Edward Thomas

he summer nests uncovered by autumn wind,
Some torn, others dislodged, all dark,
Everyone sees them: low or high in tree,
Or hedge, or single bush, they hang like a mark

To-day I want the sky,
The tops of the high hills,
Above the last man's house,
His hedges, and his cows,

Running along a bank, a parapet That saves from the precipitous wood below The level road, there is a path
It serves Children for looking down the long smooth steep,
Between the legs of beech and yew, to where A fallen tree checks the si...

She had a name among the children;
But no one loved though someone
Her, locked her out of doors at
And had her kittens duly drowned

The glory of the beauty of the morning, -The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;
The blackbird that has found it, and the
That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;
White clouds ranged even and fair as new-mown hay;

Tall nettles cover up, as they have done These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now
This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bl...

The green elm with the one great bough of gold Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one, — The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white, Harebell and scabious and tormentil, That blackberry and gorse, in dew and sun, Bow down to; and th...

There they stand, on their ends, the fifty fag
That once were underwood of hazel and
In Jenny Pink's copse
Now, by the

In the gloom of whiteness,
In the great silence of snow,
A child was
And bitterly saying:`Oh,

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
Cold, yet had heat within me that was
Against the North wind; tired, yet so that
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof

The skylarks are far behind that sang over the down;
I can hear no more those suburb nightingales;
Thrushes and blackbirds sing in the gardens of the
In vain: the noise of man, beast, and machine prevails

Thinking of her had saddened me at first,
Until I saw the sun on the celandines
Redoubled, and she stood up like a flame,
A living thing, not what before I nursed,