Poems, 1908-1919

And was famous about the shire. And he was friendly
With Cotswold nature, hearing the hidden rooks
In Golden Vale, and the thin bleat of goats,
And the rattling harness of Trilly’s teams at plough,
And Richard Parker’s scythe for many years,
As he went upon his tiling; and the great landmarks,
As loops of the Severn seen from Bisley Hill,
Were his familiars, something of his religion.

And he prospered, as men do. His little wage
Yet left a little over his wedded needs,
And here a cottage he bought, and there another,
About the Cotswolds, built of the royallest stone
That’s quarried in England, until he could think of age
With an easy mind; and an acre of land was his
Where at hay-harvest he worked a little from tiling,
Making his rick maturely or damning the wind
That scattered the swathes beyond his fork’s controlling.
And he trotted ajog to the town on market Thursdays,
Driving a stout succession of good black geldings,
That cropped his acre some twenty years apiece.
And he was an honest neighbour; and so he grew old,
And five strong sons, grizzled and middle-aged,
Carried him down the hill, and on a stone
The mason cut – “John Heritage, who died,
Fearing the Lord, at the age of seventy-six.”

And I know that some of us shatter our hearts on earth,
With mightier aims than ever John Heritage knew,
And think such things as never the tiler thought,
Because of our pride and our eagerness of mind …
But a life complete is a great nobility,
And there’s a wisdom biding in Cotswold stone,
While we in our furious intellectual travel
Fall in with strange foot-fellows on the road.

THOMAS YARNTON OF TARLTON

One of those old men fearing no man,
Two hundred broods his eaves have known
Since they cut on a Sapperton churchyard stone —
“Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton, Yeoman.”

At dusk you can hear the yeomen calling
The cattle still to Sapperton stalls,
And still the stroke of the woodman falls
As Thomas of Tarlton heard it falling.

I walked these meadows in seventeen-hundred,
Seed of his loins, a dream that stirred
Beyond the shape of a yeoman’s word,
So faint that but unawares he wondered.

And now, from the weeds of his tomb uncomely,
I travel again the tracks he made,
And walks at my side the yeoman shade
Of Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton dumbly.

MRS. WILLOW

Mrs. Thomas Willow seems very glum.
Her life, perhaps, is very lonely and hum-drum,
Digging up potatoes, cleaning out the weeds,
Doing the little for a lone woman’s needs.
Who was her husband? How long ago?
What does she wonder? What does she know?
Why does she listen over the wall,
Morning and noon-time and twilight and all,
As though unforgotten were some footfall?

“Good morning, Mrs. Willow.” “Good morning, sir,”
Is all the conversation I can get from her.
And her path-stones are white as lilies of the wood,
And she washes this and that till she must be very good.
She sends no letters, and no one calls,
And she doesn’t go whispering beyond her walls;
Nothing in her garden is secret, I think —
That’s all sun-bright with foxglove and pink,
And she doesn’t hover around old cupboards and shelves
As old people do who have buried themselves;
She has no late lamps, and she digs all day
And polishes and plants in a common way,
But glum she is, and she listens now and then
For a footfall, a footfall, a footfall again,
And whether it’s hope, or whether it’s dread,
Or a poor old fancy in her head,
I shall never be told; it will never be said.

ROUNDELS OF THE YEAR

I caught the changes of the year
In soft and fragile nets of song,
For you to whom my days belong.

For you to whom each day is dear
Of all the high processional throng,
I caught the changes of the year
In soft and fragile nets of song.

And here some sound of beauty, here