{
 "id": "edward-thomas/the-watchers",
 "title": "The Watchers",
 "ordinal": null,
 "subtitle": null,
 "poet": "Edward Thomas",
 "poet_slug": "edward-thomas",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "Poetry",
 "book_slug": null,
 "book_kind": "compilation",
 "sequence": null,
 "container": null,
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1927,
  "venue": "Two Poems (London, Ingpen & Grant, 1927)",
  "note": "Not verified against the page. Standard Ebooks names four sources for this gathering: Gutenberg 22423 (Poems, 1917), Gutenberg 22732 (Last Poems, 1918), a Collected Poems, and Two Poems (Ingpen & Grant, 1927), whose Google Books record gives it as eight pages. The 1917 and 1918 books do not contain this poem, and neither does the 1920 Selwyn & Blount Collected Poems, whose contents leaf and text were read here (archive.org collectedpoemswi00thomuoft). Two poems in the gathering are left unaccounted for, this one and the other of the pair, and one two-poem pamphlet is left unaccounted for, so the pamphlet is taken to be their printing. That is an argument from the source list, not a page anyone here has read: no copy of Two Poems is held, and its contents have not been confirmed. The title is also unsettled: the First World War Poetry Digital Archive record for the manuscript (Oxford item 88817) states that the manuscript carries no title, that a Collected Poems named the poem from its first line, and that The Watchers is Edna Longley’s title in her 2008 annotated edition. Whether the 1927 pamphlet printed a title, and which, is not established here.",
  "uncertain": true,
  "sources": [
   "https://www.google.com/books/edition/Two_Poems/3ycPAAAAQAAJ",
   "https://archive.org/details/collectedpoemswi00thomuoft",
   "https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.25692810.v1"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/edward-thomas_poetry",
  "file": "poetry.xhtml",
  "upstream": [
   "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22423",
   "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22732",
   "https://www.google.com/books/edition/Collected_Poems/LMsEAQAAIAAJ",
   "https://www.google.com/books/edition/Two_Poems/3ycPAAAAQAAJ"
  ],
  "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)"
 },
 "verification": {
  "level": "structural-only",
  "last_checked": "2026-08-20"
 },
 "stats": {
  "n_lines": 8,
  "n_stanzas": 2,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 60,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "By the Ford at the town’s edge",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Horse and carter rest:",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The carter smokes on the bridge",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Watching the water press in swathes about his horse’s chest.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "From the inn one watches, too,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "In the room for visitors",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That has no fire, but a view",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And many cases of stuffed fish, vermin, and kingfishers.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}