After last week's, another July poem by Edward Thomas.
In this one, his relish in the natural world seems tempered by some sort of foreboding of mortality; he was killed at Arras in 1917.
IT WAS UPON A JULY EVENING
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?
lattermath=aftermath
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