When I was looking for a train poem to write about, Google kept anticipating my searches with very telling suggestions: train poems about life; train poems for funerals; poems about trains and death. Hidden among all of these train-journey-as-life-journey poems, I stumbled across one about an unexpected hiatus. Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas, is a strange little poem about an unscheduled stop at the titular Gloucestershire village. I'm fond of Thomas' words – he's inspired many of my favourite writers, including Heaney and Sheers, and reminds me of the poet who inspired this blog, Thomas Traherne.
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.
The first thing I noticed about this poem was the deceptive ease with which one can read it. It’s lovely to read aloud, perhaps because at first sight it seems like a simple recollection. The first word could be the answer to a silent interlocutor, or it could be the speaker collecting his thoughts.
It’s not strong enough to indicate transportation, or an immediate jump into a memory, but it’s as if prior to this poem Thomas was probing his mind. “Adlestrop, it rings a bell, yes.” Thomas eases us into this poem – the first verse details the train pulling in ‘unwontedly’, as we slip into the narrative. The enjambment and the internal rhyme of ‘name’ and ‘express train’ is tempered with extended caesura, as though Thomas is piecing together fragmented thoughts into a loose whole. This continues into the second verse and creates a sense of slowing – the pace is mirrored in the image of a hot and hazy June afternoon.
The sense of haziness is important. The poem is not remembrance exactly, in spite of the detail, but an attempt at remembrance. Thomas invites autobiographical commentary with his specificity – ‘one afternoon’ in ‘late June’, and that afternoon in June really did happen. Thomas made a note of the stop in his journal and built the poem from there. Despite this, I feel that the detail is successfully undermined by the sense that the poem, and the scene, is not quite in existence. It occupies a literal and metaphorical hiatus – ‘no one left and no one came.’ It is neither the beginning, nor the end of a journey. Thomas doesn’t enter Adlestrop but the acknowledgement of the station means that the poem is not simply about nature alone, there is a wordly presence in the hissing steam and the cleared throat. It is neither clear recollection nor invented tale. Even the weather is not quite – the diminutive ‘cloudlets’ drift ‘high’ and almost out of sight. This sense is embodied in the structure of the first two verses, which are loosely bookended by Thomas’ assertion that he remembers ‘Adlestrop – only the name.’ Not the place, nor anything specific about it, only the name and the descriptions he concocts.
As previously noted, this not-quite style is tempered by the natural lexical field. The third verse is laden with the natural descriptions that Thomas is noted for, and the fecundity of the country is emphasised by the polysyndetic listing which draws together the second and third verses. Thomas may have only seen the name of Adlestrop, but he remembers much more of its nature. The listing also serves to quicken the pace; we’re moving to the end of the poem, to the edges of the memory and out of the station, and though a poem like this is not necessarily climactic, this is as close as we get to a moment of exultation:
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire
The most beautiful lines of the poem are also the ones that remind us of its painful brevity – the poem is a but a 'minute'. The singing blackbird pierces the haziness and indeed the memory. It is like a rustic evocation of Shelley's skylark – 'Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight...' The song appears to reverberate around the memory, 'close by, and round', and continues the pace as an inward-looking poem moves outwards. This too is emphasised by the assonance: 'mistier, / Farther and farther.... Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.' We have moved from not-quite Adlestrop out into the counties, and then the poem ends. However, Thomas' poem doesn't have a neat ending – it's as though the creatively enhanced memory is left open as the train goes on its way. It's a strange rush at the end of what initially seemed like a quiet little poem about an uneventful journey.
The sense of haziness is important. The poem is not remembrance exactly, in spite of the detail, but an attempt at remembrance. Thomas invites autobiographical commentary with his specificity – ‘one afternoon’ in ‘late June’, and that afternoon in June really did happen. Thomas made a note of the stop in his journal and built the poem from there. Despite this, I feel that the detail is successfully undermined by the sense that the poem, and the scene, is not quite in existence. It occupies a literal and metaphorical hiatus – ‘no one left and no one came.’ It is neither the beginning, nor the end of a journey. Thomas doesn’t enter Adlestrop but the acknowledgement of the station means that the poem is not simply about nature alone, there is a wordly presence in the hissing steam and the cleared throat. It is neither clear recollection nor invented tale. Even the weather is not quite – the diminutive ‘cloudlets’ drift ‘high’ and almost out of sight. This sense is embodied in the structure of the first two verses, which are loosely bookended by Thomas’ assertion that he remembers ‘Adlestrop – only the name.’ Not the place, nor anything specific about it, only the name and the descriptions he concocts.
As previously noted, this not-quite style is tempered by the natural lexical field. The third verse is laden with the natural descriptions that Thomas is noted for, and the fecundity of the country is emphasised by the polysyndetic listing which draws together the second and third verses. Thomas may have only seen the name of Adlestrop, but he remembers much more of its nature. The listing also serves to quicken the pace; we’re moving to the end of the poem, to the edges of the memory and out of the station, and though a poem like this is not necessarily climactic, this is as close as we get to a moment of exultation:
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire
The most beautiful lines of the poem are also the ones that remind us of its painful brevity – the poem is a but a 'minute'. The singing blackbird pierces the haziness and indeed the memory. It is like a rustic evocation of Shelley's skylark – 'Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight...' The song appears to reverberate around the memory, 'close by, and round', and continues the pace as an inward-looking poem moves outwards. This too is emphasised by the assonance: 'mistier, / Farther and farther.... Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.' We have moved from not-quite Adlestrop out into the counties, and then the poem ends. However, Thomas' poem doesn't have a neat ending – it's as though the creatively enhanced memory is left open as the train goes on its way. It's a strange rush at the end of what initially seemed like a quiet little poem about an uneventful journey.
I didn't want to do a contextual reading of this poem, because I like its nebulous style. However, it's worth noting that Thomas was on his way to visit his good friend Robert Frost when the train passed through Adlestrop. Frost encouraged Thomas to write more poetry, a decision which in part saved him from a depressive langour that could have claimed his life. Weeks after Thomas noted the sights and sounds of Adlestrop, England declared war on Germany, and three years later Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras. The New Statesman published Adlestrop three weeks after his death.
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