poem

The Glory, Sep 19, 2026

Edward Thomas

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THE glory of the beauty of the morning,--
The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;
The blackbird that has found it, and the dove
That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;
White clouds ranged even and fair as new-mown hay;
The heat, the stir, the sublime vacancy
Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart:--
The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning
All I can ever do, all I can be,
Beside the lovely of motion, shape, and hue,
The happiness I fancy fit to dwell
In beauty's presence. Shall I now this day
Begin to seek as far as heaven, as hell,
Wisdom or strength to match this beauty, start
And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops,
In hope to find whatever it is I seek,
Hearkening to short-lived happy-seeming things
That we know naught of, in the hazel copse?
Or must I be content with discontent
As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings?
And shall I ask at the day's end once more
What beauty is, and what I can have meant
By happiness? And shall I let all go,
Glad, weary, or both? Or shall I perhaps know
That I was happy oft and oft before,
Awhile forgetting how I am fast pent,
How dreary-swift, with naught to travel to,
Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core.

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📖 About this poem

Edward Thomas opens with a morning almost too generous to bear — cuckoo, blackbird, dove, clouds like new-mown hay — and then does something quietly radical: he lets that beauty accuse him instead of comfort him. The glory "invites" but also leaves him "scorning" his own smallness beside it. That turn is the poem's real subject, not nature itself but the ache of standing in front of something lovely and not knowing what to do with your own happiness in response.

The music matches the mind at work — long, unspooling sentences full of questions, as if Thomas is thinking aloud on a walk, unsure where the path or the syntax will end. The image of larks and swallows being "content with discontent" is a small, strange comfort. It still lands because most of us know that specific feeling: a beautiful day that somehow makes you sadder, more aware of time slipping, of never quite getting to "bite the day to the core."

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