'Landscapes of the mind.' Complementary Internals and Externals in Edward Thomas's Poetry Edward Deng 11th Grade

A great deal of Edward Thomas’s poetry deals with the intersection between the natural world and the mental arena, often revolving around what he is able to divine from his interactions in physical landscapes. The relationship between these two different worlds is key to Thomas’s poetry, through which he is able to project and interpret. Indeed, his poetry can often be seen to expound upon certain ideas in an alternate landscape, in either the natural world or the mental arena, to which they are initially rooted in. Whereas several of his poems have a heavier focus on the mental landscape rather than the natural landscape and others vice versa, other poems utilise these worlds in a way so that they complement each other.

Much of Edward Thomas’s poetry is associated with how the poet react to the natural world; Thomas is often able to discern universal truths and emotions that relate to himself from the observation and examination of physical things that he is able to witness, and the poem “Swedes” through which the poet juxtaposes a natural scene with the one rooted in humanity presented through Egyptian mythology and culture. It is a poem typical of Thomas in the sense that he takes a natural scene and expands it to a far...