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e reminds us that words are alive, and
not only alive but still half-wild and imperfectly domesticated.” Edward Thomas
(1878–1917) might have been speaking for himself and “those who love all life
so well that they do not kill even the slender words but let them play on.” As
it happens, he meant the peasant poet John Clare, a century earlier, who loved
“tracking wild searches through the meadow grass.” Like Clare, Thomas owned
close knowledge of animals and plants, of “what life is, how our own is related
to theirs,” our “responsibilities and debts among the other inhabitants of the
earth.”
“Birds’ Nests,” echoing Clare ’s poem of that name, spots summer nests
“torn” by wind and it ends on a meadow search:
And most I like the winter nest deep-hid
That leaves and berries fell into;
Once a dormouse dined there on hazel nuts;
And grass and goose-grass seeds found soil and grew.Seeming simple, like much in Edward Thomas, this opens to change and chance,
then promise of life.
“Tall Nettles” bears the darker touch that would mark his war poems.
Tall nettles cover up, as they have done
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
“Larks singing over No Man’s Land”
England Thanks to Edward Thomas, 1914–1917
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