Remembering Adlestrop

Edward Thomas and names as poetry

Camille Pissarro, Dulwich seen from Sydenham Hill, 1871

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

Some years ago I was in the gents of a fancy restaurant in the West End (this isn’t the story it sounds like), a self-enclosed world of white porcelain, gold taps, chessboard floors and acres and acres of space. That sense of being somewhere else - a stage, perhaps - was only reinforced by the voice coming over a speaker system. A man’s voice, slow and low. It took a few seconds before I realised that they were reciting poetry, a few more before I recognised the poem. Yes. I remember Adlestrop.

As a metaphor, this is a little too on-the-nose: ‘Adlestrop’ has become so familiar that it’s been turned into lift music. What was particularly strange was that outside there was a thin layer of snow over Trafalgar Square and more snow falling through the December night. ‘Adlestrop’ is a summer poem. It was late June. Late June in England, the summer solstice, is deeper into summer than August is. Right now, it is very hot.

‘Adlestrop’ is a poem about memory and place, but it is also a poem made from names.¹ Yes. I remember Adlestrop— / The name. Right from the start, the issue is blurred: is Thomas remembering the station, or the word? The opening stanzas work to make both the train and station disappear—the train becomes the hiss of its steam, the platform is empty, the cough unattributed:

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

Only the name. Even the ‘I’ has been dismantled: we don’t see Thomas himself again for the rest of the poem. It’s only once the name (in the form of a station sign) has been isolated that the true vision begins:

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.

This is what Thomas sees from the carriage, though we quickly move beyond sight into that luscious dream of an engine at rest which grows like a strange flowering plant from the still centre. But it’s also a list of names, one which begins with Adlestrop (which, read one way, could be one of the plants in the line below) and ends in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

W. H. Auden said that “proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.”² Names are the closest thing we have to magic: naming is an act of creation as much as an act of description. Names are also a kind of knowledge. When knowledge dwindles, or is transposed, it becomes obscure. I love ‘Adlestrop’, but the names have always been a problem. I can’t see the flowers. Willows, yes. Grass, yes. But what’s a willow-herb? Meadowsweet? A haycock is a small pile of hay drying in a field. When I first read the poem I thought it was another plant, maybe an early-flowering one that had already dried out. I still read it that way.

I suspect I am not the only one who can’t see what Thomas sees. Does this matter? Yes and no. The poet Dannie Abse, who was born in Cardiff and later lived in London, wrote two poems in reply to Adlestrop, which must have represented a version of poetry he felt alienated by. One of these, ‘Not Adlestrop’, was pretty awful: man stares at ‘very, very pretty girl’ in a train window.³ The other, ‘As I Was Saying’, is much better, much funnier, a defence of the residents of the ‘ignorant suburb’ against a culture which still expects poets to be in communion with nature. In reply to an imagined critic, Abse reels off a long list of names from a ‘W. H. Smith book’, mocking Thomas’s botanical precision: ‘Butterbur, Ling, and Lady’s Smock, Jack-by-the-Hedge, Cuckoo-Pint, and Feverfew, even the stinking Hellebore…’

Still, Abse is being too defensive. When Thomas launches into his list, he is launching into the names for their own sake. We don’t need to know what they are, because the words are poetry. It is easy to forget, too, that Edward Thomas was born in Balham, in the suburbs (which is near me in south London), and there would have been a time when he didn’t know the names either. Thomas’s names are a kind of invitation, one that feels all the more important now, when both the knowledge and the flowers are fading. Just hearing the word ‘willow-herb’ or ‘stitchwort’ can make you want to find out what it is, and knowing something’s name is the first step towards loving it.

1. Speaking of names: loyal readers will have spotted that I keep fiddling with the name of this newsletter, which is now ‘A Poetry Notebook’ (with apologies to Clive James). I don’t post enough to worry about branding, though clearly I worry a little: this is more a reminder to myself to keep things simple. I will try to write about a different poem every few weeks.

2. Auden said a lot of things about poetry, often contradictory, sometimes infuriating, but he did sometimes get it right.

3. There was a period when this kind of poem was a genre to itself…