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No-One Left and No-One Came

Daljit Nagra selects Edward Thomas’ No One Left and No One Came and we hear the story behind the poem ‘Adelstrop’. From 2001.

Edward Thomas died exactly 100 years ago on the battlefields of the First World War. To commemorate that moment, Â鶹Éç Radio 4's Poet in Residence, Daljit Nagra revisits the Â鶹Éç's radio poetry archive with Thomas's uneventful poem about inactivity and solitude 'No One Left and No One Came'.

In Edward Thomas's poem Adlestrop a train stops, there's a hiss of steam, someone clears his throat and a blackbird sings. And that's it. Yet this 16 line poem is one of the best-loved in English, inspiring articles, pilgrimages to the Cotswold village and many other poems. Anne Harvey tells the story of how it came to be written and explores the fascination of a short poem in which nothing happens but which deals with large themes: memory, time, naming, sound - and fear.

Producer: Julian May

First broadcast on Â鶹Éç Radio 4 in 2001.

30 minutes

Broadcasts

  • Sun 9 Apr 2017 17:00
  • Mon 10 Apr 2017 05:00
  • Sun 20 Sep 2020 12:00
  • Sun 20 Sep 2020 17:00
  • Mon 21 Sep 2020 05:00