Today is Midsummer’s Day. To mark it is this idyllic little poem from the steam age, written in 1915 but not acknowledging the shadow of the First World War. Its author, Edward Thomas, encouraged by his New Englander friend Robert Frost, in three years between 1914 and 1917, accumulated a volume of work that put him at the forefront of contemporary war poets.
Though the war obtruded in his work, as a bleak background, the bulk of his poems are a celebration of the English countryside and its inhabitants, human and avian. Thomas tragically was killed by a shell in the first hour of the Arras Offensive in April 1917.
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.
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