As the Teams Head-Brass by Edward Thomas

Summary of the Poem

The scene is rural, a young man watching the ploughman and his team of horses pulling the share. it is more suggestive and evocative than an overtly anti-war poem. The main part consists of a dialogue between the young man and the ploughman. The war has happened, the young man has lost a friend, but life goes on. The lovers symbolise the way that life goes on despite everything. But the young man ponders that the world is different that it would have been had the war not happened. His friend would have been there (not killed in the war) and he would not be sitting on the elm tree trunk as his friend would have been there to help him move it. They discuss how valuable the war was. It seems bad but perhaps if they could see the whole picture maybe there was some good to be had out of it. The elm tree echoes the fallen dead of the war, as do the clods that the ploughshare turns over. The blizzard and the flashing baled of the ploughshare echo the destructiveness of war. it also indicates the effect of the war on rural life with young men not being able to work the fields anymore. It is written in blank verse of a kind, usually ten syllables to a line.

Notes
As a couple walk together into the wood beyond, a walker rests at the edge of a field. There, a farmer is methodically ploughing his fields with a team of horses, and the narrator and farmer fall into conversation about the effects of the war. As the Teams Head Brass: the team are a pair of horses led by the farmer, pulling a plough. The farmer is preparing his land for the sowing of crops; in some ways, this seems to be a timeless agricultural scene. The head brass are the metal bridles around the horses heads that allow the horses to be led. STRUCTURE: This is a narrative poem it tells a short story. It is written in Iambic Pentameter, and has, I think, a Shakespearian feel to it: everyday events and dialogue are elevated to high poetry by Thomas feel for the significance of small things. As the teams head brass flashed out on the turn: time is important in this poem. The poem throws us into events immediately occurring. The flash of the brass in the sunlight as the horses turn at near end of the field punctuates the poem. The lovers disappeared into the wood.: Lovers appear again as key figures in a Thomas poem. We only see them at the beginning and the end of the poem, but they are important symbols of love and life. In In Memorium (Easter 1916) and The Cherry Trees the absence of lovers is a terrible loss; in As the Teams Head Brass their fleeting presence is a cause for optimism and hope. I sat and watched: the peaceful watching of the narrator as time passes gives this poem a thoughtful, ponderous tone.

the fallen elm / That strewed the angle of a fallow: the narrator sits on a fallen tree that lies on unploughed (fallow) land. The narrator views the farmer working the field just as he views the war in this poem; from the side, at an angle to events. Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square of charlock: charlock, or wild mustard, is a weed that must be cleared on arable land for farming. Thomas description of the yellow square of weed is precise and vivid. This poem utilises pastoral conventions for example, suggesting at first the peace of the country as opposed to the war beyond but only does so to subvert those conventions through a realistic depiction of the effects of the war on an English agriculture already in long, deep decline since the mid-Victorian age. The countryside was a difficult place to live in 1916: this fact, rather than an idealization of the country life, comes through in Thomas poem. the ploughman leaned About the weather, next about the war.: the farmer turns his horses to work back up the field when he reaches the narrator. They exchange pleasantries, and talk about the war. Scraping the share till the brass flashed / Once more.: the share is the ploughshare, or blade that turns over the ground. He turns over the earth as he ploughs his lines along the field, screwing along the furrow. When the farmer begins to return towards the narrator, the horses bridle flashes as it catches the sun. This flashing punctuates the poem, giving a sense of the slowness of rural rhythms. The blizzard felled the elm: Thomas preserves the iambic pentameter here as he moves forward in his narrative, beginning a new line below. There is a sense of time having passed, but also of continuity. With the blizzard and the fallen tree, Thomas introduces an image of a mishap caused by natural forces. the fallen elm / That strewed the angle of a fallow: the narrator sits on a fallen tree that lies on unploughed (fallow) land. The narrator views the farmer working the field like he views the war in this poem; from the side, at an angle. When will they take it away? / When the wars over.: the dialogue between the farmer and narrator introduces the war for the first time. War and good husbandry seem to be contrasted. One minute and an interval of ten: the rhythm of the encounter is slow, punctuated by work. The repetition emphasises this. Have you been out?: an interesting and wryly humorous conversation begins between the two. The narrators answer that he would join up If I could only come back again shows the easiness of the twos conversation. There is no pretence here, no mock-heroism. There is an almost documentary feeling here, though there is something Shakespearian about the absurd humour of the farmer.

Only two teams work on the farm this year: the significance of the single farmer working this large field is made clear by the manpower shortage caused by deaths in the war. This practical aspect is made immediately personal by the farmers dead friend. The second day / In France they killed him: this swift killing of new recruits was sadly common; new soldiers often made mistakes that exposed them to enemy fire. Sadly, Edward Thomas himself was one of these unlucky recruits who died very soon after seeing action. The very night of the blizzard, too: as in In Memoriam (Easter 1915) and The Cherry Trees, Thomas is again effective in making the presence of certain things in nature (a fallen tree) represent the absence of human beings (the man who was killed on the same night that it fell). Similarly, the blizzard here becomes linked in its devastating power to the effects of the fighting on the front. Now if he had stayed here we should have moved the tree.: this irony is really at the heart of the poems narrative. The tragedy of the farmers friends death is relayed in an unsentimental, factual way. A sense of the unremitting pressures of the farmers life comes through, perhaps, in his resigned attitude. And I should not have sat here it would have been another world: Thomas cleverly uses this tree to emphasise the tragedy of lost possibilities that the war has brought. There is a philosophical air to this reflection on change and loss. As we have seen in In Memorium (Easter 1916) and The Cherry Trees, this sense that the world has changed for the worse is insisted on through the small details of life that have been affected by the war. Ay, and a better, though if we could see all all might seem good: a better world has been lost, agrees the farmer; though he proposes optimistically, as a form of consolation, that in the broader view the loss of his friend might be explained for the good. This comforting faith is the last thing said between the farmer and the narrator. Then the lovers came out of the wood again:: the reappearance of the lovers seems to reinforce this sense of hope near the poems end, yet the final three lines work to subtly undermine this. for the last time / I watched the clods crumble and topple over: the absorption of the narrator in the action of the plough now seems linked to change, and by extension, the war. The crumbling clods of earth and their toppling as they fall from the plough suggest the change in the world wrought by humans; perhaps suggest the men falling to earth abroad. the stumbling team.: the stumbling of the team suggest the difficulty the farmer continues to face, but also of course the loose footing of life itself. [ANTHOLOGY NOTE: This poem describes events similar to that Hardy describes in In Time of the Breaking of Nations (p.161) but are quite different in tenor; where Hardy generalises and hardly touches on the actual effects of the war occurring abroad, Thomas is careful to construct a more contemporary encounter that is arguably more powerful because of the understatement of its message.]