On the surface, the poem ‘Adelstrop’ is straightforward enough. A train stops at a deserted station and the poet records his impressions while the train stands idle. Its musing tone is often taken as the jumping off point for a bucolic, essentially Engish vision of the countryside and our place in it. But I want to offer another perspective, one that has more to do with the metaphor of the train than the landscape.
One of the most striking things about the experience that Edward Thomas captures in his 16 line / 4 stanza verse is that it should not have happened at all. The train shouldn’t be there; it’s an ‘Express’ and it has stopped ‘unwontedly’ (archaic usage even at the time of its original writing).
As no-one knew it was going to stop at this particular station in advance, it is no surprise that there is no-one waiting to get on or get off; yet including these details emphasises the sense not only of something unscheduled happening, but that it will remain unexplained.
The sounds of the station are recorded too. Although the steam hisses (a sign of pent up energy being slowly released), it is still quiet enough to hear someone, sight unseen, clear their throat. Yet each carefully recorded sound serves only to emphasise the deep and sonorous stillness that the poem is really directing us towards.
Until moments before, the poet and the rest of his unseen travelling companions were on an express, with all the movement and speed and noise that that entails. Suddenly, all that heft and momentum and power is brought to a standstill. Just as suddenly, we connect with the heat and the silence of the immediate moment.
Though the details are so few, one becomes aware of the enormous sense of space between each of them, their minimalism imbuing them with an importance that we can only guess at. The quality of light, even though it isn’t mentioned directly, is tangibly there in the polar opposites of the ‘crisp dry haycocks’ and the ‘soft high cloudlets’. It’s there in the way the poet implies the residual heat that lies stored up in the earth; a very different sort of energy from the fire that’s producing the hissing steam we can hear.
The suddenness of the change from express to silent reverie heightens the senses; even while we read the next words, we linger with the poet for a full minute to listen to the singing of a blackbird. Its song is clear and loud enough to fill the foreground of our imaginative attention while echoes of birdsong recede into the vanishing point of a landscape that even the poet only senses rather than sees.
The natural world that we watched passively moments before as it slid by us on our non-stop rail-borne journey, suddenly and quietly captures us in a delicious suspension, as full and round as the vowels in the words ‘Oxfordshire’ and ‘Gloucestershire’.
Far stronger than the scene it conjures up, ‘Adelstrop’ captures a view of life from the vantage point of sudden detatchment, an extention of the natural state of our minds during a railway journey. The perspective offered gives us a chance to reflect, to question and to change ourselves before the express moves off once more.
More than all of this, as the reader reaches the last line, they realise on some level that they have just experienced what is being written about. Taking the time out from a hectic life to read a poem has given them the same opportunity as the poem’s narrator. Wherever they happen to be, their personal express comes to a halt unwondtedly. Their world tilts on its axis as they watch their life spiral away from them, fading further and further away like birdsong.
The pastoral surface is a gentle lure, just like the landscapes viewed from a moving train. ‘Adelstrop’ reels you in all unknowing, taking you on an unbidden journey. It turns into a Russian doll of a poem, each element opening up to reveal deeper, still more exquistely detailed ideas within.
