Occasionally, our poetry editor, Ralph Dartford takes a personal look at a specific poem he loves and investigates his own relationship with the poem and the author’s motivations to write it. Does the poem reflect the poet’s real life, or is he or she writing outside their own experience? For this edition, Ralph looks at Edward Thomas’s astonishing poem, Adlestrop.
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Trains and I have an intimate and powerful relationship with each other. It’s a one-sided affair and I’ve been a slave to the rail tracks for almost all my life. The reason for this servitude is that I suffer from dyspraxia, and this means I cannot drive a car, or even ride a bicycle. It would be catastrophic for me and others if I was to be put behind the wheel or saddled up for a holiday meander through sleepy English villages on a Saturday afternoon. This condition forces me to use public transport on virtually every journey I undertake. I’ve never questioned it really, it’s just the way it is. I’m good at it too: I’m patient with timetables and delays, the architecture of stations (Darlington is my favourite), platform cafes and bars (give Barcelona, Prague or Sheffield a try). I’m not obsessed by trains; they have just become a constant in the journey of my life. Trains mixed with poetry and music though, well, that’s a different kind of travelogue altogether. I could go on until the end of the line about the train poems and songs that I love, but that would take us down endless obscure sidings and ghost stations: the wistfulness of John Betjeman and the spiritual crusading of Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions always resonating within me. Perhaps I should write a book about that sometime. A soon arriving retirement project, even. But for now, let’s look at my favourite ‘Train poem’ (if push becomes shunt). The poem I’ve chosen is Adlestrop by the great Edward Thomas
Edward Thomas was born in 1878 and died at the ‘Battle of Arras’ in 1917. He was a prolific critic and essayist but did not write poetry seriously until befriending and being strongly encouraged to explore poetics by American writer Robert Frost whilst he was in England. He wrote poetry for just three years (1914 -17) and only six poems (the pamphlet, ‘6 Poems’) were officially published before his death. His full collection, ‘Poems’ was being prepared at the printers whist he was on the battlefield.
A good amount of Thomas’s poetry style can be perceived as gentle as first reading, a reaction to the natural world pitted against modernity, but further investigation reveals a sensuality and a desire for longing that is intense and almost touchable. Most great poetry has a camera surveying a scene and then framing the action within. In Adlestrop, the poet gives us moments of deep exterior connection from an interior modern position. A train stopping at a station with a name.
The poem is simple in technique. Four quatrains deploying a standard ‘ABCB’ rhyming pattern. Thomas is loose within the poem with his use of Iambic and lets the sounds of the words create its rhythm instead. And what sounds they make! Try reading it aloud. Nothing much happens within the poem in terms of a narrative, but everything happens. A train stops at an empty English station on a hot June summer’s day. The steam hisses and a blackbird sing’s a prelude, and then is joined by all the birds in the surrounding counties of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. The cumulative effect of sounds, light, heat, nature, industry and stillness render the poem almost overwhelming. The word, Adlestrop (stated twice as if a stamp on an envelope) becomes enchanting, like Brigadoon. The poem is an act of natural beauty in the moments of peace before an oncoming catastrophic war. A war that is still difficult to put a meaning to.
Sometimes I like to read poems in pairs by different writers to discover how they are talking to each other. Read Larkin’s (a great admirer of Thomas and author of another seminal train poem, The Whitsun Weddings), MCMXIV alongside Adlestrop and the overall effect is shattering. Here is Larkin.
Edward Thomas became well known after his death. Who knows what he would have achieved if he had returned from the trenches, both personally and poetically? Its riddlesome to contemplate. However, we do have this quiet poem to cherish and to hold on to in the moments that creep up on us when we are unaware. Especially whilst sitting on a slow train to nowhere in particular
Further reading:
Edward Thomas: Collected Poems (Faber & Faber)
Edward Thomas: from Adlestrop to Arras: A Biography by Dr Jean Moorcroft (Bloomsbury Continuum)
Philip Larkin: The Whitsun Weddings (Faber & Faber)
Further Listening:
Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio – Trains and More Trains
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