“Roads” is a poem by English poet and critic Edward Thomas, written in 1916.
It evokes something of a journey, epic and cosmic, in slow motion, in which the traveler greets the mythological figures he meets on his way. Here’s the first stanzas:
I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favorite gods.
Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.
The poem has sixteen stanzas, which is a lot to be turned into a song … Besides the simply beautiful feelings that flow from those words, that’s what interested me. How do you build a song that could last so long without losing the listener’s interest?
I tried to embrace the idea of travel, imagining an “orchestral” and rhythmical evolution, which starts at one point, evolves like a story, and stops at its natural end. This story was to be linked to the fate of Edward Thomas who would die in France a few months later during the Battle of Arras, one of the deadliest of the First World War.
Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance
the last stanza, so full of modern anguish, serves as a coda:
Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
and their brief multitude.