A PLAY at Ledbury's Market Theatre will mark the centenary anniversary of the death of the Dymock poet, Edward Thomas.

Thomas was killed in France at the Battle of Arras in April, 1917, and a play by Nick Dear, The Dark Earth and the Light Sky, will look at the poet's friendship with Robert Frost, his marriage to Helen and the mutual affection that developed between Edward Thomas and the writer Eleanor Farjeon.

Farjeon is best known today as the person who wrote the words for "Morning Has Broken".

The Dymock Poets were a group of writers who visited or lived in the Dymock area, near Ledbury, just prior to the First World War.

Their numbers included Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke; but although Farjeon was a talented writer, she is not usually included in their number, as an official "member".

In reality, she was very much part of the circle: being present, for instance at an infamous farm supper near Dymock, when Frost and Thomas drank far too much cider and found they could not stand.

The shy and cat-loving Farjeon first met Thomas in the autumn of 1912, when her brother invited him to tea.

A friendship soon developed between the married Thomas and the bespectacled Farjeon, which may not have been a love affair in a physical sense, but was no less intense for all that.

They wrote letters to each other; but her letters to him do not survive, which is curious, perhaps. Did Thomas destroy the letters so that his wife, Helen, could not read them?

The writer Margaret Keeping, in her study, "A Conscious Englishman", is in not doubt that it was certainly love on the part of Farjeon.

She wrote: " She fell in love and she continued to love him when that first ‘in love’ phase passed. He knew, of course, but she sensed that she must never speak about her love for him. A few close friends knew – and her mother, who was dismayed and disapproving.

"On the first occasion that she went to visit the Thomases, Helen realised it at once. Seeing that Eleanor loved her husband, her response, her strategy perhaps, was to make sure that she became Eleanor’s loving friend too."

After Thomas's death, the friendship between the two woman would endure.

The Dark Earth and the Light Sky will enjoy a run at the Market Theatre from April 27 to April 29, from 8pm each evening.

Tickets on, 07967 517125.