I find this poem a pure delight. For one thing it is, uncharacteristically for Edward Thomas, an essentially happy poem, even if the happiness is tinged with wistfulness: ‘If I should ever by chance grow rich’ – Thomas knew quite well that he was never going to grow rich, certainly not rich enough to own a tract of English countryside, having chosen the penurious life of a literary hack.

Then there are the field names: Codham, Roses, Pyrgo. Thomas loved to pore over maps finding these curious old appellations, so expressive of our ancient, many-layered, parcelled-out countryside, and letting them conjure up for him memories and visions of the landscape he was so intimate with. And there is the playful relationship in the poem with his small daughter Bronwen, the only one who could lighten his black moods, the one he would take on his spring walks, competing with her to find the first flowers of the year. So it is a light rent that he imagines asking of her first, and then really no rent at all, since it would be quite difficult not to find a blossom on furze at any time of year: hence the country saying ‘When gorse is out of bloom, kissing’s out of season’.

Happy, I called it, if  a little wistful. Yet I suspect that for the Thomas family, after Edward’s death in France in 1917, there must have been a sadness beyond wistfulness about this particular poem, having to stand as it did for all the things a father might have wished to give to a daughter whose growing up he was never to see.

If I Should Ever by Chance

If I should ever by chance grow rich
I’ll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,
And let them all to my elder daughter.
The rent I shall ask of her will be only
Each year’s first violets, white and lonely,
The first primroses and orchises –
She must find them before I do, that is.
But if she finds a blossom on furze
Without rent they shall all for ever be hers,
Whenever I am sufficiently rich:
Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo and Lapwater, –
I shall give them all to my elder daughter.

Edward Thomas