By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Edward Thomas’s poem ‘Rain’ was written in 1916, while Thomas was fighting in the trenches. ‘Rain’ is about Thomas’s experience of sitting in a hut all night alone, listening to the rain falling and meditating on his death and on the fates of his fellow soldiers in the First World War.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Inspired by his impassioned friendship with Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas (1878-1917) wrote his poem ‘Go Now’ about a woman parting ways with the male speaker and the effect that her two simple words – ‘Go now’ – had on him and his appreciation of nature.
Go Now
Like the touch of rain she was
On a man’s flesh and hair and eyes
When the joy of walking thus
Has taken him by surprise:
With the love of the storm he burns,
He sings, he laughs, well I know how,
But forgets when he returns
As I shall not forget her ‘Go now’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Edward Thomas has been labelled a ‘Georgian poet’ and a ‘war poet’, and he was really a little of both of these, and yet not quite either of them. In a brief flurry of poetic creativity between late 1914 and his death in the Great War in 1917, Edward Thomas produced some of the finest poems of the early twentieth century. ‘Aspens’ is one of his best.
Aspens
All day and night, save winter, every weather,
Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,
The aspens at the cross-roads talk together
Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.
Out of the blacksmith’s cavern comes the ringing
Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn
The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing –
The sounds that for these fifty years have been.
The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,
And over lightless pane and footless road,
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Road Not Taken’ is one of Robert Frost’s most famous poems. It appeared in his first collection, Mountain Interval, in 1916; indeed, ‘The Road Not Taken’ opens the volume. For this reason, it’s natural and understandable that many readers take the poem to be Frost’s statement of individualism as a poet: he will take ‘the road less travelled’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The poetry of Edward Thomas (1878-1917) is marked by an unsentimental view of nature, and the short poem ‘A Cat’ is a fine example of his direct and matter-of-fact style that nevertheless summons an emotional response from the reader. What a close analysis of Thomas’s poetry often reveals is a razor-sharp eye for detail and an ability to make straightforward statements which nevertheless have the feel of great poetry, and ‘A Cat’ is no different in this regard from Thomas’s better-known poetry, such as ‘Adlestrop’ or ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’.
A Cat
She had a name among the children;
But no one loved though someone owned
Her, locked her out of doors at bedtime
And had her kittens duly drowned.
In Spring, nevertheless, this cat
Ate blackbirds, thrushes, nightingales,
And birds of bright voice and plume and flight,
As well as scraps from neighbours’ pails.