Produced by Lewis Jones
Edward Thomas (1918) Last Poems
By
LONDON:SELWYN & BLOUNT,12, YORK BUILDINGS, ADELPHI, W.C. 2.1918.
I never saw that Land before
The Dark Forest
Celandine
The Ash Grove
Old Man
The Thrush
I built myself a House of Glass
February Afternoon
Digging
Two Houses
The Mill-water
A Dream
Sedge-Warblers
Under the Woods
What will they do?
To-night
A Cat
The Unknown
Song
She dotes
For These
March the Third
The New House
March
The Cuckoo
Over the Hills
Home
The Hollow Wood
Wind and Mist
The Unknown Bird
The Lofty Sky
After Rain
Digging
But these things also
April
The Barn
The Barn and the Down
The Child on the Cliffs
Good-night
The Wasp Trap
July
A Tale
Parting
Lovers
That Girl's Clear Eyes
The Child in the Orchard
The Source
The Mountain Chapel
First known when lost
The Word
These things that Poets said
Home
Aspens
An Old Song
There was a Time
Ambition
No one cares less than I
Roads
This is no case of petty Right or Wrong
The Chalk-Pit
Health
Beauty
Snow
The New Year
The Brook
The Other
House and Man
The Gypsy
Man and Dog
A Private
Out in the Dark
I NEVER saw that land before,
And now can never see it again;
Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar
Endeared, by gladness and by pain,
Great was the affection that I bore
To the valley and the river small,
The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees,
The chickens from the farmsteads, all
Elm-hidden, and the tributaries
Descending at equal interval;
The blackthorns down along the brook
With wounds yellow as crocuses
Where yesterday the labourer's hook
Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze
That hinted all and nothing spoke.
I neither expected anything
Nor yet remembered: but some goal
I touched then; and if I could sing
What would not even whisper my soul
As I went on my journeying,
I should use, as the trees and birds did,
A language not to be betrayed;
And what was hid should still be hid
Excepting from those like me made
Who answer when such whispers bid.
DARK is the forest and deep, and overhead
Hang stars like seeds of light
In vain, though not since they were sown was bred
Anything more bright.
And evermore mighty multitudes ride
About, nor enter in;
Of the other multitudes that dwell inside
Never yet was one seen.
The forest foxglove is purple, the marguerite
Outside is gold and white,
Nor can those that pluck either blossom greet
The others, day or night.
THINKING of her had saddened me at first,
Until I saw the sun on the celandines lie
Redoubled, and