On this day in 1914, an emerging poet was on a train journey with his wife from London to Malvern. As it has been in the UK recently, it was a very warm day when the train stopped temporarily at a red signal. The young man jotted this down,

"Then we stopped at Adlestrop, thro the willows cd be heard a chain of blackbird songs at 12.45 & one thrush & no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam. Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willow herb & meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel - looking out on grey dry stones between metals & the shiny metals & over it all the elms willows & long grass - one man clears his throat - and a greater rustic silence. No house in view Stop only for a minute till signal is up."

The couple were on the way to a gathering of what would become known as the Dymock Poets: Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, Robert Frost, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, and our young man, Edward Thomas. John Drinkwater became part of the group but was not present at that get-together.

Gibson captured the meeting in metric pose...

Do you remember the still summer evening

When, in the cosy cream-washed living-room

Of The Old Nailshop, we all talked and laughed -

Our neighbours from The Gallows,

Catherine And Lascelles Abercrombie; Rupert Brooke;

Elinor and Robert Frost, living a while

At Little Iddens, who'd brought over with them

Helen and Edward Thomas? In the lamplight

We talked and laughed; but, for the most part, listened

While Robert Frost kept on and on and on,

In his slow New England fashion, for our delight,

Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips,

And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes?

We sat there in the lamplight, while the day

Died from rose-latticed casements, and the plovers

Called over the low meadows, till the owls

Answered them from the elms, we sat and talked -

Now, a quick flash from Abercrombie; now,

A murmured dry half-heard aside from Thomas;

Now, a clear laughing word from Brooke; and then

Again Frost's rich and ripe philosophy,

That had the body and tang of good draught-cider,

And poured as clear a stream.

Edward Thomas, was the emerging poet I mentioned earlier and sadly he had less than three years to live. It was of Edward that Robert Frost, with Edward's indecisive behaviour in mind when they were out walking in the countryside together, would write 'The Road Not Taken'.

Despite his early death Edward would become arguably one of Britain's most influential poets. Frost would say, "He gave me standing as a poet, he more than anyone else" and later "Edward Thomas was the closest friend I ever had and I was the closest friend he ever had; and this was something I didn’t wait to realise after he had died. It makes his death almost too much to talk about".

Others poets as diverse as WH Auden, Philip Larkin and Derek Walcott also acknowledged their debt to Edward. And here's what Edward wrote, almost in answer to Gibson, of that short stop at Adlestrop on a hot June day over a century ago...

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.