Explore the poem

This meditation on sleep as welcome rest and as the ultimate rest of death was written during the First World War when Thomas was serving in France. He did not survive the war.

Thomas compares the moment just before falling into a deep sleep to reaching the border of a dense forest. Notice the use of the image of a road or track, which  suggests a journey or a purposeful sense of direction, and yet in this poem the road does not lead to anywhere but oblivion.

Consider the third verse, where Thomas seems to confront directly the prospect of death. What does the poem suggest will end with death?

In the penultimate verse Thomas appears to be choosing to turn from the known world of books and people to embrace the unknown, and he expresses a powerful realisation that he must do this ‘alone’, repeatedly using the active pronoun ‘I’.

The poem ends with the paradox of hearing silence and Thomas’s reference once again to the forest, with all its traditional associations of enchantment, mystery and danger.

About Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas is often thought of as a war writer, but by 1914 he was already the father of three children and had been supporting his family for some years through book reviewing and writing essays (especially about the English countryside) and biographies. His novel The Happy‑Go‑Lucky Morgans was published in 1913.

He began to produce poetry in 1914, partly encouraged by his friendship with the American poet Robert Frost, who was living near Thomas in England at the time. Frost urged Thomas to move with his family to New England, but Thomas enlisted in 1915. He was killed by a shell blast in France in 1917.

He wrote many poems between 1915 and 1917, recording both his experiences of war and his response to the countryside around him with the kind of meditative thoughtfulness seen in one of his most widely read and loved poems, written before the war, ‘Adlestrop’.