A year before he died at Arras, Edward Thomas wrote "Tall Nettles"—eight lines about some old farm tools going under the nettles. He declined to feel sorry for them. That refusal is the poem. Faced with something neglected, most of us feel the same reflex. A derelict building, an overgrown garden, machinery going green at the edges. We assume it has fallen from a better state, and that the proper response is to restore it or to mourn it. Pity Arrives Before Thought Does Two p

Two hundred years ago a farm labourer watched surveyors draw lines across the common ground he loved. What he did next is the most useful thing I know about how to write a place. Here is the idea underneath everything below, and it turns out to be the whole reason I write any of this down. Nothing here is waiting for us. That is exactly what makes it worth the looking. Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry opens on that principle, in a poem whose title is deliberatel