Adlestrop by Edward Thomas (1917): a remembered moment when an express train stopped at a quiet country station one June afternoon, and how Thomas uses four quatrains, pauses and a view that widens at the end.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the collection it compares well with, and on which themes.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Yes. I remember Adlestrop', 'the express-train drew up there', 'Unwontedly. It was late June.', 'The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.', 'No one left and no one came / On the bare platform', 'Was Adlestrop—only the name', 'And willows, willow-herb, and grass', 'No whit less still and lonely fair', 'And for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by', 'Farther and farther, all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire'.
Form and structure: four quatrains, a conversational opening, short sentences and pauses that stop the poem as the train stops, then a final sentence that widens from one blackbird to the birds of two counties.
Language: sounds in a silence (the hiss of steam, a cough, birdsong), a list of plants, the bare platform and the name alone, and the dreamlike word 'mistier'.
Context: Thomas's train journey from Paddington on 24 June 1914, noted in his notebook; his turn from prose to poetry at the end of 1914, encouraged by Robert Frost; his enlistment in 1915 and death at Arras on 9 April 1917; and the poem's picture of a peaceful England just before the First World War.
Compares well with: To Autumn (a rich, still moment in nature), Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 (stillness and silence), First Flight (a journey) and Where the Picnic was (memory of a place).
