Letter from Edward Thomas to his wife, Helen Thomas. Archival reference: 424/1/1/1/1/133
Lincoln College
Oxford
6.12.1899
My dearest friend,
I am consumed by understandable impatience and desire in these last days of waiting. There is nothing that makes writing pleasant or worth doing. I can’t [illegible] which I have. If I can writer Morgan - say. I want to be away. Then loneliness is worse still. I accuse everyone of coldness and irritability?
Tomb: and then I would swim to meet and do next and do the same. Alas that it should say so, when my desire is sprung from a dream of Helen, the meek, [illegible], who is neither Cleopatra, nor Sappho, what a fool I am written a [illegible] that is as God in [illegible] as morality, who have never done anything bold, who knew the breasts of no careless and voluptuous beauties….write to me like this, or I shall go mad.
Whereas I am probably the coldest and most irritable of mortals. I cannot be satisfied. I think lasciviously all day, and nobody is lascivious enough for me. If you wrote a lascivious letter, perhaps it would satisfy me. Try. Nothing else could. I am now in the fiercest ardures of love, and now of shame because nobody
Shares them with me. Life is too slow. I would have it shorter than the willow or tree lightening. It is too cold. I would have it tropical, torrid, volcanic. I lie upon the breasts of the loveliest women. I would play with their hair, give them fierce draughtsman that would make their lust like hunger of a wild beast, and lasting as the [illegible] of the
I can write nothing more. I must make these days short as a marriage night is short, and without you and your nakedness it is impossible. I feel now like the [illegible] drowning and cold in the Seine, think Browning saw dead in the morgue at Paris.
I have nobody who
Write soon waste time [illegible] me. I am alone.
Goodbye - or rather let me say goodnight as when I turn from your bosom for a moment only to return again.
Good night. I am yours.
Edward.
My own sweet little one, goodnight.