Finals Week Attack!
I'm going to start locking posts about my volunteer work and academics. No sense having that much information about my activities out on display. Sometimes I consider going back and making all non-thematic entries (i.e., everything except the poetry) private, but I feel that would diminish the whole of the journal. Each of the poems and songs I have chosen to go in it has meant something, and the non-thematic posts include revelations about what was behind some of them. I've learned a lot about myself in the four years that I've kept this journal.
Now I was planning to post about how I just turned in my papyrology final, or about how the spectacular melodrama of Callirhoe and how I will never have to read it again, or about the way Santa Barbara Boy absolutely made my morning with some hilarious mangled Greek. But then, going by my own new rules, I would have to lock the post. And I think I want to tie this one in to my theme after all. So here is a poem for June. June 1917, to be precise.
Adlestrop
Edward Thomas
Yes. I remember Adlestrop--
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop--only the name.
And willows, willow herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Savor the moment.
Now I was planning to post about how I just turned in my papyrology final, or about how the spectacular melodrama of Callirhoe and how I will never have to read it again, or about the way Santa Barbara Boy absolutely made my morning with some hilarious mangled Greek. But then, going by my own new rules, I would have to lock the post. And I think I want to tie this one in to my theme after all. So here is a poem for June. June 1917, to be precise.
Adlestrop
Edward Thomas
Yes. I remember Adlestrop--
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop--only the name.
And willows, willow herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Savor the moment.