The world is not just a set of separately existing localized objects, externally related only by space and time…Something deeper, and more mysterious, knits together the fabric of the world.
—Tim Maudlin, professor of philosophy and physics at NYU.
The poetry of Edward Thomas (1878-1917) teaches us how to look into a moment and see the world. William Blake, who saw eternity in a flower, would get Thomas’ poetry, though his own work is so vastly different it may as well have been written on another planet. The vision’s the thing, the integrating capacity of a refined imagination. Thomas’ vision shows us how as embodied souls we avoid the landscape around us at our own peril. We weren’t meant to drift like untethered balloons on any whim of wind, but then neither were we to live like moles burrowed safely into our own illusions, hiding from the light of the sun.
Of all the things Thomas cared about, shallow comforts had to be the least of them. His comforts came at the end of long, long walks in the downs and meadows of England, where every path and flower and tree whispered to him of journeys and gifts only won by a heart ready to venture everything for that one thing just out of reach.
Thomas is a fascinating character who struggled in his life. His battles were many: depression, a periodic but life-long affliction, his sense of obligation to serve in the coming war, and his tireless efforts to provide for his family. His ambitions as a writer are invariably instructive. Thomas hungered to make his writing count, to write seriously about his world and what was going on in his own heart. His life gives witness to the values of friendship, of getting out into the natural world, of the challenges and joys of seeking to master a craft.
Admittedly, Thomas didn’t always react to his difficulties in exemplary ways. But as a poet—a vocation he discovered late in his life—he shows us how to see an ordinary scene in its unique particulars in a manner that somehow answers our innate desire to try to see the world whole. While it’s true his agnosticism robbed him of recognizing a higher significance in nature, I find him a sympathetic writer due to his passion for what is. This passion or talent is no doubt related to Thomas’ ability to see with a naturalist’s eye, observing everything with a rare intensity.
But who was Edward Thomas?

Thomas was an author of biographies, novels, reviews, and travel books on nature and places, particularly where he lived, in Southwest England. His reputation as a poet is due to a single volume of verse which he didn’t start writing until he was thirty-six, two years before his death. Though Thomas was born in London, all of his grandparents were Welsh, and like his father, Thomas kept up with his Welsh background, visiting relatives and friends in Swansea and other towns. Thomas attended Lincoln College, Oxford from 1898 to 1900, and while still an undergraduate, married Helen Berenice Noble. He would finish his degree with a Second Class in History.

After marrying Helen, he dedicated himself to making his living by writing. He and Helen would have three children. Their marriage was marked by Thomas’ bouts with depression. He would sometimes leave his family for weeks and months at a time, either on foot or by bicycle. This behavior was often inexcusable, though we must remember the primitive state of psychiatry in these years offered little in regards to helpful treatment. Through all this, Helen Thomas showed a heroic patience dealing with her husband’s often difficult personality. Incredibly, she outlived him by fifty years, never remarried, and was totally devoted to his memory despite the internal storms that drove him away. Thomas always did come back—until he couldn’t, through no fault of his own. But that comes later.
Thomas had that turbulent, creative temperament that frequently characterizes poets. But for most of his life, Thomas didn’t see himself as a poet at all, though he reviewed many books of poetry in the Daily Chronicle in London. Then, in 1913, in perhaps the most consequential moment of his life, he met Robert Frost.
In many ways, Thomas’ life before Frost had been a perfect preparation for their meeting. After all, Thomas, since his earliest years, had taken a delight in walking, botany, and birding (Frost’s favorite pastimes), especially when visiting relatives in Wales. In Wiltshire, as a child, he got to know a local named David “Dad” Uzzel who not only followed his own schedule exploring the area streams and woods at all hours of the day, but taught Thomas much about natural beauty and how to observe it with a careful eye. This kind of non-conformity left a strong mark on Thomas. His poetry would often have such a figure in it, accountable, it seems, to nature alone.
But such free-spirited living wasn’t easily come by. Years later, Thomas would consider himself a “hack writer”—and so he was, in a certain sense. He lived from book to book, and the income wasn’t very good or very dependable. But he learned to write what he so carefully observed and reflected upon. In the ten years before he met Frost, Thomas wrote thirty books, totaling a million words, and published around 1900 reviews. While such output surely brought its own lessons in the art of writing, it also brought intense personal frustration. But Thomas didn’t quite know what to do about it.
As Frost wisely saw, Thomas’ often excellent prose descriptions were only missing meter and rhyme not to be called poetry. Take this passage from his 1909 The South Country, in which Thomas gives us a lyrical account of birdsong which he loved with almost a mystical ardor:
I know that there are bland melodious blackbirds of easy musing voices, robins whose earnest song, though full of passion, is but a fragment that has burst through a more passionate silence, hedge-sparrows of liquid confiding monotone, brisk acid wrens, chaffinches and yellowhammers saying always the same thing (a dear but courtly praise of the coming season), larks building spires above spires into the sky, thrushes of infinite variety that talk and talk of a thousand things, never thinking, always talking of the moment, exclaiming, scolding, cheering, flattering, coaxing, challenging, with merry-hearted, bold voices that must have been the same in the morning of the world…
Notice how Thomas infuses his description with bold action verbs (“exclaiming, scolding, cheering, flattering, coaxing, challenging…”) so that we don’t just read a report of the birdsong, but in a sense experience it through his prose as it strains with an almost excess of vitality to give us a measure of the agelessness of those birds singing in trees under which Thomas walked.
Frost saw a talent for poetry in Thomas almost as soon as their friendship formed. Lucky for both men, then, that Frost and Thomas somewhat improbably became neighbors. If Frost in 1912 hadn’t sold the farm in New Hampshire given to him by his grandfather and used the money to sail with his wife and children to England, he and Thomas never would have met.
It was a brave venture on Frost’s part for getting poems into print, and it worked. Within a short time, he had a contract with a London publisher for his first volume of poems, A Boy’s Will. On January 8, 1913, he was one of hundreds of poets and critics and editors attending the opening of the Poetry Bookshop on Devonshire Street in London. Thomas was there but they didn’t meet. That would occur later, at St. George’s Restaurant in October of the same year. The friendship grew very quickly. Thomas wrote helpful reviews of A Boy’s Will, and Frost’s second book, in 1914, North of Boston. The relationship would intensify over long walks in the county, and reach it pinnacle in the month they lived near each other in Little Iddens, in the Dymock region of Gloucester.
Frost would encourage Thomas to leap into verse. Years later, in a letter to a friend, Frost put it this way: “It was plain he wanted to be a poet all the years he had been writing about poets not worth his little finger.” As Frost was gradually realizing it himself, both poets were striving for something new in English poetry: they were seeking a language that was as much like conversation as it was poetically beautiful and stirring. Frost and Thomas would walk the countryside for miles discussing their sense of a new kind of poetry they were trying to cultivate. As Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods (2005), put it, nature does not steal time, it amplifies it. That’s certainly what happened here, for both men. Frost called them his “Talk-Walks.”
We know a lot about the circumstances in which Thomas’ most famous poem was written. Adlestrop was a railway station named after a village in Gloucestershire. The station no longer exists, though nearby a sign from the time hangs in memorial to the poet and the poem. At the British National Archives, Bruno Derrick has unearthed the timetable for the Great Western Railways on June 24, 1914, the day we know from Thomas’ notebook that he was travelling from London to see Frost who was living in Ledbury. The “we” in the notebook entry could indicate he was accompanied by Helen, but we’ve no confirmation from other sources if she was there. That matters less than the concision of his notes incubating the poem in seed, so to speak, waiting to bloom under Thomas’ imaginative touch. Here’s what Thomas jotted down in his notebook:
Then we stopped at Adlestrop, thro the willows cd be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12.45 & one thrush & no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam. Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willow herb & meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel.
It’s not a rarity that a great poem can spring from the pages of a notebook or letter. John Keats, for one, has articulated an inspiration in a letter that found full-flower in a later poetic masterpiece. As to the details in the notes: Campden is a small town in the Cotswolds, meadowsweet a variety of roses. It’s fascinating that what Thomas seems to note most of all is the “extraordinary silence.” He was a contemplative soul.

Let’s take a brief look at the poem. Here it is:
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.
Four relatively unadorned stanzas of four lines each. Neat quatrains that square away the world as clearly as a trim window’s glass. The poem starts as an answer to an unspoken question, from within or without, we’re not certain, but the answer presents itself as a word unfurling all its immeasurable riches in one shake of its tail, so to speak. The poem’s suggestiveness comes from this simplicity. The speaker is open to the scene before him. There’s no grasping for the schedule, never mind an itch for a cell-phone. And it all comes forth from the name, Adlestrop.
One would be hard-pressed to find such a pure moment of receptivity in so short a poem as this. As many have noted, the poem no sooner starts than it stops—again and again. One word, “Yes”, then a full-stop. The interruptions continue, telling us that it was “early June” or that the “steam hissed” or someone “cleared his throat.” The syntax gives the reader a sense of steel and steam stopping abruptly, doors opening to nowhere. Until the poet turns his attention outward, and listens.
“Unless a man write with his whole nature concentrated upon his subject,” wrote Thomas in his biography of art historian Walter Pater, “he is unlikely to take hold of another.” In the silence of Adlestrop, amid the willows, and willow-herbs, and haystacks, and the ever-still clouds in the broad sky, Thomas heard the countryside come alive: “all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire” rose up in that moment in a wistful way that would remind countless readers of the deaths of their own sons and brothers and husbands on the muddy fields of France. From a place name flows without pause (only two periods in the last two stanzas) riches of earth and sky, engaging the eye and ear, and not least, the memory. Thomas’s imagination, his deep attentiveness, has caught a glimpse of the fabric of the world.

The great poets teach with their words the wordless riches of reality. Despite Thomas’ emotional wounds, he comes across over the pages of his poems and prose as a survivor, a triumphalist and servant of the real. But how do we get even half-way close to this responsiveness to life? By uncluttering, by simplifying, by opening ourselves to the nearly infinite richness outside the nearest window: surely this is a huge part of that journey. Getting out of the house of mirrors that is pixilated unreality is the mandatory first step, I’m quite sure Thomas would advise.
Thomas is among a small number of poets who refashioned English verse in the early twentieth-century. His work has been praised by W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin, among many others. His sharply observant persona, for all its immersion in woods and fields, is adrift in his verse in ways that epitomize the uprooted early decades of modernity.
The New Statesman published “Adlestrop” three weeks after Thomas’ death. It has been included in numerous poetry anthologies in England for perfectly capturing the calm before Europe was shattered by the storm of the Great War.
Robert Frost and his family left England for American in August 1914 as the war was about to start. He and Thomas had a few weeks together, roaming in the countryside on their walks. So close were the two poets that Thomas’ oldest son joined the Frosts on their voyage to America to start a life there, perhaps, so they hoped, with Thomas joining them later, at least for a visit. It was not to be, however, for the boy was sent back due to improper immigration papers. After Frost left, Thomas agonized about when and how to enlist for the war everyone knew was coming, though, at thirty-six, and married, he could have avoided service. Instead, he enlisted in the Artists Rifles, a regiment in the army reserve founded in the nineteenth century. Many of its officers were men of the professional and educated classes.
In November 1916, Thomas was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery. During the first day of the Battle of Arras, on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, he was killed at an Observation Post by a small-round German shell which hit him in the chest. His death was as a soldier-poet, though he didn’t live to hold his own book of poems (the last weeks of his life were spent, in between soldiering, writing letters to his wife, and getting his manuscript set for print). Sorrowful as his death was, I can’t help but dwell on his dying out on an “OP” as the troops called it. He never stopped observing until the very end. Edward Thomas’ grave lies in Agny, France, in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery.
