The Mind

Beauty

by Edward Thomas 1878–1917

From Last Poems (1918)

The MindNature

What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph--
"Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one." Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening while it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unswerving to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.

✦ ✦ ✦

A tired speaker composes a mock epitaph, 'Here lies all that no one loved of him / And that loved no one', and then sends his heart 'like a dove' to a tree in a quiet vale where Beauty is.

MLA

Thomas, Edward. “Beauty.” Poetry Codex, poetrycodex.com/poem/thomas_e/38/.

Chicago

Thomas, Edward. “Beauty.” Poetry Codex. https://poetrycodex.com/poem/thomas_e/38/.

Read this poem with the Codex →

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