“Like the Touch of Rain” by Edward Thomas

17 Monday Jun 2013

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Edward Thomas, Like the Touch of Rain, Poem, poetry

Like the touch of rain she was
On a man’s flesh and hair and eyes
When the joy of walking thus
Has taken him by surprise:

With the love of the storm he burns,
He sings, he laughs, well I know how,
But forgets when he returns
As I shall not forget her ‘Go now’.

Those two words shut a door
Between me and the blessed rain
That was never shut before
And will not open again.

__________

“Like the Touch of Rain” by Edward Thomas, which you can find in his irreplaceable collection Selected Poems and Prose.

“Gone, Gone Again” by Edward Thomas

15 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

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Edward Thomas, Gone Gone Again, Poem, poetry, Writing

Gone, gone again,
May, June, July,
And August gone,
Again gone by,

Not memorable
Save that I saw them go,
As past the empty quays
The rivers flow.

And now again,
In the harvest rain,
The Blenheim oranges
Fall grubby from the trees,

As when I was young—
And when the lost one was here—
And when the war began
To turn young men to dung.

Look at the old house,
Outmoded, dignified,
Dark and untenanted,
With grass growing instead

Of the footsteps of life,
The friendliness, the strife;
In its beds have lain
Youth, love, age, and pain:

I am something like that;
Only I am not dead,
Still breathing and interested
In the house that is not dark:—

I am something like that:
Not one pane to reflect the sun,
For the schoolboys to throw at—
They have broken every one.

__________

“Gone, Gone Again” by Edward Thomas. Find it along with Thomas’s best in his Selected Poems and Prose.

The photograph: somewhere outside Grindelwald, Switzerland.

“Early One Morning” by Edward Thomas

01 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 3 Comments

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Early One Morning, Edward Thomas, Kingsley Amis, Poem, poetry

Early one morning in May I set out,
And nobody I knew was about.
I’m bound away for ever,
Away somewhere, away for ever.

There was no wind to trouble the weathercocks.
I had burnt my letters and darned my socks.

No one knew I was going away,
I thought myself I should come back some day.

I heard the brook through the town gardens run.
O sweet was the mud turned to dust by the sun.

A gate banged in a fence and banged in my head.
‘A fine morning, sir’, a shepherd said.

I could not return from my liberty,
To my youth and my love and my misery.

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet,
The only sweet thing that is not also fleet.
I’m bound away for ever,
Away somehwere, away for ever.

__________

“Early One Morning” by Edward Thomas, which can be found in his Annotated Collected Poems.

“How a poet convinces you he will not tell you anything he does not think or feel, since you have only his word for it, is hard to discover, but Edward Thomas is one of those who do it.”

Kingsley Amis, An Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse