Edward Thomas

“ She is to be kissed
Only perhaps by me;
She may be seeking
Me and no other; she
May not exist.
SONG AT poet's tears,
Sweeter than any smiles but hers,
She laughs; I sigh;
And yet I could not live if she should die.
And when in June
Once more the cuckoo spoils his tune,
She laughs at sighs;
And yet she says she loves me till she dies.
SHE DOTES SHE dotes on what the wild birds say
Or hint or mock at, night and day,—
Thrush, blackbird, all that sing in May,
And songless plover,
Hawk, heron, owl, and woodpecker.
They never say a word to her
About her lover. ”

“ Nevertheless I went contentedly on between mossy banks, hedges of beech, rhododendrons, and woodlands of oak, beech, and larch, which opened out in one place to show me the fern and pine of Ganger Common. The earth was quiet, dark, and beautiful. The owl was beginning to hunt over the fields, while the blackbird finished his song. Pleasant were the yellow road, the roadside bramble and brier hoops, the gravel pits and gorse at corners. But the sky was wild, threatening the earth both with dark clouds impending and with momentary wan gleams between them, angrier than the clouds. ”

“ This was so like the old Ann that I was delighted, with all my conceit. I remembered that first visit well, limping into the yard the day after the paper-chase, and seeing big Jack (aged then about twenty) and tall Roland (less than two years younger) discussing a greyhound with a blackguard in an orange neck-tie, Jessie (my own age) surrounded by pigeons, Mr Morgan and Mr Torrance at the top of the steps looking on, and away on the pond under the elms little Harry and Lewis crying for help to release their craft from the water-lilies of that perilous sea. ”

“ No garden is so fortunate in retaining its splendour when summer brusquely departs, or so rich in the idiom of green leaves when the dewy charities of the south wind are at last accepted. None so happily assists the music and laughter and lamps of some festivity. And when in February the heavy rain bubbles at the foot of the trees, and spins a shifting veil about their height and over the grass, it seems to reveal more than it conceals. The loneliness of the place becomes intense, as if one were hidden far back in time, and one’s self an anachronism. ”

“ She is a Lady May, careless, proud, at ease. On her lips, indeed, is a childish song; but she has become more strange and distant to children than older women are, for the moment—perhaps for to-day only, since to-morrow she may meet a man and stay late in the lanes. She is as strange as the silver water that gushes among green grass and marigold in the copse, or as the blue swallow slanting down the sunny red wall. To look at her is to take deep breaths as at the savour of warm bread, of honeysuckle, of cows when they come from the meadows into a dusty road. ”

“ I had entered that golden age that is always with us, where there are no wars except in the Iliad and Paradise Lost. At one stile, I saw Aeneas,—in mediæval mail,—revealing a blue-eyed, confident face, with a slippery mouth set firm by his destiny.
The country was without obvious character. An artist could have made nothing of it. Nothing in the arrangement of meadow and corn-land, wood and reedy water, made a clear impression on the mind: they might, perhaps, have been rearranged without attracting attention. So the landscape occupied the eyes little and the mind not at all. ”