Adlestrop -- Edward Thomas

(Poem #1192) 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. -- Edward Thomas

Adlestrop is a village in the Cotswolds, lying just off the road between two
equally charmingly-named towns - Chipping Norton and Stow-on-the-Wold. Its
claim to fame, apart from today's poem of course, is that Jane Austen was
often a guest at the Rectory (her uncle was the rector), and Adlestrop Park
may have been the setting for Mansfield Park.

As for the poem... it's a little gem. It doesn't attempt too much (always a
good thing, unless you're Milton), but what it sets out to do it does
perfectly: it captures place and season to a nicety. Especially refreshing,
given the weather we've been having lately.

thomas.

[Links]

Ah, the wonders of the internet: http://www.adlestrop.org.uk/

Edward Thomas:
Poem #1032, Words
Poem #1174, No One So Much As You

Places:
Poem #3, Inversnaid  -- Gerard Manley Hopkins
Poem #5, Chicago  -- Carl Sandburg
Poem #60, Byzantium  -- William Butler Yeats
Poem #128, London, 1802  -- William Wordsworth
Poem #235, Pennsylvania  -- Carl Sandburg
Poem #361, Cologne  -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poem #1021, Matsushima -- Matsuo Basho

[Afterword]

The Scrabble player in me would like to point out that ADLESTROP is a
fertile source of 8-letter words: DROPLETS PETROSAL POLESTAR PROLATES
ADOPTERS ASPORTED PASTORED READOPTS PORTALED PROLATED LEOPARDS TADPOLES
DELATORS LEOTARDS LODESTAR. So now you know.