WORDS
by: Edward Thomas
- UT of us all
- That make rhymes,
- Will you choose
- Sometimes--
- As the winds use
- A crack in the wall
- Or a drain,
- Their joy or their pain
- To whistle through--
- Choose me,
- You English words?
-
- I know you:
- You are light as dreams,
- Tough as oak,
- Precious as gold,
- As poppies and corn,
- Or an old cloak;
- Sweet as our birds
- to the ear,
- As the burnet rose
-
- In the heat
- Of Midsummer:
- Strange as the races
- Of dead and unborn:
- Strange and sweet
- Equally,
- And familiar,
- To the eye,
- As the dearest faces
- That a man knows,
- And as lost homes are:
- But though older far
- Than oldest yew,--
- As our hills are, old,--
- Worn new
- Again and again:
- Young as our streams
- After rain:
- And as dear
- As the earth which you prove
- That we love.
-
- Make me content
- With some sweetness
- From Wales,
- Whose nightingales
- Have no wings,--
- From Wiltshire and Kent
- And Herefordshire,
- And the villages there,--
- From the names, and the things
- No less.
- Let me sometimes dance
- With you,
- Or climb,
- Or stand perchance
- In ecstasy,
- Fixed and free
- In a rhyme,
- As poets do.
'Words' is reprinted from An
Anthology of Modern Verse. Ed. A. Methuen. London: Methuen
& Co., 1921. |
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