"Adlestrop" is a poem by Edward Thomas. It is based on a railway journey Thomas took on 24 June 1914, during which his train briefly stopped at the now-closed station in the Gloucestershire village of Adlestrop. The poem was written, not during or immediately after the 1914 journey, but at Thomas's leisure. He began making notes for it the following January, and created several versions of the poem before it was ready for publication. Since then, the poem has become symbolic of a turning-point in Thomas's literary career, and is used as such in the title of Jean Moorcroft Wilson's 2015 biography of the poet. Although not, strictly speaking, a war poem, it has become popular in anthologies because of its reference to a peaceful time and place, only a short time before the outbreak of the First World War. Thomas enlisted the following year, and was killed in 1917, just before the poem was due to be printed in his collection Poems, published by Henry Holt and Company. It was published in the New Statesman, three weeks after he died. Thomas's earlier career had mainly been as a writer of prose, his first collection of poems having been published only in 1916. The change in creative direction is often attributed to the influence of Robert Frost. One hundred years to the day after the original journey, an "Adlestrop Centenary Special" Cotswold Line train was arranged, carrying 200 passengers from Oxford to Moreton-in-Marsh and stopping at Adlestrop in the place where the station formerly stood. Adlestrop village also held a celebration to mark the centenary, with a public reading of the poem by Robert Hardy.
Text of the poem
Yes. I remember Adlestrop The name, because one afternoon Of heat, 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. What I saw Was Adlestrop—only the name And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky. And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
