He was killed by a shell blast in France in Back Why register? We're not interested in your data You can use most of our website without any need to register.
Log in Register. Contact Twitter. Advanced search X. Register For Poetry By Heart news, resources and competitions. For Poem of the Week email. Login Username Password Forgotten your password? Show all poems. Learn more about this image. Adlestrop Edward Thomas. 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.
Learn more about the language of this poem in the Oxford English Dictionary :. But in this case both of them record the train on weekdays in June as leaving Paddington at , getting to Oxford at , leaving Oxford at and then getting to Adlestrop at So, allow a degree of poetic licence because he was capturing something which he thought represented something after the event.
So he wrote the poem in and he was perhaps reinterpreting what happened beforehand as being more significant then it may have been at the time. But anyway…be that as it may, it looks at though the train was due to stop. Although he was not a military man by inclination, Thomas did enlist at the start of war, as I mentioned earlier on.
And by he was a commissioned second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery, having served as a corporal in the Artist Rifles. In time he became fairly enthusiastic about army life and the British war effort, unlike a lot of the other war poets of the First World War who tended to view things the other way. They started off quite enthusiastic and then became disillusioned. With Thomas, it appears to be largely the other way round.
His serving record is kept in The National Archives. He is described as an author by trade, and details for his two children are provided, Bronwyn and Myfanwy, who are both described as being not baptised, whatever that signifies. His death on 9 April is recorded as a copy of a telegram sent to Mrs Thomas of Steep, Petersfield:.
The inventory of his possessions suit the passions of a literary man: one watch of celluloid case, one compass in leather case with sling, one diary containing a 50 centime note, one advanced book, one packet of correspondence, one purse containing four small keys, one cheque book, one book of common prayer, one work of Shakespeare, one sonnet of William Shakespeare, one Mountain Interval, which was a collection of poems by Robert Frost — who was friends with Edward Thomas, and with whom he had been discussing the morality of the war, during and after enlistment, I gather — and also at the end, one Annual of New Poetry.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, with a degree of licence as well I think, describes him as one of the war poets. The accounts of his death vary. However, it seems that he survived the battle itself, but died as a consequence of the concussive blast wave of one of the last enemy shells of the battle.
He died as he stood up to light his pipe. The telegraph boy waited to see if Mrs Thomas wanted to make a response. And we have known those days, when we Would wait to hear the cuckoo first; When you and I, with thoughtful mind, Would help a bird to hide her nest, For fear of others less kind.
But thou, my friend, art lying dead: War with all its hell-born childishness, Has claimed thy life, and many more: The man that loved this England well, And never left it once before. So was there indeed, as the poem seems to suggest, a golden period before the outbreak of the First World War?
After , blackbirds continued to sing, country ramblers continued to enjoy willows and willowherb and grass and meadowsweet and hay crops dry. Throat clearing did not stop, but Thomas asks us to consider the particular poignancy of these images in the summer before the outbreak of war.
A fragile thing, an epoch, was coming to an end. The world he was evoking was not really the raucous world of the Edwardian musical, but more a gentle and considered take on things.
This poem I believe, rather suggests that blackbirds would never sing in quite the same way ever again. But even allowing for poetic imagery, does the pre world really deserve to be treated in this way, if one can use such terminology? With or without the benefit of hindsight, was there really a long Edwardian summer?
What was life like on the ground for the average citizen who was not a poet? In , the population of Britain including Ireland stood at some 45 million people, and on the outbreak of war in , it was estimated to stand at some 46 million people. Living conditions in Britain could be fairly good for people in certain parts of the country if they were in employment and if they perhaps lived in one of the new suburbs such as Hampstead Garden Suburb.
With money, the better-off could travel more, join tennis clubs and operatic societies, and some of them had the time, leisure and facilities to take up causes. The golden image conjured up of the pre world has some validity, even if this image was created with hindsight. Along with the growth of suburbia and longer life expectancies and other indicators of improved living standards, one should consider the reaching tentacles of the British Empire.
The years to , especially after the conclusion of the Boer War, marked the high watermark of Pax Britannica, although cracks were beginning to appear.
In later years, the summer of came to be remembered as a particularly golden summer, and not just because the weather was very hot. Juliet Nicolson in The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in , speaks of the season from May to September as one of the huge sunlit meadows of English history. But most people did not set their diaries by the requirements of the season, and even the introduction of old age pensions in did not remove the fact that for many life was harsh, with many of the poor and unemployed living in neglected, disease-ridden slums with the threat of the workhouse hanging over them.
The Reverend Hewlett Johnson, later to become famous, or infamous, as the Red Dean of Canterbury, an apologist for Stalin, had a cure at Altrincham, then a fairly prosperous suburb of Manchester. But even Altrincham, Johnson noted, and this was in I have a quote here:. I should particularly like to emphasise the indecency of Chapel Street in the matter of closets, and the Albert Street schools, the nuisance from the manure heap and the swarm of flies which this brings into the school.
The manure heap is only some 15 feet or 18 feet from the cloakroom. The smell is very bad. In , hard-pressed tenants in Leeds organised a rent strike. There was a further strike of dock workers in London , following on from the strike of The strikes started in May and were centred around the issues of pay conditions and the victimisation of trade unionists.
There was in the years before an expanding trade union movement and more MPs were taking up seats as in parliament on behalf of the Labour Party led by Mr Kier Hardy. The Labour Party was a constitutional party advocating change by a democratic means and more Labour MPs were being elected to parliament. But there was a threat, or a perceived threat, posed by foreign born anarchists who sometimes mixed political rhetoric with straightforward criminality.
This incident served to heighten fears about the numbers of immigrants coming to Britain chiefly from Eastern Europe. In of course the war started. But before , war was widely predicted. But the prediction was for civil war in Britain over the Irish question or rather civil war in Ireland spreading to mainland Britain.
The Home Rule Bill passed in anticipated a Home Rule parliament or a self-governing parliament for the whole of Ireland. Since the s, unionists and Protestant interests in Ireland, but chiefly centred on North East of Ireland, had vowed to oppose any form of Home Rule for any part of Ireland. The Ulster Covenant signed in by Carson and by thousands of others vowed to oppose Home Rule in its entirety and this it may be argued exacerbated tensions in the rest of Ireland, where some Home Rulers now started to advocate for independence, an Irish Republic.
Guns were smuggled in to Ulster so that loyalists could be armed and ready if the Home Rule Bill ever got off the statue books, and guns were smuggled into the rest of Ireland to meet this threat and increasingly a militantly republican agenda. The Curragh Incident in , when British officers stationed at the Curragh Camp in Ireland threatened to resign their commissions if they were ordered to implement Home Rule in the north of Ireland, highlighted the problems the whole of the United Kingdom would face if things got out of hand in Ireland.
Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem called Ulster in which became a rallying call for the Irish Unionist although it was also widely derided as doggerel. Believe, we dare not boast, Believe, we do not fear — We stand to pay the cost In all that men hold dear. What answer from the North? One Law, one Land, one Throne. If England drive us forth We shall not fall alone!
The other big issue of the pre-war period of course was the suffragette movement, or the campaign to obtain votes for women, which was perhaps, not at its peak in The change in creative direction is often attributed to the influence of Robert Frost. The text of the poem is used on the album Adlestrop by Gilroy Mere, and its mood informs the album - the sounds of trains, birds, and evoking the English summer - which is themed around rural train stations that were closed in the s. Edward Thomas en.
Adlestrop en. Adlestrop poem en.
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