If you see the words “daffodil” and “poetry” in the same sentence you might well think of William Wordsworth wandering about the Like District with his sister Dorothy and being confronted by a trumpeting host of golden blossoms. But if you’ve been to a daffodil weekend in Dymock, or its near neighbour Kempley, then other poets may spring to mind. These annual events take place around the end of March when visitors can take guided tours to see meadows of wild daffodils.
Along the way your tour guide will almost certainly tell the story of the Dymock Poets. Between 1911 and 1915 a group of poets, some celebrated at the time, some who found fame later, gathered in the delightful corner of Gloucestershire that abuts Herefordshire. The half dozen men of letters who formed this writers’ colony produced a quarterly magazine titled New Numbers, which they dispatched to subscribers from Dymock Post Office.
It was a journal that introduced a new style of poetry, along with poems that remain favourites to the present day. Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” (If I should die think only this of me, That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England..
.) first appeared in New Numbers. Brooke and John Drinkwater arrived in Dymock at the invitation of a fellow poet named Lascelles Abercrombie who lived at Ryton in a cottage named The Gallows.
Not the most attractive name you might think, but it provided a peaceful setting for Mr Abercrombie to put pen to paper. .