The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas

by Edward Thomas

A TALE THERE once the walls Of the ruined cottage stood. The periwinkle crawls With flowers in its hair into the wood. In flowerless hours Never will the bank fail, With everlasting flowers On fragments of blue plates, to tell the tale.

PARTING THE Past is a strange land, most strange. Wind blows not there, nor does rain fall: If they do, they cannot hurt at all. Men of all kinds as equals range The soundless fields and streets of it. Pleasure and pain there have no sting, The perished self not suffering That lacks all blood and nerve and wit, And is in shadow-land a shade. Remembered joy and misery Bring joy to the joyous equally; Both sadden the sad. So memory made Parting to-day a double pain: First because it was parting; next Because the ill it ended vexed And mocked me from the Past again, Not as what had been remedied Had I gone on,—not that, oh no! But as itself no longer woe; Sighs, angry word and look and deed Being faded: rather a kind of bliss, For there spiritualized it lay In the perpetual yesterday That naught can stir or stain like this.