Poetry
Collected Poems
Edward Thomas · 1920
Opening lines
RISE up, rise up,
And, as the trumpet blowing
Chases the dreams of men,
As the dawn glowing
The stars that left unlit
The land and water,
Text quoted from en.wikisource.org
Synopsis
More than one hundred and thirty poems, collected three years after their author's death. An express train stops for no reason, one afternoon in late June, at a small country station where no one gets on or off. A child, passing, pinches the tips of a southernwood planted in front of a door, and a man searches for what this bitter smell reminds him of. Rain falls at midnight on an isolated hut. At every turn of the plough, a ploughman talks about the war with a man sitting on a felled elm. A chilled walker hears an owl crying in the night.
Context
The American poet who had encouraged him advised him to recast pages of his prose in verse, in exactly the same cadence. The poems were written from December 1914 to Christmas 1916. In his lifetime, only six appeared in volume form, in 1916, under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway, and eighteen others in an anthology of 1917 that he did not live to see published. A first collection, in preparation at his death, came out in October 1917, a second in 1918; the combined edition of 1920, preceded by a foreword by Walter de la Mare, is not complete: one poem remained unpublished until 1949.
Who it is for
Short poems of the English countryside, which say nothing of the trenches; in French, a single selection of twenty-one poems, published in 2023.
Prizes and reception
Ted Hughes called him “the father of us all”; since 1985 his name has been among the sixteen poets of the Great War commemorated at Westminster Abbey.
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