WRITING in 1916, as the First World War raged, Edward Thomas ponders the timeless world of nature and man's equally timeless propensity for waging war.

The bleakness of the theme is countered by the vivid rural imagery and deft rhymes.

FEBRUARY AFTERNOON

Men heard this roar of parleying starlings, saw,

A thousand years ago even as now,

Black rooks with white gulls following the plough

So that the first are last until a caw

Commands the last are first again, - a law

Which was of old when one, like me, dreamed how

A thousand years might dust lie on his brow

Yet thus would birds do between hedge and shaw.

Time swims before me, making as a day

A thousand years, while the broad ploughland oak

Roars mill-like and men strike and bear the stroke

Of war as ever, audacious or resigned,

And God still sits aloft in the array

That we have wrought him, stone-deaf and stone-blind.