English Poetry. Edward Thomas. Words. Эдвард Томас.

Edward Thomas (Эдвард Томас)

Words

Out of us all
That make rhymes
Will you choose
Sometimes -
As the winds use
A crack in a 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. 

Edward Thomas’s other poems:

1. The Huxter
2. For These
3. The Cherry Trees
4. The Long Small Room
5. How at Once

Poems of other poets with the same name (Стихотворения других поэтов с таким же названием):

William Yeats (Уильям Йейтс) Words (“I HAD this thought a while ago”)

Sylvia Plath (Сильвия Плат) Words (“Axes after whose stroke the wood rings”)

Ella Wilcox (Элла Уилкокс) Words (“Words are great forces in the realm of life”)

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