It really is a great poem. I think there's something special, too, about placing a proper name at the end of a line. Marlowe does this so often and it always works:
I'm not sure this is a poem about names. I think it's about the way a name (in this case 'Adlestrop') is the magic sound that opens a rich memory, a particular instant. And then he invites you into the memory, which is sensual but not really linked to other particular names. Grass is generic. Birds are generic. And everybody knows what a blackbird looks like (though not everyone would automatically hear its song, as Thomas would have done). Willow is green and willowy, and it doesn't matter what you see for 'willowherb', it's the sound repetition that suggests green and soft, the herb and the willow, and for 'meadowsweet', it's the meadow, and the sweetness. Isn't it the 'feel' of the words that matters here, not the precise image or the particular names? Also the way that sensation (oh for a life of sensations not thoughts!) that opens out into two whole counties, not one named place. And yet one name (Adlestrop) conjures this instant, this moment stopped in time. I've known this poem all my life it seems -- well, at least for 58 years -- and I'm sure I had no idea what willowherb was when I first read it, or meadowsweet either, but I didn't feel the need to look them up. The words just sounded right. And I knew that I KNEW that moment, that Adlestrop moment. I know what the plants look like now, but even so, when I read the poem I don't 'see' them. I'm immersed in the sound and the sensation. It's funny that 'Adlestrop' itself is a clunky word. The irony is that it conjures a magic moment.
Thanks Nell - completely agree it’s the feeling that’s important, not knowing the names doesn’t matter. Though clearly it bothered Abse. I’ve been trying to learn more plants and flowers recently, so it’s the names I was noticing… Thomas’s prose is often just (but of course not “just”) a list of names, plants or places or people - he’ll cycle past a graveyard and tell you all the families in it.
I rather like Adlestrop, the word! I think it would be a small, yellow weedy thing which grows in bogland and can be brewed for tea, though it has been known to make the drinker unusually grumpy.
Love this, and the Thomas poem. Knowing about the war that was yet to come when he first wrote about Adlestrop in his journal makes the poem sweeter and sadder, of course, but I like to think the being-for-being's-sake aspect of it would still work had it not been for the horrors that came.
Thomas's interest in names (and lists!) seems to have been ongoing. His travel book The South Country (1909) begins with "The name," and there is also this passage later on:
"As the historic centuries are reached, the action of great events, battles, laws, roads, invasions, upon the parish—and of the parish upon them—must be shown. Architecture, with many of its local characteristics still to be traced, will speak as a voice out of the stones of castle, church, manor, farm, barn and bridge. The birds and beasts cannot be left out. The names of the local families—gentle and simple—what histories are in them, in the curt parish registers, in tombstones, in the names of fields and houses and woods. Better a thousand errors so long as they are human than a thousand truths lying like broken snail-shells round the anvil of a thrush. If only those poems which are place-names could be translated at last, the pretty, the odd, the romantic, the racy names of copse and field and lane and house. What a flavour there is about the Bassetts, the Boughtons, the Worthys, the Tarrants, Winterbournes, Deverills, Manningfords, the Suttons: what goodly names of the South Country—Woodmansterne, Hollingbourne, Horsmonden, Wolstanbury, Brockenhurst, Caburn, Lydiard Tregoze, Lydiard Millicent, Clevancy, Amesbury, Amberley (I once tried to make a beautiful name and in the end it was Amberley, in which Time had forestalled me); what sweet names Penshurst, Frensham, Firle, Nutley, Appleshaw, Hambledon, Cranbrook, Fordingbridge, Melksham, Lambourn, Draycot, Buscot, Kelmscot, Yatton, Yalding, Downe, Cowden, Iping, Cowfold, Ashe, Liss...."
Really enjoyed this one. I've been thinking about names as well and how they can represent things but also invent or create things. This could be said of language in general. It's really a fundamental question that gets to the heart of, well...everything.
About the name for the newsletter, I'm in the same boat. I never really thought about it, then I got a few readers, wondered if I should change it, but I sort of like just keeping the generic Substack title. I feel like if I give it an official title, that will somehow lead me to narrow my concerns and prevent me from writing about anything I want.
This feels like a terrible admission, but I've never known if Adlestrop has a long or a short A. I like the sound of the long A, which slows the line down; but is it correct?
Not terrible at all, this was at the back of my mind while writing. I say/hear it with a long A, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m wrong and indeed Wikipedia gives it a short one. Would need to find a local…
Hi Jem, a thought provoking piece and I too posted on the background to Edward's poem yesterday. I am so much in admiration of the talent that turned Edward's brief jotting (there seems poetry even in this) on that late June day into something so beautiful...
"Then we stopped at Adlestrop, thro the willows cd be heard a chain of blackbird songs at 12.45 & one thrush & no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam. Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willow herb & meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel - looking out on grey dry stones between metals & the shiny metals & over it all the elms willows & long grass - one man clears his throat - and a greater rustic silence. No house in view Stop only for a minute till signal is up."
As you know he and his wife Helen (you'll have no doubt read her wonderful reminiscence of life with Edward - Under Storms Wing?) were on the way to a gathering of what would become known as the Dymock Poets.
I've always thought that in Adlestrop Edward was somehow answering Wilfrid Wilson Gibson's prose that captured that get together of poets and to your point Gibson too lists many names...
Do you remember the still summer evening
When, in the cosy cream-washed living-room
Of The Old Nailshop, we all talked and laughed -
Our neighbours from The Gallows,
Catherine And Lascelles Abercrombie; Rupert Brooke;
Elinor and Robert Frost, living a while
At Little Iddens, who'd brought over with them
Helen and Edward Thomas?
In the lamplight
We talked and laughed; but, for the most part, listened
While Robert Frost kept on and on and on,
In his slow New England fashion, for our delight,
Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips,
And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes?
We sat there in the lamplight, while the day
Died from rose-latticed casements, and the plovers Called over the low meadows, till the owls
Answered them from the elms, we sat and talked -
Now, a quick flash from Abercrombie; now,
A murmured dry half-heard aside from Thomas;
Now, a clear laughing word from Brooke; and then
Again Frost's rich and ripe philosophy,
That had the body and tang of good draught-cider,
And poured as clear a stream.
And of course without Edward, Frost might not have achieved the heights he did. If nothing else their walks together gave us the Road Not Taken.
If only that artillery shell on Easter Day 1917 had landed fifty feet further away, as the one a few days earlier had done.
I've never really noticed the list of names aspect of this poem, although I see it now. It resonates for me mostly because he wrote it just one month before the outbreak of the First World War. Everyone knew what was coming, and there would have been an increasing amount of jingoistic, patriotic propaganda around.
With Adlestrop, Thomas took a different approach, focusing hard on a tiny, relatively unknown part of England, quietly showing what we were about to lose. The names are not as important as the atmosphere that he paints with them. If it had been some better known place it wouldn't have had quite the same impact.
I think that it is almost cinematic when he sweeps upwards, away from the train and station and takes an almost aerial view of the surrounding counties with the sound of the blackbird singing over them.
It really is a great poem. I think there's something special, too, about placing a proper name at the end of a line. Marlowe does this so often and it always works:
With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled
Thou shalt be drawn amidst the frozen pools,
And scale the icy mountains' lofty tops,
Which with thy beauty will be soon resolv'd:
My martial prizes, with five hundred men,
Won on the fifty-headed Volga's waves,
Shall we all offer to Zenocrate,
And then myself to fair Zenocrate.
Or, similarly, Celan's Todesfuge.
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played
Singing of Mount Abora
Well, and Zenocrate has such a wonderful cadence.
I'm not sure this is a poem about names. I think it's about the way a name (in this case 'Adlestrop') is the magic sound that opens a rich memory, a particular instant. And then he invites you into the memory, which is sensual but not really linked to other particular names. Grass is generic. Birds are generic. And everybody knows what a blackbird looks like (though not everyone would automatically hear its song, as Thomas would have done). Willow is green and willowy, and it doesn't matter what you see for 'willowherb', it's the sound repetition that suggests green and soft, the herb and the willow, and for 'meadowsweet', it's the meadow, and the sweetness. Isn't it the 'feel' of the words that matters here, not the precise image or the particular names? Also the way that sensation (oh for a life of sensations not thoughts!) that opens out into two whole counties, not one named place. And yet one name (Adlestrop) conjures this instant, this moment stopped in time. I've known this poem all my life it seems -- well, at least for 58 years -- and I'm sure I had no idea what willowherb was when I first read it, or meadowsweet either, but I didn't feel the need to look them up. The words just sounded right. And I knew that I KNEW that moment, that Adlestrop moment. I know what the plants look like now, but even so, when I read the poem I don't 'see' them. I'm immersed in the sound and the sensation. It's funny that 'Adlestrop' itself is a clunky word. The irony is that it conjures a magic moment.
Thanks Nell - completely agree it’s the feeling that’s important, not knowing the names doesn’t matter. Though clearly it bothered Abse. I’ve been trying to learn more plants and flowers recently, so it’s the names I was noticing… Thomas’s prose is often just (but of course not “just”) a list of names, plants or places or people - he’ll cycle past a graveyard and tell you all the families in it.
I rather like Adlestrop, the word! I think it would be a small, yellow weedy thing which grows in bogland and can be brewed for tea, though it has been known to make the drinker unusually grumpy.
Or possibly even stroppy....
Love this, and the Thomas poem. Knowing about the war that was yet to come when he first wrote about Adlestrop in his journal makes the poem sweeter and sadder, of course, but I like to think the being-for-being's-sake aspect of it would still work had it not been for the horrors that came.
Thomas's interest in names (and lists!) seems to have been ongoing. His travel book The South Country (1909) begins with "The name," and there is also this passage later on:
"As the historic centuries are reached, the action of great events, battles, laws, roads, invasions, upon the parish—and of the parish upon them—must be shown. Architecture, with many of its local characteristics still to be traced, will speak as a voice out of the stones of castle, church, manor, farm, barn and bridge. The birds and beasts cannot be left out. The names of the local families—gentle and simple—what histories are in them, in the curt parish registers, in tombstones, in the names of fields and houses and woods. Better a thousand errors so long as they are human than a thousand truths lying like broken snail-shells round the anvil of a thrush. If only those poems which are place-names could be translated at last, the pretty, the odd, the romantic, the racy names of copse and field and lane and house. What a flavour there is about the Bassetts, the Boughtons, the Worthys, the Tarrants, Winterbournes, Deverills, Manningfords, the Suttons: what goodly names of the South Country—Woodmansterne, Hollingbourne, Horsmonden, Wolstanbury, Brockenhurst, Caburn, Lydiard Tregoze, Lydiard Millicent, Clevancy, Amesbury, Amberley (I once tried to make a beautiful name and in the end it was Amberley, in which Time had forestalled me); what sweet names Penshurst, Frensham, Firle, Nutley, Appleshaw, Hambledon, Cranbrook, Fordingbridge, Melksham, Lambourn, Draycot, Buscot, Kelmscot, Yatton, Yalding, Downe, Cowden, Iping, Cowfold, Ashe, Liss...."
Thanks Joseph. Yes names are so important to his travel books (which I love), I wish I'd mentioned them and I'm glad you did!
I had a professor in college who once said that all great poems are really lists. A remark not so much true as deeply suggestive.
It is (not true but deeply suggestive). A lot of great prose is really a list too.
Really enjoyed this one. I've been thinking about names as well and how they can represent things but also invent or create things. This could be said of language in general. It's really a fundamental question that gets to the heart of, well...everything.
About the name for the newsletter, I'm in the same boat. I never really thought about it, then I got a few readers, wondered if I should change it, but I sort of like just keeping the generic Substack title. I feel like if I give it an official title, that will somehow lead me to narrow my concerns and prevent me from writing about anything I want.
This feels like a terrible admission, but I've never known if Adlestrop has a long or a short A. I like the sound of the long A, which slows the line down; but is it correct?
Not terrible at all, this was at the back of my mind while writing. I say/hear it with a long A, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m wrong and indeed Wikipedia gives it a short one. Would need to find a local…
Hi Jem, a thought provoking piece and I too posted on the background to Edward's poem yesterday. I am so much in admiration of the talent that turned Edward's brief jotting (there seems poetry even in this) on that late June day into something so beautiful...
"Then we stopped at Adlestrop, thro the willows cd be heard a chain of blackbird songs at 12.45 & one thrush & no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam. Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willow herb & meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel - looking out on grey dry stones between metals & the shiny metals & over it all the elms willows & long grass - one man clears his throat - and a greater rustic silence. No house in view Stop only for a minute till signal is up."
As you know he and his wife Helen (you'll have no doubt read her wonderful reminiscence of life with Edward - Under Storms Wing?) were on the way to a gathering of what would become known as the Dymock Poets.
I've always thought that in Adlestrop Edward was somehow answering Wilfrid Wilson Gibson's prose that captured that get together of poets and to your point Gibson too lists many names...
Do you remember the still summer evening
When, in the cosy cream-washed living-room
Of The Old Nailshop, we all talked and laughed -
Our neighbours from The Gallows,
Catherine And Lascelles Abercrombie; Rupert Brooke;
Elinor and Robert Frost, living a while
At Little Iddens, who'd brought over with them
Helen and Edward Thomas?
In the lamplight
We talked and laughed; but, for the most part, listened
While Robert Frost kept on and on and on,
In his slow New England fashion, for our delight,
Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips,
And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes?
We sat there in the lamplight, while the day
Died from rose-latticed casements, and the plovers Called over the low meadows, till the owls
Answered them from the elms, we sat and talked -
Now, a quick flash from Abercrombie; now,
A murmured dry half-heard aside from Thomas;
Now, a clear laughing word from Brooke; and then
Again Frost's rich and ripe philosophy,
That had the body and tang of good draught-cider,
And poured as clear a stream.
And of course without Edward, Frost might not have achieved the heights he did. If nothing else their walks together gave us the Road Not Taken.
If only that artillery shell on Easter Day 1917 had landed fifty feet further away, as the one a few days earlier had done.
I've never really noticed the list of names aspect of this poem, although I see it now. It resonates for me mostly because he wrote it just one month before the outbreak of the First World War. Everyone knew what was coming, and there would have been an increasing amount of jingoistic, patriotic propaganda around.
With Adlestrop, Thomas took a different approach, focusing hard on a tiny, relatively unknown part of England, quietly showing what we were about to lose. The names are not as important as the atmosphere that he paints with them. If it had been some better known place it wouldn't have had quite the same impact.
I think that it is almost cinematic when he sweeps upwards, away from the train and station and takes an almost aerial view of the surrounding counties with the sound of the blackbird singing over them.
Really enjoyed this! Love the Auden and close-reading.