A Neverending Love Story

Under The Sudden Blue
Sylvia Townsend Warner

Under the sudden blue, under the embrace
of the relenting air, under the restored shadow
of the bird flying over the sunny meadow,
the garden ground
preserves an unconvinced and sullen face;
as though
it yet remembered the smite of frost, the wound of snow.
Automatically and without grace
it puts forth monosyllables of green,
answers Yes, or No,
with a muddy daisy, or a celandine,
or in ravel of last year's weeds lies winter-wound.
Poor cadet earth, so clumsly and so slow,
how, labouring with clods, can she keep pace
with air, the firstborn element, tossing clouds to and fro?

And yet she answers with a spurt
of crocus, and makes light
of snow with snowdrops, and her celandine
is burnished to reflect the sun.

How like your absense this winter has been!
Long vapours stretched between
me and your light, I saw you bright
beyond them, but your shine
fondled a field not mine.

There was the illumination and there the flight
of shadows black as night;
but I looked round
ever on the same november clear-obscure of dun
and grey and sallow and ash-colour and sere;
even my snows were white
not long, and melted into dirt.
Put out your hand.  Feel me.  Though the spring is here
I am still cold.

Because of this, because of the winter's hurt,
because I am of the earth element,
dusky, stubborn, retentive, slow to take hold, slow to loose hold,
because even to my hair's end I carry the scent
of peat and wood-smoke and of leaf-mould,
and because I have been
so long your tillage, so deeply your well-worked ground,
you must be patient;
forgiving my lack of green, my lack of grace,
my stammering blossoms one by one
shoved out, and my face doubtful under the sudden blue, under the embrace
of the relenting, of the returning sun.

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