Poems by Edward Thomas — Poems by Edward Thomas Section 8
THE GLORY
THE glory of the beauty of the morning,-- The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;
The blackbird that has found it, and the dove That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;
White clouds ranged even and fair as new-mown hay;
The heat, the stir, the sublime vacancy Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart:-- The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning All I can ever do, all I can be, Beside the lovely of motion, shape, and hue, The happiness I fancy fit to dwell In beauty's presence.
Shall I now this day Begin to seek as far as heaven, as hell, Wisdom or strength to match this beauty, start And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops, In hope to find whatever it is I seek, Hearkening to short-lived happy-seeming things That we know naught of, in the hazel copse?
Or must I be content with discontent As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings?
And shall I ask at the day's end once more What beauty is, and what I can have meant By happiness?
And shall I let all go, Glad, weary, or both?
Or shall I perhaps know That I was happy oft and oft before, Awhile forgetting how I am fast pent, How dreary-swift, with naught to travel to, Is Time?
I cannot bite the day to the core.
MELANCHOLY
THE rain and wind, the rain and wind, raved endlessly.
On me the Summer storm, and fever, and melancholy Wrought magic, so that if I feared the solitude Far more I feared all company: too sharp, too rude, Had been the wisest or the dearest human voice.
What I desired I knew not, but whate'er my choice Vain it must be, I knew.
Yet naught did my despair But sweeten the strange sweetness, while through the wild air All day long I heard a distant cuckoo calling And, soft as dulcimers, sounds of near water falling, And, softer, and remote as if in history, Rumours of what had touched my friends, my foes, or me.
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.
THE GREEN ROADS
THE green roads that end in the forest Are strewn with white goose feathers this June, Like marks left behind by some one gone to the forest To show his track.
But he has never come back.
Down each green road a cottage looks at the forest.
Round one the nettle towers; two are bathed in flowers.
An old man along the green road to the forest Strays from one, from another a child alone.
In the thicket bordering the forest, All day long a thrush twiddles his song.
It is old, but the trees are young in the forest, All but one like a castle keep, in the middle deep.
That oak saw the ages pass in the forest: They were a host, but their memories are lost, For the tree is dead: all things forget the forest Excepting perhaps me, when now I see The old man, the child, the goose feathers at the edge of the forest, And hear all day long the thrush repeat his song.
THE MILL-POND
THE sun blazed while the thunder yet Added a boom: A wagtail flickered bright over The mill-pond's gloom: Less than the cooing in the alder Isles of the pool Sounded the thunder through that plunge Of waters cool.
Scared starlings on the aspen tip Past the black mill Outchattered the stream and the next roar Far on the hill.
As my feet dangling teased the foam That slid below A girl came out.
"Take care!"
she said-- Ages ago.
She startled me, standing quite close Dressed all in white: Ages ago I was angry till She passed from sight.
Then the storm burst, and as I crouched To shelter, how Beautiful and kind, too, she seemed, As she does now!
IT WAS UPON
IT was upon a July evening.
At a stile I stood, looking along a path Over the country by a second Spring Drenched perfect green again.
"The lattermath Will be a fine one."
So the stranger said, A wandering man.
Albeit I stood at rest, Flushed with desire I was.
The earth outspread, Like meadows of the future, I possessed.
And as an unaccomplished prophecy The stranger's words, after the interval Of a score years, when those fields are by me Never to be recrossed, now I recall, This July eve, and question, wondering, What of the lattermath to this hoar Spring?
