Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 124
A Nature Book Reader
TRACEY THORN
Singer, songwriter, gardening columnist
Poetry of Edward Thomas
by Edward Thomas
My favourite is a poem
called The Brook, which
simply describes a child
paddling in a brook on a
hot summer’s day. It’s a
scene of complete peace and
tranquility, there’s almost a
sense that time has stopped,
and watching the child, and
the stream, and a butterfly
on a rock, he has a sense of
losing himself entirely, and
at the same time feeling
connected with the ancient
dead lying in the ground
below. Thomas is usually
regarded as a war poet, and
many of his poems, written
between 1915 and 1917, deal
with the suffering of the First
World War, and this poem
seems to yearn towards a
recapturing of peace and
innocence.
“No one’s been here
before” the child says, and
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it’s a line that I always think
of whenever I’m anywhere
quiet and still in the
countryside.
