Adlestrop

[Clitheroekid]

Finally the summer has arrived in Lancashire, and it's been a beautiful day. On my travels this afternoon I noticed a steam train puffing its way along, and the combination of a steam train and a warm, sunny afternoon reminded me of one of my favourite poems, `Adlestrop', by Edward Thomas, written almost exactly 108 years ago, on 24 June 1914:

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.

He was 36 when he wrote it, and the following year he enlisted for war service, He served in France, where he was shot dead in 1917.

[staffordian]

One of my favourites too. One we studied at school more years ago than I care to remember.

It's amazing how just a few words can conjure up such an evocative image in the mind.

And the train you saw was probably The Pendle Dalesman...

https://youtu.be/cU1auArBzX4

(Not my video)

[GrahamPlatt]

Ah, Adlestrop. One of the Nation’s Favourite Poems, as collated in two books and tapes by the BBC. Which I once owned, but several moves and many years later, are now lost.

[Rhyd6]

One of my favourites too. I was introduced to this poem by a wonderful English teacher Mr Leadbeater, he opened a lot of minds to books and poems that we'd previously labelled "boring".
I remember giving a copy of this poem to my dad, explaining that we had to try and work out what it meant. He too had fought in the Great War, I still remember his reply - it was what so many of my friends and I believed in that we were prepared to die for it. It took me a very long time to understand what he meant.

R6

[redsturgeon]

Ah, Adlestrop. One of the Nation’s Favourite Poems, as collated in two books and tapes by the BBC. Which I once owned, but several moves and many years later, are now lost.

I too came across that poem first through the BBC's nation's favourite poems work, I found it poignant from first reading.

I feel the best poems take a specific observation that translates to a universal truth.

Another of my favourites by A E Houseman, I always think of this when looking at a cherry tree in bloom.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

[UncleEbenezer]

Another of my favourites by A E Houseman, I always think of this when looking at a cherry tree in bloom.

You prompted me to look on youtube, where I found a slightly disconcerting phenomenon. The rendition I liked best (amongst three I checked) was Anthony Rolfe Johnson. He's a tenor, and sings it in a higher key than is displayed on the youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MMy96vig9k