Poem of the Day: ‘Adlestrop’

It was William Wordsworth (1770-1850) who invented the phrase “spots of time.” In his long, boyhood-haunted poem, “The Prelude,” he wrote, There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence — depressed By false opinion and contentious thought, Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, In trivial occupations, and the round Of ordinary intercourse — our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired . . . In other words, some experience or vision, however fleetingly glimpsed, endures in memory as a redemptive and healing presence, to “renovate” and “repair” the mind caught in and damaged by some later darkness. So Wordsworth’s own remembered encounters with the sublime, in the wild country around the River Derwent, strike a continual light to illuminate the rest of his life.So, too, a country station glimpsed from a train, for the later English poet Edward Thomas (1878–1917). Thomas, killed at Arras, in France, on Easter Monday in the last full year of World War I, is notable as a war poet whose most famous poem isn’t about war at all. At least, it’s not directly about war. Slated to be published just before its author’s battlefield death, “Adlestrop” recalls a railway journey taken before the outbreak of the war. The poem, in four tetrameter quatrains, offers a healing backward glimpse, triggered by some mention of the name, of a place where nothing is happening.What we experience through it is not Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility,” but tranquility recollected, presumably, in the pulverizing emotional mill of the war. It’s a tranquility composed of inconsequential sounds and sights: someone clearing his throat, the high-clouded summer sky, the wind on the grasses. And birdsong, which seems to open out as the train pulls away again, into the sounds of all the birds at the heart of an England the poem’s speaker carries with him and will never see again. Adlestrop by Edward Thomas 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. ___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Adlestrop’

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