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.