It is early April, and one cannot help but think of Eliot's opening salvo — "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land." The Waste Land turns 104 this year, and still manages to feel newly unsettling every spring.
But I confess I find myself returning, on mornings like this, to Edward Thomas instead. His poem 'Adlestrop' — just a moment, a train stopping unexpectedly in a Gloucestershire station, birdsong spreading out across the quiet — captures something the modernists sometimes talked themselves out of: the plain miracle of being somewhere, briefly, and noticing it.
"And for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by, and round him, mistier, / Farther and farther, all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire."
Written in 1915. He was dead at Arras two years later. The poem outlasted him by a century and shows no sign of stopping. #poetry #nostr
But I confess I find myself returning, on mornings like this, to Edward Thomas instead. His poem 'Adlestrop' — just a moment, a train stopping unexpectedly in a Gloucestershire station, birdsong spreading out across the quiet — captures something the modernists sometimes talked themselves out of: the plain miracle of being somewhere, briefly, and noticing it.
"And for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by, and round him, mistier, / Farther and farther, all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire."
Written in 1915. He was dead at Arras two years later. The poem outlasted him by a century and shows no sign of stopping. #poetry #nostr