I imagine most people first come upon Edward Thomas through the celebrated ‘Adlestrop’, but my own acquaintance began with this lesser known but entirely characteristic piece. I was immediately attracted by its beautiful precision – the diamonds of rain on the grassblades, the unshaken petals further down, the parsley stalks that ‘twilight has fined to naught’. I did not fully appreciate at the time that how deeply sad a poem this is, and how subtly revealing of the writer’s temperament. It turns on that almost throwaway phrase that begins the third verse, ‘Unless alone..’, an admission that he can no longer respond to human love as he did in the first flush of courtship, that happiness now is a thing to be sought only in solitude. This would of course have been hurtful to those who loved him, particularly his long-suffering wife Helen, but that’s how it goes: a poet’s passion for truth can be a sharp blade on which others cut themselves.

Parsley: this is of course cow-parsley with its white umbels, not the garden herb.

It Rains

It rains, and nothing stirs within the fence
Anywhere through the orchard’s untrodden, dense
Forest of parsley. The great diamonds
Of rain on the grassblades there is none to break,
Or the fallen petals further down to shake.

And I am nearly as happy as possible
To search the wilderness in vain though well,
To think of two walking, kissing there,
Drenched, yet forgetting the kisses of the rain:
Sad, too, to think that never, never again,

Unless alone, so happy shall I walk
In the rain. When I turn away, on its fine stalk
Twilight has fined to naught, the parsley flower
Figures, suspended still and ghostly white,
The past hovering as it revisits the light.

Edward Thomas