Comparing Thomas 'Adlestrop And The Tuft Of Flowers'

Thomas and Frost both write about the experience of unexpected joy.
In Edward Thomas’ “Adlestrop” and Robert Frosts’ “The Tuft of Flowers” we read about the speakers experiences of unexpected joy through the poet’s aspects of imagery, form, language and tone of each of their poems.
In Frosts’ poem “The Tuft of Flowers” the speaker, at first, is musing on the separateness of mankind and the workers. Whilst he muses this he is led by a butterfly to gaze upon a tuft of flowers that has been left by the mower he had been following and the speaker is touched by the appreciation of beauty and feels a sense of togetherness looking at the flowers, banishing his loneliness and isolation which is shown at the beginning of the poem “And I must be,
He says “…I must be, as he had been – alone” the word “alone” shows loneliness and isolation which at the end is transformed to the joyful statement “Men work together” showing the speakers view of universal togetherness. Frost uses heroic couplets to show the epic scope of the speaker’s experience of unexpected joy and shows the poems emphasis on harmony and clarity, whereas in Thomas’ “Adlestrop” his rhyming ABCB conveys the speakers attempt to order his recollection of his unexpected joy. The first half of “Adlestop” has a lot of punctuation, dashes “Yes I remember Adlestrop-” and full stops “...unwontedly. It was late June.” showing a fractured structure and his memory of the experience is not very clear, however in the second half of the poem there is less punctuation showing his recollection of the experience is becoming clearer. “Adlestrop” beings as though it is answering a question “Yes, I remember Adlestrop” and the speaker is recalling his experience and he reminisces about it whereas in “The Tuft of Flowers” no question has been asked it is more the speaker’s