EDWARD THOMAS  (1878–1918)

Adlestrop


Yes. I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

8 January 1915 [First published in Poems, 1917]


NA: Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime’s poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914, at the age of 36, kick-started into poetry by his conversations with Robert Frost. Often viewed as a “war poet”, he wrote nothing directly about the trenches, finishing his last poem in January 1917 before embarking for France. And yet all his poetry was written during the war and is shadowed by its presence.
      Thomas was plagued by self-recrimination over whether or not he should follow friends and fellow writers who had enlisted, these doubts surfacing in a number of poems reflecting on the state of England during the war. Over-age, he was under no obligation to do so, but in July 1915 he finally volunteered, joining the Artists’ Rifles as a private. In November 1916 he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant with Artillery, arriving at Arras on the front line in February 1917, where he was killed on 9 April. While on leave he had arranged for the publication of his first poetry collection, Poems, using the pseudonym Edward Eastaway with a dedication to Robert Frost. That collection appeared after his death in 1917.
      ‘Adlestrop’ translates memories from the golden summer of 1914 – before the outbreak of war in August – into a poetic epiphany. Edward and Helen Thomas were travelling from London to visit the Frosts in Ledbury on 24 June 1914 when their express train made an unscheduled stop at the country station of Adlestrop in Gloucestershire. His field notebook records how ‘through the willows could be heard a chain of blackbirds song at 12.45 and one thrush and no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam’. They stopped at another signal outside Campden ‘by banks of long grass willowherb and meadowsweet’, with ‘another stop like this outside Colwell on 27th with thrush singing on hillside above’. The poem conflates details from these three stops on two journeys.

BK: Some of the best lyric poems deal with moments that are personal, vivid, calm and memorable. A train stops ‘unwontedly’ at a station named Adlestrop. It is late June, hot, there is a sound of hissing steam and someone clearing his throat, the platform is bare, the scene of trees, grass, flowers and haycocks is peaceful and still as the June sky itself. A blackbird sings, and suddenly the world becomes pure birdsong in which ‘all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’ play their part. All this lasts a moment, or as Edward Thomas puts it, ‘for that minute’.
      ‘Adlestrop’ celebrates the name of that quiet station; it is this name, rhythmically local and homely when one says it over and over to oneself, that Thomas remembers and which leads him on to other striking names: Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire. ‘Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge’ wrote Patrick Kavanagh in his poem ‘Hospital’. Twice, Edward Thomas says he remembers ‘the name’. And for a brief ‘minute’ of peace, wonder and birdsong, that name, Adlestrop, becomes the source and scene of an articulate act of rapt personal attention to nature’s music.

Neil Astley
    11    Preface: The Making of the Heavy Bear
Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966)
    19    Introduction: The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
    25    ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547)
    27     'Wyatt resteth here'
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)
    30     ‘Thou blind man’s mark’
Edmund Spenser (1552–1599)
    32     ‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’
Chidiock Tichborne (1558–1586)
    34     Elegy for Himself
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)
    36     Elegia VI
Sir Walter Ralegh (1552–1618)
    40     The Lie
Robert Southwell (?1561–1595)
    44     The Burning Babe
Michael Drayton (1563–1631)
    46     Since There’s No Help
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
    48     Sonnet 73: ‘That time of year…’
Thomas Nashe (1567–1601)
    50     ‘Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss’
Thomas Campion (1567–1620)
    53     What if a Day
John Donne (1572–1631)
    55     The Flea
Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
    58     On My First Son
Robert Herrick (1591–1674)
    60     Gather Ye Rosebuds
Henry King (1592–1669)
    62     Exequy upon His Wife
George Herbert (1593–1633)
    67     Love III
Edmund Waller (1606–1687)
    69     Go, Lovely Rose
Richard Crashaw (1612/3–1649)
    71     The Flaming Heart
Richard Lovelace (1618–1658)
    74     To Althea from Prison
Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672)
    76     A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment
Henry Vaughan (1621–1695)
    79     They Are All Gone into the World of Light!
Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
    82     To His Coy Mistress
John Milton (1608–1674)
    86     from Paradise Lost
Thomas Traherne (1637–1674)
    89     Dreams
John Dryden (1631–1700)
    93     from Absalom and Achitophel
John Oldham (1653–1683)
    95     from The Third Satire of Juvenal, imitated
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
    101     A Description of a City Shower
Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
    104     Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
    107     from London: A Poem
Thomas Gray (1716–1771)
    114     An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard
Christopher Smart (1722–1771)
    120     from Jubilate Agno
Oliver Goldsmith (c.1730–1774)
    125     from The Deserted Village
William Cowper (1731–1800)
    129     The Poplar-Field
William Blake (1757–1827)
    131     The Tyger
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
    134     Kubla Khan
William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
    138     Upon Westminster Bridge
Lord Byron (1788–1824)
    140     Darkness
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
    146     Ode to the West Wind
John Keats (1795–1821)
    152     Ode to a Nightingale
Thomas Hood (1799–1845)
    158     I Remember, I Remember
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)
    160     Tithonus
John Clare (1793–1864)
    163     I Am
Robert Browning (1812–1889)
    165     My Last Duchess
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
    169     How do I love thee?
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855)
    171     Stanzas (attr.)
Emily Brontë (1818–1848)
    173     Remembrance
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
    176     Dover Beach
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)
    180     Remember
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1892)
    182     Sudden Light
Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
    184     Native Moments
Emily Dickinson (1822–1888)
    186     Because I could not Stop for Death
Alice Meynell (1847–1922)
    188     Renouncement
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1899)
    190     The Windhover
George Meredith (1828–1909)
    200     Lucifer in Starlight
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)
    202     Luke Havergal
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
    205     from The Ballad of Reading Gaol
A.E. Housman (1859–1936)
    215     Good creatures do you love your lives
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
    217     The Voice
Charlotte Mew (1869–1928)
    219     Madeleine in Church
Walter de la Mare (1873–1956)
    227     The Listeners
Robert Frost (1874–1963)
    229     The Road Not Taken
Edward Thomas (1878–1918)
    232     Adlestrop
Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918)
    234     Break of Day in the Trenches
Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967)
    236     Base Details
Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
    238     Strange Meeting
W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)
    241     The Second Coming]
    242     Leda and the Swan
Hart Crane (1899–1932)
    247     My Grandmother’s Love Letters
D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930)
    249     Snake
Edna St Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
    253     Sonnet: What my lips have kissed
Langston Hughes (1902–1967)
    255     The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Marianne Moore (1887–1972)
    257     A Grave
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
    259     The Snowman
Elinor Wylie (1885–1928)
    261     Full Moon
E.E. Cummings (1894–1962)
    262     ‘next to of course god america i’
Archibald MacLeish  (1892–1982)
    264     Ars Poetica
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)
    267     The Journey of the Magi
Patrick Kavanagh (1905–1967)
    270     Shancoduff
    270     Epic
    276     Brendan Kennelly: ‘A Man I Knew’
Ruth Pitter (1897–1992)
    277     The Coffin Worm
Elizabeth Daryush (1887–1977)
    279     ‘Anger lay by me all night long’
Sheila Wingfield (1906–1992)
    281     from Beat Drum, Beat Heart
W.H. Auden (1907–1973)
    286     In Memory of W.B. Yeats
Keith Douglas (1920–1944)
    289     How to Kill
Louis MacNeice (1907–1963)
    291     Prayer Before Birth
Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
    295     Do Not Go Gentle into That Goodnight
Stevie Smith (1902–1971)
    297     The River God
Ted Hughes (1930–1998)
    299     The Thought-Fox
    300     from The Burnt Fox
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
    302     Morning Song
Denise Levertov (1923–1997)
    304     Living
Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016)
    305     September Song
Austin Clarke (1894–1974)
    307     The Redemptorist
W.S. Graham (1918–1986)
    310     The Beast in the Space
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012)
    312     Diving into the Wreck
Michael Longley (born 1939)
    316     Wounds
Derek Mahon (1941–2020)
    319     A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford
Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
    324     One Art
Derek Walcott (1930–2017)
    326     Love after Love
Philip Larkin (1922–1985)
    327     Aubade
Anne Stevenson  (1933–2020)
    330     Poem for a Daughter
Ken Smith (1938–2003)
    332     Being the third song of Urias
Seamus Heaney (1939–2013)
    334     from Sweeney Astray
Eavan Boland (1944–2020)
    340     The Journey

    348    References
    352    Acknowledgements