Reading Edward Thomas aloud to an unsuspecting audience

I have a terrible memory, and it's this more than anything else that means I'll never be an actor. How on earth do they learn all those lines?

It's not for lack of trying that I can't remember lines - tonight I'm reading Edward Thomas's poem, 'As the team's head-brass', between a couple of scenes in our community play, and I've really made a go of learning it by heart.

I read it aloud in bed. I marched across the fields reciting it. I pinned it up in the kitchen so I could keep checking it.

No good. I learned the first stanza, but moving onto the second, I could feel those first hard-won lines falling out of my head again. So I'll be reading from the page.

But my attempts at learning the poem by heart have paid off. I'm a lot more confident about reading it, of course, but I've also seen so much more in the poem that I just slid over when reading it to myself.

Reading aloud to an audience, especially an audience that most likely don't read poetry from choice, really makes you think hard about what every line means. I want everyone in the room to feel the beauty of the poem, to see Thomas's images, to hear his sadness at leaving England for the front, and his knowledge that this is a place he loves so much it's worth defending.

Reading it as I first heard it in my head, the audience would hear little of this - I'm a lazy reader, I've found, reading too fast. Even if I read a poem aloud to myself, I don't go over and over a line that puzzles me, I say it just well enough to move on, and then move on. You can't do this when you're reading to other people - you have to work it all out, word by word, line break by line break.

In one of my attempts to tell the poem aloud from memory, I completely missed out the second line, 'The lovers disappeared into the wood.' It's easy to miss: the poem still makes perfect sense without it. But by leaving it out, you lose a rare smile in Thomas's poetry - he's glad they're off to make love and that their urge for life is so strong and unaffected by the death around them. At the end of the poem, the lovers reappear in a matching single line, just as Thomas is saying farewell to the scene before him and perhaps to his own life, and this acknowledgement that life will carry on, whatever happens, both softens the sadness and makes it more poignant.

After the lovers return - and this is easy to miss too - Thomas says 'The horses started and for the last time/ I watched the clods crumble and topple over/After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.' Because Thomas's style appears so conversational, the words 'for the last time' don't jump out at you - but here they are, at the end of a line, three lines from the end of the poem, leading us into a description of the breaking of earth with metal. Thomas is a subtle poet. He doesn't need to tell us what he sees ahead - he prepares the land and sows the seed, and leaves it to us to understand in the silence that follows.