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First Edition (first printing). 8vo. xix, 190pp. Blue cloth with a printed paper spine label. Tissue-protected portrait frontispiece. Some wear to the backstrip ends and corner tips, and to the outer upper and lower hinges, but the binding still perfectly sound. Free endpapers lightly toned. Lacking the uncommon dust wrapper. With the pencilled ownership signature of F. Spencer Chapman to the front free endpaper, beneath which he has noted the details of his alma mater, followed by "(See essay on E.T. in 'On the Margin', Aldous H) Compare - Shropshire Lad". There are some further pencilled ticks in the text, seemingly to highlight preferred poems, and one passage of the foreword, plus a slip of paper to bookmark one further poem. Also laid in is a separate sheet of paper upon which has been inked the text of Thomas' poems 'The Lane' and 'The Watchers', both of which are omitted from this collection. A nice bright copy, really very crisp internally, and splendidly enhanced by the ownership details of a pre-renown Spencer Chapman. De la Mare's ten-page foreword precedes 136 poems, essentially combining the content of 'Poems' (1917) and 'Last Poems' (1918). See Eckert pp. 246. Freddie Spencer Chapman was an explorer, British Army officer and WWII veteran, most celebrated for his exploits behind enemy lines in Japanese occupied Malaya. In 1926 Chapman won a Kitchener Scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge to study history and English, and it must have been at about this time he acquired this volume. He was later a member of Gino Watkins' 1930-31 British Arctic Air Route Expedition and the subsequent fatal 1932-33 Greenland Expedition; and in 1936 lead a five-man team that became the first to summit the holy mountain Chomolhari (a feat not repeated until 1970). He enlisted with the Seaforth Highlanders in 1939 and later joined the SOE's Special Training School 101 in Singapore and, following series of escapades, eventually found himself cut off, spending three years in the Malayan jungle conducting guerrilla raids with the Chinese Communists, events recorded in his celebrated memoir 'The Jungle is Neutral' (1948). He was the recipient of the Distinguished Service Order and Bar, the Polar Medal, the Gill Memorial Medal, Mungo Park Medal, and the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal. In his foreword to Chapman's memoir Field Marshall Earl Wavell compares Chapman to T.E.Lawrence, noting that "for sheer courage and endurance, physical and mental . the two men stand together as examples of what toughness the body will find, if the spirit within it is tough.". Seller Inventory # BC18851
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