Edward Thomas died at the battle of Arras, in France, in April of 1917. He was thirty-nine years old.
In this picture, he looks intense, suspicious, soulful, possibly even poetic, — but not the suffering-soul-kind of poet. When he joined the military, he transformed himself into the stereotype of an officer. The new "look" was not a success, in my opinion.
Before he went off to the war, Edward Thomas conducted a flirtation and possibly an affair but more probably what they called in those inhibited days a "romantic friendship" with Edna Clarke Hall. She was a beautiful, intelligent woman, an artist. Here she is looking positively post-Pre-Raphaelite.
And here again — youthful, delicate and glowing.
After Edward died, his wife Helen, herself a gifted, attractive and certainly long-suffering woman, wrote to Edna. "Why wasn't I beautiful to Edward? Oh, I did so long for your beauty not to take it from him, not take but give, to have hair & eyes & mouth & that something else…. I remember you so clearly standing for all I longed to have to give him."
I am moved by Helen's grief and also by her generosity.
Edna Clarke Hall died at age 100 in 1979.
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