Today’s Poem: Adlestrop

Edward Thomas, spots of time, and tranquility recollected in emotion

Railway station at Adlestrop, on the Didcot-to-Oxford line, 1961 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Adlestrop 

by Edward Thomas 

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.

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As our readers may recall, we’ve long nursed a fascination with that famous phrase of William Wordsworth (1770-1850): “spots of time.” In his long, boyhood-haunted poem, The Prelude, Wordsworth wrote, 

There are in our existence spots of time, 
That with distinct pre-eminence retain 
A renovating virtue, whence--depressed 
By false opinion and contentious thought, 
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, 
In trivial occupations, and the round 
Of ordinary intercourse--our minds 
Are nourished and invisibly repaired . . . 

In other words, some experiences perdure in memory as redemptive and healing presences, to “renovate” and “repair” the mind caught in and damaged by some later darkness. So Wordsworth’s own remembered encounters with both the awful sublime and the more tranquil beautiful, in the wild country around the River Derwent, strike a continual light to illuminate the rest of his life.

We’ve theorized that other poets have made use of this Wordsworthian idea, so that in English poetry we can identify as a subgenre the “spot of time” poem. But let’s apply a little pressure to this theory. Does any poem recollecting the past count as a “spot of time” poem? That would present a massively overlapping Venn diagram — not a perfect circle, maybe, but awfully close — of poems in English since the Romantic period. Even if we narrowed things down by saying, “No, no, only poems in which a memory is invoked as a soul-cleansing agent,” would those poems all fulfill Wordsworth’s original meaning?

For Wordsworth, a “spot of time” might be not obviously refreshing, but harrowing, like his own memory, in The Prelude, of being lost as a child on the moors at night. What seems important, in Wordsworth’s formulation of the idea, is that there’s never a single spot of time renewing the mind. They work in pairs: the horrifying night scenes witnessed by the child, overlaid by memories of the same places as experienced by a young man in love. 

Edward Thomas, 1917 (Wikimedia Commons)

In this light, we can consider “Adlestrop,” that brief, perfect poem about nothing much happening, by the British poet Edward Thomas (1878–1917). Thomas, killed at Arras, in France, on Easter Monday in the last full year of World War I, is notable as a war poet, author of “February Afternoon,” which appeared here in February. Although most of his poetic outputwas produced in the years of that war, the war poet’s most famous poem is not about war at all. Instead, it takes as its subject an English country railway station.  

At least, the explicit subject of “Adlestrop” is a country railway station, as it exists in memory. Written sometime between 1915 and 1917, scheduled for publication just before its author’s battlefield death, the poem recalls a moment before the outbreak of the war. Its four tetrameter abcb quatrains offer a healing backward glimpse, triggered by some mention of the name of the Cotswold village, a recollected place of absolute stillness. What we experience through it is not Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility,” but tranquility recollected, as we may surmise, against a backdrop of continual emotional assault, the pulverizing mill of warfare. 

It’s a tranquility composed of inconsequential sounds and sights — someone clearing his throat, the high-clouded summer sky, the wind on the grasses — which appear in soul-cleansing high relief in their juxtaposition with the horror that isn’t in the poem. It’s an incredibly subtle reworking of Wordsworth’s idea, in which all the elements of that idea are present, though some remain outside the poem’s actual frame. The train pulls away in the direction of that boundary, away from peace and into what lies beyond. The birdsong, seeming to widen in the wake of the train, becomes the sound of all the birds at the heart of an England the poet would never see again. 

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