In Pursuit of Spring

by Edward Thomas

With this rusticity, if that be the right name for it, I cannot help connecting that most tyrannous obsession of the blindness of Fate, the carelessness of Nature, and the insignificance of Man, crawling in multitudes like caterpillars, twitched by the Immanent Will hither and thither. Over and over again, from the earliest poems up to the “Dynasts,” he amplifies those words which he puts into the mouth of God,—

“My labours, logicless,

You may explain; not I:

Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess

That I evolved a Consciousness

To ask for reasons why.”

And, referring to the earth,—

“It lost my interest from the first,

My aims therefor succeeding ill;

Haply it died of doing as it durst.