Monography

Today, April 9, being the anniversary of Edward Thomas’s death in action in 1917, I thought I would share what Dylan Thomas said about him in his radio talk, Welsh Poets, produced by John Arlott and broadcast on the BBC Eastern Service January 5 1946.

“He loved the fields, the woods, the winding roads, he knew a thousand country things: the diamonds of rain on the grassblades, the ghostly white parsley flower, mouse and wren and robin, each year’s first violets, the missel-thrush that loves juniper, hawthorn berry, hazel-tuft, new-mown hay, the cuckoo crying over the untouched dew, churches, graveyards, farms and byres, children, wild geese, horses in the sun. 

“And when, indeed, he was killed in Flanders, a mirror of England was shattered of so pure and true a crystal that a cleverer and tenderer reflection can be found no other where than in these poems.”

[Collected in written form, Quite Early One Morning (1954) Dent, London, page 143.]