John Drinkwater

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May Garden

A shower of green gems on my apple tree

This first morning of May

Has fallen out of the night, to be

Herald of holiday --

Bright gems of green that, fallen there,

Seem fixed and glowing on the air.

Until a flutter of blackbird wings

Shakes and makes the boughs alive,

And the gems are now no frozen things,

But apple-green buds to thrive

On sap of my May garden, how well

The green September globes will tell.

Also my pear tree has its buds

But they are silver-yellow,

Like autumn meadows when the floods

Are silver under willow,

And here shall long and shapely pears

Be gathered while the autumn wears.

And there are sixty daffodils

Beneath my wall. . . .

And jealousy it is that kills

This world when all

The spring's behaviour here is spent

To make the world magnificent.

The Midlands

Black in the summer night my Cotwold hill

Aslant my window sleeps, beneath a sky

Deep as the bedded violets that fill

March woods with dusky passion. As I lie

Abed between cool walls I watch the host

Of the slow stars lit over Gloucester plain,

And drowsily the habit of these most

Beloved of English lands moves in my brain,

While silence holds dominion of the dark,

Save when the foxes from the spinneys bark.

I see the valleys in their morning mist

Wreathed under limpid hills in moving light,

Happy with many a yeoman melodist:

I see the little roads of twinkling white

Busy with fieldwork teams and market gear

Of rosy men, cloth-gaitered, who can tell

The many-minded changes of the year,

Who know why crops and kine fare ill or well;

I see the sun persuade the mist away,

Till town and stead are shining to the day.

I see the wagons move along the rows

Of ripe and summer-breathing clover-flower,

I see the lissom husbandman who knows

Deep in his heart the beauty of his power,

As lithely pitched, the full-heaped fork bids on

The harvest home. I hear the rickyard fill

With gossip as in generations gone,

While wagon follows wagon from the hill.

I think how, when our seasons all are sealed,

Shall come the unchanging harvest from the field.

I see the barns and comely manors planned

By men who somehow moved in comely thought,

Who, with a simple shippon to their hand,

As men upon some godlike business wrought;

I see the little cottages that keep

Their beauty still where since Plantagenet

Have come the shepherds happily to sleep,

Finding the loaves and cups of cider set;

I see the twisted shepherds, brown and old,

Driving at dusk their glimmering sheep to fold.

And now the valleys that upon the sun

Broke from their opal veils, are veiled again,

And the last light upon the wolds is done,

And silence falls on flock and fields and men;

And black upon the night I watch my hill,

And the stars shine, and there an owly wing

Brushes the night, and all again is still,

And, from this land of worship that I sing,

I turn to sleep, content that from my sires

I draw the blood of England's midmost shires.

The Cotswold Farmers

Sometimes the ghosts forgotten go

Along the hill-top way,

And with long scythes of silver mow

Meadows of moonlit hay,

Until the cocks of Cotswold crow

The coming of the day.

There's Tony Turkletob who died

When he could drink no more,

And Uncle Heritage, the pride

of eighteen-twenty-four,

And Ebenezer Barleytide,

And others half a score.

They fold in phantom pens, and plough

Furrows without a share,

And one will milk a faery cow,

And one will stare and stare,

And whistle ghostly tunes that now

Are not sung anywhere.

The moon goes down on Oakridge lea,

The other world's astir,

The Cotswold Farmers silently

Go back to sepulchre,

The sleeping watchdogs wake, and see

No ghostly harvester.

Reciprocity

I do not think that skies and meadows are

Moral, or that the fixture of a star

Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees

Have wisdom in their windless silences.

Yet these are things invested in my mood

With constancy, and peace, and fortitude,

That in my troubled season I can cry

Upon the wide composure of the sky,

And envy fields, and wish that I might be

As little daunted as a star or tree.

Birthright

Lord Rameses of Egypt sighed

Because a summer evening passed;

And little Ariadne cried

That summer fancy fell at last

To dust; and young Verona died

When beauty's hour was overcast.

Theirs was the bitterness we know

Because the clouds of hawthorn keep

So short a state, and kisses go

To tombs unfathomably deep,

While Rameses and Romeo

And little Ariadne sleep.

Olton Pools

Now June walks on the waters,

And the cuckoo's last enchantment

Passes from Olton pools.

Now dawn comes to my window

Breathing midsummer roses,

And scythes are wet with dew.

Is it not strange for ever

That, bowered in this wonder,

Man keeps a jealous heart? . . .

That June and the June waters,

And birds and dawn-lit roses,

Are gospels in the wind,

Fading upon the deserts,

Poor pilgrim revalation? . . .

Hist . . . over Olton pools!

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