Tall Nettles Poem by Edward Thomas

Oh my! I googled this after forty years. I have loved this poem so long, having read it I think in the Telegraph in 1976. Never forgotten. I smelled the dust on nettles, never lost in the courtyard of Clubley's farm on Spurn Head back in the sixties collecting unpasteurised milk from the parlour at seven in the morning. The milk was still warm and so is this poem in my heart. It spoke so clearly to me then and still does. The imagery remains intact. Ace.

this has long been one of my favourite poems, it is a lightning flash of an image and the poet makes it so clear what he wants you to see, this inconsequential corner where he may sit and gaze, in safety, at the mundanity of the world that. for him, as for millions of others, was about to change forever with the advent of WW1. The power in these few lines can take on a mantra like quality and also offers an early example of less is more. Here the microcosm of the abandoned corner of the yard reflects the chaos to come and the impossibility it is to return to an innocent and simpler life.

Really e. thomas, with a few words, is expresing his life; he loves English landscape and he enjoyed how nature survive against artificial things or tools; in this way, tall nettles cover the rusty harrow; his life is a fight too, he looks a very nervous man fighting for the country he loves, so he write 'this corner of the farmyard I like most' to end with a few pleasure words' the sweetness of a shower; His poems are a mixture of love for Eglish landscape and the nature life; his words, with sweetness adorn his passions.