Best 18 quotes of Edward Thomas on MyQuotes

A merely great intellect can produce prose, but not poetry, not one line.

As well as any bloom upon a flower I like the dust on the nettles, never lost Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over.

I built myself a house of glass:It took me years to make it:And I was proud. But now, alas!Would God someone would break it.

If I should ever by chance grow richI'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,And let them all to my eldest daughter.

I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers - as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero.

I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,Sniff them and think and sniff again and tryOnce more to think what it is I am remembering,Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,With no meaning, than this bitter one.

Making war or rebellion is messy, like eating soup off a knife.

November’s days are thirty: November’s earth is dirty, Those thirty days, from first to last; And the prettiest things on ground are the paths.... Few care for the mixture of earth and water, Twig, leaf, flint, thorn, Straw, feather, all that men scorn, Pounded up and sodden by flood, Condemned as mud.

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed The speculating rooks at their nests cawed And saw from elm tops, delicate as flower of grass, What we below could not see, Winter pass.

Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey. Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin.

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood This Eastertide call into mind the men, Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should Have gathered them and will do never again.

The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.

To-day I think Only with scents, - scents dead leaves yield, And bracken, and wild carrot's seed, And the square mustard field; Odours that rise When the spade wounds the root of tree, Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed, Rhubarb or celery; The smoke's smell, too, Flowing from where a bonfire burns The dead, the waste, the dangerous, And all to sweetness turns. It is enough To smell, to crumble the dark earth, While the robin sings over again Sad songs of Autumn mirth." - A poem called DIGGING.

Verse is the natural speech of men, as singing is of birds'The Week's Survey, 18 June 1904

Yes; I remember Adlestrop- The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June.

I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more… The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything… I am alone. The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.

This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors Many a frozen night, and merrily Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores: "At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush," said he, "I slept." None knew which bush. Above the town, Beyond `The Drover', a hundred spot the down In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps More sound in France -that, too, he secret keeps.