Three by One
Three things I found, learned or enjoyed this week
Midsummer has tipped over and the year is holding its breath at its fullest — the light long, the hedgerows heavy, everything arrived and nothing yet going. This fortnight’s three turned out to share a single thread: the held minute. A stopped train, a soaring violin, a poem read slowly. Two of them were made in the same summer, on the very edge of something.
A poem to enjoy — Edward Thomas, “Adlestrop” — It has to be this one this fortnight, because Thomas wrote it out of a train that drew up, unwontedly, at a small Gloucestershire platform on 24 June 1914 — a hundred and twelve years ago to the day. Nothing happens. “No one left and no one came.” And then a blackbird, and behind it “all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire,” two whole counties opening out of one stilled moment. It is the quietest of the great poems and the most attentive — a lesson in how much an unbidden pause will give you, if you only let it.
A Substack to follow — Sixty Odd Poems, by Mike O’Brien — One poem at a time, read slowly and companionably, with footnotes that wander off down the best sort of side-roads. I came to it through his piece on The Lark Ascending, which sets the music beside “Adlestrop” and notices they were made in the same year, doing the same thing: the natural setting, the widening view, the moment caught just before the world changed. If you like being walked through a poem by someone who plainly loves it, this is a good table to sit at.
Music to sit with — Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Lark Ascending — Begun in 1914, the same summer as the train at Adlestrop, though not heard in full until after the war it seemed to foreshadow. The solo violin doesn’t describe the lark so much as become it, climbing its own thread of sound “without a break” while the orchestra keeps the landscape low and still beneath. Find a quiet quarter of an hour for it — any of the well-loved recordings will do. It is the sound of looking up.
A question for you
When did you last let a minute simply stop — no phone, no next thing — and notice what came into it? I’d love to hear what you found there.
A thought from me
What strikes me about all three is that the held moment isn’t empty; it is the opposite. The train stops and the birdsong of two counties pours in. Paying attention isn’t a way of leaving the world but of letting more of it reach you. Late June is generous like that, if you stand still long enough to be reached.
— Adam