Edward Thomas – Key Quotes

Edward Thomas – Key Quotes

1. March

   • "Spring will come again, / Perhaps tomorrow"
   • "Cold burning"
   • "Primroses / Torn by the hail"
   • "The mighty sun wept tears of joy"
   • "It was lost, too"
   • "Rain, snow, sleet, hail"
   • "They fought, if they remembered to fight"
   • "They cared not what they sang or screamed"
   • "Hoarse or sweet or fierce or soft"
   • "They could do no wrong"
   • "Not till night had half its stars"
   • "Riot of songs, a silence"
   • "Spring returns, perhaps tomorrow"

2. Old Man

   • "Old Man, or Lad's-love"
   • "In the name there's nothing"
   • "Feathery herb"
   • "The herb itself I like not, but for certain / I love it"
   • "Snipping the tips and shrivelling"
   • "Thinking, perhaps of nothing"
   • "A bent path to a door"
   • "Me / Forbidding her to pick"
   • "Shrivel the grey shreds"
   • "I have mislaid the key."
   • "Think of nothing, I see and I hear nothing"
   • "Never can, remember"
   • "An avenue, dark, nameless, without end."

3. Tears

   • "It seems I have no tears left."
   • "If tears have ghosts"
   • "All equals in their rage of gladness"
   • "a great dragon"
   • "the double-shadowed Tower"
   • "Stirring and sweet"
   • "Strange solitude was there and silence"
   • "The music piercing that solitude"
   • "Truths I had not dreamed, / And have forgotten since their beauty passed.

4. But these things also

   • "Long-dead that is greyer now"
   • "All the Winter it was"
   • "The shell [...] bleached"
   • "Splashes of purest white"
   • "A man mistakes / For earliest violets"
   • "Something to pay Winter's debts"
   • "Spring's here, Winter's not gone"

5. Melancholy

   • "The rain and wind, the rain and wind, raved endlessly."
   • "The Summer storm [...] Wrought magic"
   • "I feared the solitude / Far more I feared all company"
   • "Sweeten the strange sweetness"
   • "Wild air"
   • "A distant cuckoo calling"
   • "Near water falling"
   • "As if in history"
   • "Rumours of what had touched my friends, my foes, or me."

6. The Glory

   • "The glory of the beauty of the morning"
   • "The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew"
   • "The blackbird [...], and the dove"
   • "Something sweeter than love"
   • "The sublime vacancy / Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart"
   • "The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning"
   • "All I can ever do, all I can be"
   • "As far as heaven, as hell"
   • "I was happy oft and oft before"
   • "How dreary-swift [...] is Time?"
   • "I cannot bite the day to the core."

7. Words

   • "Choose me, / You English words?"
   • "Light as dreams, / Tough as oak"
   • "Make me content / With some sweetness"
   • "Whose nightingales / Have no wings"
   • "Fixed and free"
   • "As poets do."

8. Aspens

   • "The aspens at the cross-roads talk together"
   • "The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing"
   • "The whisper [...] is not drowned"
   • "Lightless pane and footless road"
   • "Calls their ghosts"
   • "A silent smithy, a silent inn"
   • "The night of nightingales"
   • "A ghostly room"
   • "It would be the same"
   • "Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear"
   • "But need not listen [...] to my rhymes."
   • "We cannot other than an aspen be"

9. This is no case of petty right or wrong

   • "I hate not Germans, nor grow hot / With love of Englishmen"
   • "My hatred of the Kaiser is love true"
   • "A kind of god he is, banging a gong."
   • "The storm smoking"
   • "Two witches' cauldrons roar."
   • "An England beautiful / And like her mother that died yesterday."
   • "The phoenix broods serene"
   • "The best and meanest Englishmen"
   • "Lest / We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed."

10. Rain

    • Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain"
    • "Remembering again that I shall die"
    • "I was born into this solitude"
    • "Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon"
    • "Dying tonight or lying still awake"
    • "Helpless among the living and the dead"
    • "Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff"
    • "What [...] Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint."

11. No one so much as you

    • "Loves this my clay"
    • "All that I ever did / For you seemed coarse"
    • "Scarce my eyes dare meet you"
    • "I but respond [...] And do not love."
    • "We look and understand, / We cannot speak"
    • "Words the most weak."
    • "A helpless fretting"
    • "A pine in solitude / Cradling a dove."

12. The sun used to shine

    • "Slowly together, paused and started"
    • "Cheerfully parted"
    • "We never disagreed"
    • "An apple wasps had undermined"
    • "In sunless Hades fields."
    • "Under the moonlight"
    • "Like memory's sand"
    • "Other men through other flowers"

13. As the team's head brass

    • "The fallen elm"
    • "The horses turned / Instead of treading me down"
    • "The blizzard"
    • "A woodpecker's round hole"
    • "If I could only come back again"
    • "One of my mates is dead."
    • "Another world."

14. Gone, Gone Again (Blenheim Oranges)

    • "Harvest rain"
    • "Fall grubby from the trees."
    • "When the lost one was here"
    • "To turn young men to dung"
    • "The old house"
    • "The footsteps of life"
    • "Youth, love, age and pain"
    • "I am something like that"
    • "Still breathing and interested"
    • "The house that is not dark"
    • "Not one pane to reflect the sun"
    • "They have broken every one."

15. Lights Out

    • "The unfathomable deep"
    • "Where all must lose / Their way"
    • "They can not choose."
    • "Deceived the travellers"
    • "In they sink."
    • "Here love ends – / Despair, ambition ends"
    • "Sleep that is sweeter"
    • "I must enter, and leave, alone, / I know not how."
    • "Its silence I hear and obey"
    • "I may lose my way / And myself."