Gordon Bottomley

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Littleholme

In entering the town, where the bright river

Shrinks in its white stone bed, old thoughts return

Of how a quiet queen was nurtured here

In the pale, shadowed ruin on the height;

Of how, when the hoar town was new and clean

And had not grown a part of the gaunt fells

Tha peered down into it, the burghers wove

On their small, fireside looms green, famous webs

To cling on lissome, tower-dwelling ladies

Who rode the hills swaying like green saplings,

Or mask tall, hardy outlaws from pursuit

Down beechen caverns and green under-lights.

(The rude, vain looms are gone, their beams are broken;

Their webs are now not seen, but memory

Still tangles in their mesh the dews they swept

Like ruby sparks, the lights they took, the scents

They held, the movement of their shapes and shades);

Of how the Border burners in cold dawns

Of Summer hurried North up the high vales

Past smoking farmsteads that had lit the night

And surf of crowding cattle; and of how

A laughing prince of cursed, impossible hopes

Rode through the little streets Northward to battle

And to defeat, to be a fading thought,

Belated in dead mountains of romance.

A carver at his bench in a high gable

Hears the sharp stream close under, far below

Tinkle and rustle, and no other sound

Arises there to him to change his thoughts

Of the changed, silent town and the dead hands

That made it and maintained it, and the need

For handiwork and happy work and work

To use and ease the mind if such sweet towns

Are to be built again or live again.

The long town ends at Littleholme, where the road

Creeps up to hills of ancient-looking stone.

Under the hanging eaves at Littleholme

A latticed casement peeps above still gardens

Into a crown of druid-solemn trees

Upon a knoll as high as a small house,

A shapely mound made so by nameless men

Whose smoothing touch yet shows through the green hide.

When the slow moonlight drips from leaf to leaf

Of that sharp, plumy gloom, and the hour comes

When something seems awaited, though unknown,

There should appear between those leaf-thatched piles

Fresh, long-limbed women striding easily,

And men whose hair-plaits swing with their shagged arms;

Returning in that equal, echoed light

Which does not measure time to the dear garths

That were their own when from white Norway coasts

They landed on a kind, not distant shore,

And to the place where they have left their clothing,

Their long-accustomed bones and hair and beds

That once were pleasant to them, in that barroow

Their vanished children heaped above them dead:

For in the soundless stillness of hot noon

The mind of man, noticeable in that knoll,

Enhances its dark presence with a life

More vivid and more actual than the life

Of self-sown trees and untouched earth. It is seen

What aspect this land had in those first eyes:

In that regard the works of later men

Fall in and sink like lime when it is slaked,

Staid, youthful qeeen and weavers are unborn,

And the new crags the Northmen saw are set

About an earth that has not been misused.

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