Nothing Here Needed Saving, It Only Needed Someone to Prefer It: Edward Thomas's Tall Nettles and Exmoor's Simonsbath

In a corner of a farmyard, a rusty harrow, a worn-out plough, and a stone roller have vanished under nettles for years. Most poets would mourn that. Edward Thomas doesn't. In eight quiet lines, written during the war that would kill him within months, he simply confesses a preference: "This corner of the farmyard I like most." No metaphor, no lesson, no grief. Just liking, stated plainly.
Thomas came to poetry late, at thirty-six, after Robert Frost urged him to set his own prose out in lines. He wrote nearly 140 poems in two years before enlisting, and was killed at Arras in April 1917..
Alden then takes us to Simonsbath, deep on Exmoor, where in 1818 a wealthy ironmaster named John Knight tried to turn an entire wild moor into farmland — a twenty-nine-mile wall, roads, farmsteads, a failed mine. Two centuries on, the moor is quietly undoing all of it, unhurried and without malice.
The discussion asks why so much craft advice insists a poem must earn its subject through history, cost, or meaning — and what it would mean to write, instead, about something you simply like, for no reason you can name.
This is the final Somerset episode before the podcast moves to North Yorkshire next week.
Email a guest poem suggestion to aldencarrow78@gmail.com to enter the draw for a signed copy of Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, sent by hand. Also available on Amazon.
New episodes every Wednesday at 6am.