Page:Poems (Edward Thomas, 1917).djvu/33

 For the life in them he loved most living things,

But a tree chiefly. All along the lane

He planted elms where now the stormcock sings

That travellers hear from the slow-climbing train

Till then the track had never had a name

For all its thicket and the nightingales

That should have earned it. No one was to blame.

To name a thing beloved man sometimes fails.

Many years since, Bob Hayward died, and now

None passes there because the mist and the rain

Out of the elms have turned the lane to slough

And gloom, the name alone survives, Bob's Lane.

EARLY ONE MORNING

one morning in May I set out,

And nobody I knew was about.

I'm bound away for ever,

Away somewhere, away for ever.

There was no wind to trouble the weathercocks.

I had burnt my letters and darned my socks.

No one knew I was going away,

I thought myself I should come back some day.

I heard the brook through the town gardens run.

O sweet was the mud turned to dust by the sun.

A gate banged in a fence and banged in my head.

"A fine morning, sir," a shepherd said.

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