Edward Thomas

• Now I know that Spring will come again

As if the mighty sun wept tears of joy

• They had but one hour to sing. On boughs they sang,

For singing merely. So they could keep off silence and night

• Stained with all that hour's song, a silence

• Even to one that knows it well, the names

Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:

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• I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray

And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing,

• Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;

• It seems I have no tears left. They should have fallen -

• When twenty hounds streamed by me, not yet combed out

• Soldiers in line, young English countrymen,

Fair-haired and ruddy, in white tunics. Drums

• And silence, told me truths I had not dreamed,

And have forgotten since their beauty passed.

• In the grass; chip of flint, and mite

Of chalk; and the small bird's dung;

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• All the white things a man mistakes

For earliest violets

• The rain and wind, the rain and wind, raved endlessly.

On me the Summer storm, and fever, and melancholy

• What I desired I knew not, but whate'er my choice

Vain it must be, I knew. Yet naught did my despair

• The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;

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• The heat, the stir, the sublime vacancy

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• That we know nought of the hazel copse?

• Or must I be content with discontent

As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings?

• A crack in a wall

 Or a drain,

• Choose me,

You English words?

• You are light as dreams,

Tough as oak,

Precious as gold,

• Worn new

Again and again:

• All day and night, save winter, every weather,

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• Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.

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• The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing

• Aspens may shake their leaves and men may hear

But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

• This is no case of petty right or wrong

That politicians or philosophers

Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot

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• Beside my hate for one fat patriot (So rampant in his cheery patriotism)

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• The phoenix broods serene above their ken.

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• And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.

• Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me,

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• Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:

• No one so much as you

Loves this my clay:

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• You know me through and through

Though I have not told,

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• A pine in solitude

Cradling a dove.

• The sun used to shine while we two walked

Slowly together, paused and started

Again, and sometimes mused, sometimes talked

• Each night. We never disagreed

Which gate to rest on. The to be

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• The fallen apples, all the talks

And silences - like memory's sand

• The lovers disappeared into the wood.

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• Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square

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• 'Have you been out?' 'No.' 'And don't want to perhaps?'

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• A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,

I should want nothing more...Have many gone

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• The lovers came out of the wood again:

• Gone, gone again

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• In the harvest rain,

The Bleinham oranges

Fall grubby from the trees,

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• Look at the old house,

...With grass growing instead

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• Not one pane to reflect the sun,

For the schoolboys to throw at -

They have broken every one.

• Forest where all must lose

Their way, however straight,

Or winding, soon or late;

They cannot choose.

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• Up to the forest brink,

Deceived the travellers

Suddenly now blurs,

And in they sink.

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• Here love ends,

Despair, ambition ends,

All pleasure and all trouble,