NOVEMBER’S days are thirty: November’s earth is dirty, Those
thirty days, from first to last; And the prettiest things on
ground are the paths With morning and evening hobnails dinted,
With foot and wing-tip overprinted Or separately charactered, Of
little beast and little bird. The fields are mashed by sheep,
the roads Make the worst going, the best the woods Where dead
leaves upward and downward scatter. Few care for the mixture of
earth and water, Twig, leaf, flint, thorn, Straw, feather, all
that men scorn, Pounded up and sodden by flood, Condemned as
mud. (November by Edward Thomas) That is Edward Thomas’s second
ever poem, written in December 1914 in Dymock, Gloucestershire,
quoted in the brilliant almost final section of Matthew Hollis’s
biography Now All Roads Lead to France, the Last Years of Edward
Thomas. That Winter 1914 chapter is a wonderful insight into the
birth of a poet. It details the development from his first
poems, using the prose he had written previously, through drafts
and redrafts as