praise too low.
Such reticence my reverence demands,
For silence falls with laying on of hands.Forgive me that my words come thin and slow.
This could not be a time for eloquence,
For silence falls with healing of the sense.We only utter what we lightly know.
And it is rather that my love knows me.
It is that your perfection set me free.

Verse is dressed up that has nowhere to go,
You took away my glibness with my fear.
Forgive me that I stand in silence here.
It is not words could pay you what I owe.

Edward and Helen Thomas: from Professing Poetry

John Wain’s open letter to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, October 1973, BBC Radio 3

The Incidental Thoughts of Marshall McLuhan by John Wain (1986)

Remarks on the short story

Edward and Helen Thomas: from Professing Poetry

“The best lecture…. I have ever heard”: John Wain on Milton’s ‘Masque of Comus’