Wordsworth frequently situates his meditative poems within or near copses, the small intimate woodlands providing both physical shelter and the reflective atmosphere his verse requires — "a copse of birches by the stream"; Keats's landscape poetry uses copse to frame the middle distance of a pastoral scene — nearer than the forest, more structured than the hedgerow, the small wood as a compositional element in the poem's visual field; A poet might write "the copse held its darkness even at noon, a small theorem of shadow in the bright geometry of the summer field"; In elegies for the English countryside, the loss of a copse — grubbed out for arable land — represents the erasure of a small but complete ecosystem, the wood and all its inhabitants replaced by the monotony of a single crop; Edward Thomas's walking poems move through landscapes punctuated by copses — the small woodlands functioning as resting points, navigation markers, and moments of shade and concealment in an otherwise open landscape; The word's single syllable and hard final consonant give it a compactness that suits the thing it names — the copse is contained, self-sufficient, complete in itself, and the word enacts this quality.