It was this theme—one of the great sorrows of human life—that struck the young JRR Tolkien in Lichfield during the First World War, and which became the making of him as a young poet. He recollected the moment, in a letter written 50 years later.

"I said, outside Lichfield Cathedral, to a friend of my youth — long since dead of gas-gangrene (God rest his soul: I grieve still) — ‘Why is that cloud so beautiful?’ He said: ‘Because you have begun to write poetry, John Ronald.’ He was wrong. It was because Death was near, and all was intolerably fair, lost ere grasped. That was why I began to write poetry."


"And all was intolerably fair, lost ere grasped” is a nice poetic phrase: unbearable, too, like an inversion of Shakespeare’s “When I consider everything that grows/Holds in perfection but a little moment”. This is Tolkien’s familiar grand theme from The Lord of the Rings —the time of Middle-earth being, to mankind, almost lost ere grasped. Notice, too, the Wordsworthian note in this letter: “Why is that cloud so beautiful?” We think of Tolkien as a writer inspired by the lost civilisations of the north, a man of myth and saga. In his poetry we can see more clearly the late romanticism that pervades his work. He shares those poets’ sentimental sorrow of the world.

...What struck me most from the first volume (of three) of the Collected Poems was just how much Tolkien was a poet of his times. The editors deny this, pointing to the idiosyncratic nature of his verse, and they are surely right about that. But if you gave some of these poems as a close reading exercise, it wouldn’t be too hard to devise that the poet was born the year Tennyson died (1892) and was an undergraduate in the days of Rupert Brooke and John Masefield.

Where the modernists made fragmentary literature from the disorder of the new world, Tolkien saw the fresh power of old stories: the terror of the waking dragon and the reality of the evil eye. Though he is not often (if ever) a truly great poet, Tolkien’s war poetry is hugely moving about lost time, lost men, lost ideals. The year after [Tolkien's friend GB Smith] died (along with their friend Rob Gilson, killed on the first day of the Somme), Tolkien wrote a poem before a commemorative dinner for the Battle of Minden, fought in Prussia in 1759 and in which Tolkien, Smith and Gilson’s regiment had fought. Although “Companions of Honour” is ostensibly about 1759, it is clearly a memorial to his friends.


For you to-day I drink the silent toast
And pour the wine, and wear my rose, and sing
That yours is now of all the proudest boast
Who, loathing wars and all they mean or bring,
Went forth in horror, charged the Gates of Hell,
And poison-piercèd by a foe unseen
Drenched with your blood the tortured Earth, and fell
Where no rose springs nor any blade of green.

Anyone who works through to the final volume will find a more pessimistic tone. The pressures of fame, the loss of CS Lewis and the modernisation of the Catholic Church all depressed Tolkien. As he had done when he was young, he responded to his trials with poetry of strong, fine feeling about the travails of lost time:

’Tis hard indeed not to believe
that endlessly without reprieve
the dreadful ghost of What-is-done
shall still pursued for ever run
from the remorseless wraith unseen,
the Ghost of Ghosts, the Might-have-been.

These poems are not going to become a major part of Tolkien’s legacy. His reputation as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century will rest on his two great novels (and the often splendid poems, a hundred in all, that they contain). But in these Collected Poems we can trace much of Tolkien’s development, both in terms of his attempt to capture time before it was lost in youth and in his mourning the loss of the world in his old age.

Still, this Collected Poems is a significant achievement, and the editors are to be praised for their work. The book’s value is largely as a storehouse of knowledge about Tolkien’s development and career.
[And, later]

These collected volumes are best suited for specialists, devotees, completionists, collectors and cranks.