Theme
This month we’re taking a break and thinking about rest and contemplation. Much of the time, our working world can be frenetic, fast-paced, and high-pressured, and it’s important to be able to switch off and take stock. This can take all sorts of forms: go for a walk, or a swim, or simply sit and think—preferably leaving your phone behind. Many organisations offer employees meditation and mindfulness classes to help emphasise this need for relaxation and downtime. Personally, when I want to exercise my powers of contemplation, I read a poem.
Adlestrop
Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Who?
And this month’s poem is one of my favourites. It was written by Edward Thomas (1878 – 9 April 1917) in 1914, at the beginning of his sadly short poetic career. As you can probably tell from those dates, Edward Thomas fought in the First World War, where he died. For this reason he’s often considered a ‘war poet’, and indeed he did write about his experiences in the trenches. But he’s a very different kind of war poet to, say, Wilfred Owen or even Roy Fuller: Thomas wrote a great many – very beautiful – nature poems, closely observing the wildlife around him, like owls and peewits. He was an expert in finding a moment in all the noise and simply being within it, a restful and contemplative poet of great subtlety.
What?
‘Adelstrop’ takes its time. Take note of how it begins, witha simply, one-word affirmation: ‘Yes’. The first stanza is then punctuated verycarefully to allow the reader time to breathe, and thereby mimics the act of atrain coming to rest in a deserted station, and allowing one’s mind to wander. T. S. Eliot famously said that ‘verse, whatever else it may or may not be, is itself a system of punctuation; the usual marks of punctuation themselves are differently employed’. Thomas’s particular system employed here allows the punctuation to represent the stops and steps of his train journey—even the dash after the first ‘Adlestrop’ might remind us of an old-fashioned train-signal.
This is known as mimesis, a fancy word taken from Classical Greek for when your form reflects the thing you’re talking about. We can see how this works, again, by the way Thomas builds a slow and ponderous atmosphere, mimicking the sluggish heat of late June and the way a memory unfolds, and building musical lists out of the things he observes: ‘And willows, willow-herb, and grass | And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry’. Remember, all of this takes place for just ‘that minute a blackbird sang’, but Thomas is able to elongate this moment, to elasticate it, make the most of it, and punctuate it: it is a lesson in slowing down, contemplating closely, and finding the purpose in rest.
The Broader Context
Edward Thomas found places of rest all around him, in flora and fauna of the countryside, but also with his friends. He was a great letter writer, and formed an important epistolary bond with Robert Frost, tragically cut short by the war. But this remains an important point: our moments of rest and contemplation needn’t be strictly solitary, and they can sometimes be most valuable when shared, between friends, or family, or colleagues. Such moments of collective reflection can build long-lasting connections and take us, in Thomas’s words, ‘Farther and farther’: in harmony with a sometimes-chaotic world.
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