Poem of the Week – Lights Out by Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas is perhaps the greatest exponent of native English verse in modern times. Starting his brief but explosive career late in his short yet eventful life, Thomas was initially a professional critic and famous nature diarist. A close friend and champion of Robert Frost, historians have speculated that the Nobel Prize winner’s poem, The Road Not Taken, was intended to be a subtle jibe at Thomas’s indecision over joining the army during the Great War. Less than two years after signing up, Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras, in Northern France, in 1917.

Often labelled a “war poet”, the bulk of his subject matter is meticulously concerned with nature and displays a deep knowledge and understanding of the flora and fauna of the English countryside.

An aficionado of subtle structural amendments and captor of lyrical cadences, Thomas quietly cultivated a new kind of English verse. The dawn of modernism soon eclipsed the delicate yet dramatic developments Thomas, and several other Georgian poets made.

Ted Hughes called him “the father to us all”. Picasso said something similar about Cezanne. Like Cezanne, Thomas can present an ostensibly subdued and unambitious piece with a setting and theme that belies its originality and ingenuity. This week’s selection is Lights Out. It musically describes a surrender to sleep, be it temporary or permanent. We hope you enjoy this week’s poem as much as we did.

Lights Out by Edward Thomas

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn’s first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.

Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends;
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter, and leave, alone,
I know not how.

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.