‘What will they do when I am gone?’

Edward Thomas was gloomy as Eeyore. In 1906 he complained to a friend that his writing ‘was suffering more & more from a silly but unavoidable nervous interest in the children’s movement in and out of the house’. The following year, he noted, I have no ‘interests’ at all, and marriage, he said, is ‘continually encrusting the soul’.