At the Team's Head-Brass

I went to a charity booksale today and was surprisingly self-restrained. I did emerge, however, (into the October rain), with a slim volume of poems by Edward Thomas, one of the most-celebrated nature poets of the early twentieth century. Whilst T.S.Eliot was busily adding one tortuous, esoteric phrase upon another, "making obscurity a creed" as someone once said, Thomas was following Hard's lead, using the language of the people to illuminate the beauty of the ordinary. We have Robert Frost to thank for turning Thomas, the hack writer, from prose to poetry. They met in London in 1913. Frost recognized the lyrcal quality of Thomas' best writing and encouraged him to follow the muse. Thomas went on to produce a third of his extant poetry within a mere six months.
One of Thomas' poems is called "At the Team's Head-Brass." A man sits on a fallen elm, watching a farmer plough a field with his team of horses. At every far turn the horse-brasses catch the sunlight; at every near turn the farmer and his watcher exchange a few words, mostly about the War, in France. As the poem begins, and as the team sets off to narrow the yellow square of the field, two lovers disappear into a distant wood. At the poem's end they reappear; the watcher realizes he will not watch that earth be turned again.
"The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team."
It's a poem of contrasts: the fertility of the ancient earth is echoed in the embrace of lovers. The contrast is barely mentioned. In England the fields are ploughed, as they have been for centuries, ready for the seedtime and the harvest. But that world is passing away. Not many miles away, in France, the fields are soaked with blood. Europe's manhood collapses in the embrace of death.
Edward Thomas was killed by a shell during the Battle of Arras on April 9th, 1917.

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There is a chilling beauty in simple words, not to be found in the over-elaboration of the professionally pedantic. That's a lesson a preacher would do well to remember.

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/tutorials/intro/thomas/head_brass.html