Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern. Today is

February 18th, 2020. And the poem that I'm going to read today is by an English poet named

Edward Thomas. He lived from 1878 to 1917, wrote poems, essays, novels, and is one of the World War I poets, one of the war poets.

And unfortunately, he was actually killed in action during World War I in 1917 in France.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called February Afternoon.

It goes like this.

Men heard this roar of parlaying starlings, saw a thousand years ago, even as now, black rooks

with white gulls following the plow, so that the first are last until a caw commands

that last our first again. a law which was of old

when one like me dreamed how a thousand years might dust lie on his brow, yet thus would birds

do between hedge and shaw. Time swims before me, making as a day a thousand years,

while the broad plowland oak roars mill-like,

and men strike and bear the stroke of war as ever,

audacious or resigned,

and God still sits aloft in the array that we have wrought him,

stone deaf and stone blind.

So this seems like a dark poem, I suppose, and perhaps even a nihilist poem at first glance.

But it's a very skilled poem, and I don't think that it's as nihilistic as many people read it to be.

It's certainly a poem about the passing of time, about the way time works on us and against us.

The phrase, a thousand years, is used, I believe, at least three times, perhaps four times in this poem.

This is a Petrarchan sonnet

and the first eight

...