It was late June

June 24, 2014 1:16 AM

On 24 June 1914, a young man caught the 10.20 train from London to Malvern. At around 12.45 the train stopped at a small country station in Gloucestershire. And what happened then? Well .. nothing much. The station closed in 1966, but this afternoon a special train will be stopping there, unwontedly, to mark the centenary of one of the best-loved poems in the English language.

The manuscript of 'Adlestrop', and a full digital facsimile of the poet's notebook.

Further poems and writings by Edward Thomas, from the First World War Poetry Digital Archive.

posted by verstegan (19 comments total)

Richard Burton's reading of this is fantastic.
posted by fallingleaves at 2:07 AM on June 24, 2014 [4 favorites]

Thanks for this, verstegan! Thomas is such a sad, fascinating figure. Anyone interested in his late flowering as a poet (and his relationship with Robert Frost) should read Matthew Hollis's luminous 2011 biography, Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas, which is just great, though heartbreaking.
posted by Sonny Jim at 2:59 AM on June 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'd never heard of this. Thanks for a lovely morning discovery.
posted by jmccw at 4:30 AM on June 24, 2014 [4 favorites]

Yeah no but, fuckin' "Adlestrop"
Or summit. 'cos the other day right,
It were fuckin hot, the train broke down.
Again! English trains are fuckin' shite.

I was fuckin' pissed; some fella swore.
Weren't even no passengers came
Off the platform. Fuckin' door stayed shut
at Empty-Strop or whatsitsname.

Just weeds and shit and Tesco bags,
Broken bottles, a few dog turds.
I said fuck it, took me iPhone out,
Fucked around with Angry Birds.

Then the driver's on the tannoy, right:
"Signal failure. Hope we'll be goin'
in 10 minutes; if you must complain
Write First Great Western a fuckin' poem".
posted by the quidnunc kid at 4:41 AM on June 24, 2014 [60 favorites]

There's something about Thomas's poem that always makes me imagine he was alone on that train when it stopped at Adlestrop in 1914. But the BBC radio coverage of today's anniversary revealed that his wife was with him at the time. They were on their way to see Robert Frost, who later persuaded Thomas to publish his poetry.
posted by Paul Slade at 5:37 AM on June 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

What a lovely poem!

I have in fact been to Malvern (albeit in a deux chevaux), but hadn't heard of the poem before. Thank you for posting this.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:43 AM on June 24, 2014

I had never heard of this, either. Granted, I wasn't an English major, but is it just more popular in Britain or did I somehow miss a poetic superstar of writing in my American upbringing? As for the poem, itself, it's not bad, but not one that I shall print out and greedily read on days when I need a pick me up.*



*Not an English major.
posted by Atreides at 6:46 AM on June 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

No, I don't remember Adlestrop.
posted by Decani at 6:54 AM on June 24, 2014

quidnunc, that was amazing
posted by Dreadnought at 7:13 AM on June 24, 2014

"One of the best known poems in the English language"? You know, when you stop and think about that, it's meaningless; Every poem in the English language is "one of" those--just with more or fewer "better known" poems ranking above them. In the case of this poem, there's rather a large number of "better known" poems to wade through before you hit this one.
posted by yoink at 7:24 AM on June 24, 2014 [3 favorites]

I'd pay cash money for a Youtube recording of Richard Burton reading Quidnunc's poem. OK, I'll settle for some yob from Essex.

(I recently discovered that Youtube is just full of amazing recordings of poets reading their own poems. I asked Metafilter to teach me to poem a few months back, and one of the biggest takeaways I got is that poetry is better approached as a spoken medium than a written one. And here's this amazing archive online! Yesterday's pleasure was Eliot reading the Hollow Men.)
posted by Nelson at 7:28 AM on June 24, 2014 [4 favorites]

> one of the best-loved poems in the English language.

I'd never heard of it, so I checked my anthologies and it wasn't in any of them, even the large ones. Not saying it's not much-loved, it may be the favorite poem of lots of people, but I think it's being a bit oversold. (Also, it's hard to take lines like "No whit less still and lonely fair" as seriously these days as was intended at the time.)

> I'd pay cash money for a Youtube recording of Richard Burton reading Quidnunc's poem. OK, I'll settle for some yob from Essex.

Same here; I much prefer it to the Thomas!
posted by languagehat at 8:48 AM on June 24, 2014

Nelson, you might like to check these out too:

The Poetry Archive. Created by former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion as a free online archive of poets reading their own work.

Poetry Please. BBC radio's excellent poetry request show. Several episodes always available on the iPlayer with a new half-hour edition added each week.
posted by Paul Slade at 8:53 AM on June 24, 2014 [3 favorites]

I'm an English major from England and I'd never heard of this poem, but oh well. It is a nice one, and it brought back a strong memory of monthly visits to my grandfather's village and the bristling green barely-visited fullness of the nature there, slowly drying under 32 centigrade of bright, quiet-humming English summer. It also had a near-abandoned platform that you could hail down the occasional 2-carriage passing train from. I never saw anyone there.
posted by Drexen at 9:03 AM on June 24, 2014

Once upon a time, I hitch-hiked up the Malayasian coast from Butterworth (opposite Penang island) to the Thai border. At one point, someone dropped me off near a small, country railway station. It must have been built by the British, goodness knows when. The day was mid-afternoon hot with hardly a breeze to stir the leaves. Peace and calm reigned... and I thought of Adlestrop.
posted by Mister Bijou at 9:33 AM on June 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

You never can predict the moments when your mind expands beyond your head to plug-in to the greater goings-on around you. But odds are, it will be at a moment that you thought was delaying you from getting done what you thought you should be getting done.
posted by benito.strauss at 9:46 AM on June 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

Came to mark this lovely post as a favorite.
Stayed to guffaw at the quidnunc kid's version.
Great show all round, chaps.
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:07 PM on June 24, 2014

Oh, this is lovely. Thanks, verstegan! I've always liked Adlestrop, and it even made an appearance in my English GCSE syllabus in the early nineties (though, as I was the kind of child who read poetry for fun, I'd already encountered it in anthologies by then). It's brightened my evening to learn that the centenary's been marked.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 1:36 PM on June 24, 2014

I love this poem, though it is unlike most of what I favor. I memorized it a long time ago. A few years ago, on holiday and staying in nearby Stow-on-the-Wold, I walked the ten miles or so to Adlestrop. It was early July (during the World Cup, but no matches that day), and a hot, sunny day.
I walked through fields,climbed over stiles, got lost a bit despite the Survey map, dodged some sheep. Finally getting to Adlestrop, sitting in the churchyard, remembering my way through the poem--a great memory.
And then my beloved came and drove me back, to Guinness and dinner. Who could ask for a better day?
posted by librosegretti at 7:59 PM on June 24, 2014 [4 favorites]