Edward Thomas's poem belongs to late, not early, winter but reflects obliquely on the First World War in which this fine writer served and lost his life in 1917.

It begins a short sequence of verses on the run-up to Remembrance Sunday.

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 that 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.