“Adlestrop” (1917) is Edward Thomas’s most celebrated poem. It is a brief narrative poem of sixteen tetrameter lines in which an apparent non-event is remembered. The speaker has been on a train journey that has halted for one minute at a small rural station, where the platform is deserted and nobody gets on or off the train, so in most ordinary senses nothing has happened. But the very absence of action has provoked in the speaker, and in us as he takes us through this remembered minute, an enhanced attention to what is around him. He notices trivial sounds like somebody clearing his throat, then unremarkable sights like trees, clouds, and grass, then another sound of a blackbird, until he persuades himself that he hears the extended bird-life of the Cotswolds region around him.…
2013 words
Citation: Baldick, Chris. "Adlestrop". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 March 2021 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=40478, accessed 21 November 2024.]
