Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday, August 12th, 2020.

Today's poem is by a British poet named Philip Edward Thomas, more often known as Edward Thomas.

He lived from 1878 to 1917. He's one of the most important poets of the early 20th century, and

unfortunately died at the age of 39 in

World War I. But he was highly influential for poets like W.H. Auden, W.H. Davies, and Ted Hughes.

And he was a letter writing, a pen pal, if you will, with Robert Frost. The poem that I'm going to read today is called Liberty,

and I'm reading it from Harold Bloom's collection,

The Best Poems of the English Language.

And I'll share some of his comments on this poem

and on Edward Thomas briefly in between readings.

So again, this is Edward Thomas' poem, Liberty.

The last light has gone out of the world,

except this moonlight lying on the grass like frost

beyond the brink of the tall elms shadow.

It is as if everything else had slept many in age,

unforgotten and lost.

The men that were the things done long ago, all I have thought.

And but the moon and I live, yet and here stand idle over a grave where all is buried.

Both have liberty to dream what we could do if we were free to do some thing we had desired long, the moon and I.

There is none less free than who does nothing and has nothing else to do, being free only for what is not to his mind, and nothing is to his mind.

If every hour like this one passing that I have spent among the wiser others when I have

forgot to wonder whether I was free or not were piled before me and not lost behind and I could take

...