Ah, the Dymock poets. Which included Edward Thomas and Robert Frost. I believe that local scholars even claim to have identified the two roads that divided in a yellow wood somewhere near the village. Anybody ever been to Dymock?
Having mentioned these two roads, it strikes me that the road itself is another theme that was common to many of these poets - in particular, the open road. It's a theme that probably comes down from writers like George Borrow and Richard Jefferies - writers that Edward Thomas, for example, admired greatly. I know Whitman wrote "Song of the Open Road", but he was really celebrating the fact that it was a public road, one that linked everyone in democratic fashion, whereas the English poets are always walking along country roads, and nearly always alone. Here's W. H. Davies, the "supertramp", in "Return to Nature":
Quote:
Seek me no more where men are thick,
But in green lanes where I can walk
A mile, and still no human folk
Tread on my shadow.
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Frost wrote "The Road Not Taken" about Thomas and sent it to him in a letter and the later poem he wrote in commemoration of him, "Iris by Night", celebrates a walk they took together. As it's not very well-known, and as it's fairly Georgian in spirit, I'll post it here:
Quote:
One misty evening, one another’s guide,
We two were groping down a Malvern side
The last wet fields and dripping hedges home.
There came a moment of confusing lights,
Such as according to belief in Rome
Were seen of old at Memphis on the heights
Before the fragments of a former sun
Could concentrate anew and rise as one.
Light was a paste of pigment in our eyes.
And then there was a moon and then a scene
So watery as to seem submarine;
In which we two stood saturated, drowned.
The clover-mingled rowan on the ground
Had taken all the water it could as dew,
And still the air was saturated too,
Its airy pressure turned to water weight.
Then a small rainbow like a trellis gate,
A very small moon-made prismatic bow,
Stood closely over us through which to go.
And then we were vouchsafed the miracle
That never yet to other two befell
And I alone of us have lived to tell.
A wonder! Bow and rainbow as it bent,
Instead of moving with us as we went,
(To keep the pots of gold from being found)
It lifted from its dewy pediment
Its two mote-swimming many-colored ends,
And gathered them together in a ring.
And we two stood in it softly circled round
From all division time or foe can bring
In a relation of elected friends.
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