Edward Thomas, friend of Robert Frost and late-flowering but most sensitive and original of nature poets, faced the prospect of his own mortality in the First World War with stoicism. He was killed in the Arras offensive in 1917; a year of massive battles and loss of life.
IT WAS UPON
It was upon a July evening.
At a stile I stood, looking along a path
Over the country by a second Spring
Drenched perfect green again. ‘The lattermath
Will be a fine one.’ So the stranger said,
A wandering man. Albeit I stood at rest,
Flushed with desire I was. The earth outspread,
Like meadows of the future, I possessed.
~
And as an unaccomplished prophecy
The stranger’s words, after the interval
Of a score years, when those fields are by me
Never to be recrossed, now I recall,
This July eve , and question, wondering,
What of the lattermath to this hoar Spring?
NO ONE CARES LESS THAN I
‘No one cares less than I,
Nobody knows but God,
Whether I am destined to lie
Under a foreign clod,’
Were the words I made to the bugle call in the morning.
~
But laughing, storming, scorning,
Only the bugles know
What the bugles say in the morning,
And they do not care, when they blow
The call that I heard and made words to early this morning.
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