November
By Edward Thomas
November’s days are thirty:
November’s earth is dirty,
Those thirty days, from first to last;
And the prettiest thing on ground are the paths
With morning and evening hobnails dinted,
With foot and wing-tip overprinted
Or separately charactered,
Of little beast and little bird.
The fields are mashed by sheep, the roads
Make the worst going, the best the woods
Where dead leaves upward and downward scatter.
Few care for the mixture of earth and water,
Twig, leaf, flint, thorn,
Straw, feather, all that men scorn,
Pounded up and sodden by flood,
Condemned as mud.
But of all the months when earth is greener
Not one has clean skies that are cleaner.
Clean and clear and sweet and cold,
They shine above the earth so old,
While the after-tempest cloud
Sails over in silence though winds are loud,
Till the full moon in the east
Looks at the planet in the west
And earth is silent as it is black,
Yet not unhappy for its lack.
Up from the dirty earth men stare:
One imagines a refuge there
Above the mud, in the pure bright
Of the cloudless heavenly light:
Another loves earth and November more dearly
Because without them, he sees clearly,
The sky would be nothing more to his eye
Than he, in any case, is to the sky;
He loves even the mud whose dyes
Renounce all brightness to the skies.
About the Poem
Edward Thomas’s “November” opens with blunt realism—mud, muck, and the mess of late autumn—but soon unfolds into a meditation on beauty, humility, and the interdependence between earth and sky. The poem’s first half dwells in the physical world: sheep-trampled fields, sodden leaves, the “mixture of earth and water” that most people scorn. Thomas does not romanticize this landscape; he names it for what it is—mud—yet finds in it a strange, quiet loveliness. Even the paths “hobnails dinted” with the marks of animals and people suggest the persistence of life and movement through bleakness.
In the second half, Thomas turns his gaze upward to the brilliant clarity of the November sky. After the storms have passed, the heavens appear “clean and clear and sweet and cold,” a mirror opposite to the sullied ground below. Yet he refuses to separate them. The poem ends by contrasting two ways of seeing: one who yearns for escape into the “pure bright” refuge of the sky, and another who loves the earth all the more for its imperfections. For Thomas, the latter vision is truer. Without the mud, there would be no sky—no brightness to contrast its purity. The poem thus becomes a subtle argument for groundedness, for finding grace not in transcendence but in the honest, dirty beauty of the world beneath our feet.
In “November,” Thomas achieves a spiritual balance between realism and reverence. His speaker does not seek heaven apart from earth but sees both as part of one continuous whole—each giving meaning to the other. The mud’s dull tones make the sky’s brilliance possible, just as human imperfection gives shape to our longing for clarity.
About the Poet
Edward Thomas (1878–1917) was a British poet, essayist, and nature writer whose work bridges the late Victorian and early modernist periods. Born in London to Welsh parents, he was a close observer of the English countryside, capturing its subtle moods with honesty and restraint.
Thomas’s poetry often reflects a tension between melancholy and wonder, combining the simplicity of rural life with the philosophical depth of modern thought. Encouraged by his friend Robert Frost to write verse, Thomas began publishing poetry only a few years before his death. His brief but remarkable career produced enduring works such as “Adlestrop,” “Rain,” and “November.”
In 1915, despite being nearly forty and deeply introspective by nature, Thomas enlisted in the British Army during World War I. He was killed in action in 1917 at the Battle of Arras. His poems, written in those last few years, remain some of the most quietly profound meditations on nature, time, and the human spirit in twentieth-century English poetry.
