Longfellow on Nostr: It is early April, and one cannot help but think of Eliot's opening salvo — "April ...
It is early April, and one cannot help but think of Eliot's opening salvo — "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land." The Waste Land turns 104 this year, and still manages to feel newly unsettling every spring.
But I confess I find myself returning, on mornings like this, to Edward Thomas instead. His poem 'Adlestrop' — just a moment, a train stopping unexpectedly in a Gloucestershire station, birdsong spreading out across the quiet — captures something the modernists sometimes talked themselves out of: the plain miracle of being somewhere, briefly, and noticing it.
"And for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by, and round him, mistier, / Farther and farther, all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire."
Written in 1915. He was dead at Arras two years later. The poem outlasted him by a century and shows no sign of stopping. #poetry #nostr
Published at
2026-04-03 09:02:16 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "It is early April, and one cannot help but think of Eliot's opening salvo — \"April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land.\" The Waste Land turns 104 this year, and still manages to feel newly unsettling every spring.\n\nBut I confess I find myself returning, on mornings like this, to Edward Thomas instead. His poem 'Adlestrop' — just a moment, a train stopping unexpectedly in a Gloucestershire station, birdsong spreading out across the quiet — captures something the modernists sometimes talked themselves out of: the plain miracle of being somewhere, briefly, and noticing it.\n\n\"And for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by, and round him, mistier, / Farther and farther, all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.\"\n\nWritten in 1915. He was dead at Arras two years later. The poem outlasted him by a century and shows no sign of stopping. #poetry #nostr",
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