From the Hulton Archive/Stringer, rights managed by Getty Images. Edward Thomas was a poet, critic, and biographer who is best known for his careful depictions of rural England and his prescient understanding of modernity’s tendency toward disconnection, alienation, and unsettledness. Although prominent critics and authors as Walter de la Mare, Aldous Huxley, Peter Sacks, Seamus Heaney, and Edna Longley called Edward Thomas one of England’s most important poets, Thomas wrote all of his poetry over a three year span, 1914–17, and was much more widely known as a critic and prose writer during his lifetime. Despite affinities with the Georgian movement of the early 20th century United Kingdom, Edward Thomas’s verse consistently defies classification. Like the work of his Georgian contemporaries, his poems display a profound love of natural beauty and, at times, an archaic use of diction. However, Thomas’s personalized voice and intensity of vision give his poetry an artistic force which the Georgians never approached. In particular, Thomas’s experiences of World War I, which echo and sometimes intrude on his poems, distinguish his work from his predecessors. : : Thomas wrote his first poems in 1914 at the urging of the American poet Robert Frost, with whom he forged a friendship during Frost’s years in England. Two years later his first book of verse, Six Poems, was published. : In 2012, Nick Dear wrote a play about the last seven years of Thomas’s life, The Dark Earth and the Light Sky, and Matthew Hollis covered similar material in his account of Thomas’s friendship with Frost, Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (2012). Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s full-scale biography of Thomas, Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras (2015) offered a frank assessment of Thomas’s life, including his struggles with depression, marital troubles, and his many attempts at suicide. : Reviewing the book for the Literary Review, Bevis noted that “even at his most tortured and torturing, he has a matter-of-fact resilience. … Poetry freed him from his motives. Or, rather, it freed him from his obsession with ‘thinking out my motives for this or that act or word in the past until I long for sleep’ by allowing him to observe and to create things he didn’t feel the need to account for.” : : Most critics would agree with Andrew Motion, who states that Thomas occupies “a crucial place in the development of twentieth-century poetry” for introducing a modern sensibility, later found in the work of such poets as W.H. Auden and Ted Hughes, to the poetic subjects of Victorian and Georgian poetry. ( From poetryfoundation.org ) Song thrush Turdus philomelos singing on the branch of fir tree.Singing Thrush Nightingale on the spring branch.
The Thrush : : By Edward Thomas( 1878 – 1917 ) When Winter’s ahead, What can you read in November That you read in April When Winter’s dead? I hear the thrush, and I see Him alone at the end of the lane Near the bare poplar’s tip, Singing continuously. Is it more that you know Than that, even as in April, So in November, Winter is gone that must go? Or is all your lore Not to call November November, And April April, And Winter Winter—no more? But I know the months all, And their sweet names, April, May and June and October, As you call and call I must remember What died into April And consider what will be born Of a fair November; And April I love for what It was born of, and November For what it will die in, What they are and what they are not, While you love what is kind, What you can sing in And love and forget in All that’s ahead and behind.
“The Thrush”, An 8 Stanzas in sweet melodious Nature Poem , By Edward Thomas ( 1878 – 1917 ) is About thinking 🤔 of the Songbird , “The Thrush”. It’s a conversation with the Poet Speaker himself with a view to finding the Thrush Song in man. The final conclusion in 8 Th Stanza which reads , ” While you love what is kind, What you can sing in And love and forget in All that’s ahead and behind.” : : : :
Notes for each of the Stanzas Pending visit this post again later on to enjoy the appreciation of the poem V Jayaraj Pune India October 31, 2023 : : : :
MADHU MALTI 