Henry Williamson

“ He may shout and wave his arms in excitement, the ravens croak, the gulls scream, the lone buzzard wail as he circles, but the love-chase continues. On the falcons rush, above the crested waves and the marbled troughs of the ocean, past the crannies and the ledges of the precipice, among the summer cloudlets, over the hills of heather and the slopes of golden gorse, by the mounded sand-dunes and the glistening mud-flats; all the heavenly freeness is theirs to roam. Bold they are, and observe no law, but they hunt openly and in defiance—often cursed by the sporting farmer ”

“ Generation after generation of men, bent with age and unceasing labour, plodding the earth, sowing the yellow grains that would produce a million million berries for mankind. Spring after spring, each with its glory of blue-winged swallows speeding, wheeling, falling through the azure, the cuckoo calling in the meadows, and the lark-song shaking its silver earthchain as it strove to be free. Through all the sowings and the reapings for thousands of years the wheat had known that it was grown for man, and the soul of the wheat grew in the knowledge of its service. ”

“ The lesser celandine flowers are in the hedge-banks, the sorrel is rising, the wild arum will shortly show its purple club in the green sheath, pink campion is blooming. Proserpine, the goddess of spring, has returned to see how her children are faring; and a little child-god is in her arms. With her, too, is the spirit of the apple blossom, symbolling felicity, whispered to me by those fairy heralds, the goldfinches; the loved swallows have not waited to see her. Again I wonder to myself if the penalty of meeting an Immortal is death. ”

“ Gone is the evejar, that weird moth-taker who pairs for life. By the Nile, with the cuckoo, the nightingale, and the swift, he flaps his mottled wings. The jackdaws and the curlews are with me; there is the seal four hundred feet below hunting the conger-eel come back to the deep pools. Of his summer diet of dogfish he must have wearied by now. The orange hawkbits are everywhere at my feet—common weeds, perhaps, but very dear: each yields a thought of beauty, each is a gold coin of our true heritage of the earth. The metal coin that they stamp with the die is false ”

“ Centuries of apple blossom, scented beanfields and floating thistledown; all the happiness of harvest garnered; all the hunger and the misery of man, ever striving with his neighbour. Can you not see what the dandelion tells? The swallows on the beam know no passage of time—they look forward to no happiness—they [29] have no illusions—all is for them now. The calendar is not for them. Joyous they are, and wild; their hopes are not for to-morrow—the to-morrow of the mounded earth—but for to-day.
Summer comes in with their return, though the calendar shall deny. ”

“ One of the greatest of nature-writers wrote, “The beautiful swallows, be tender to them.” In fancy Richard Jefferies, too, was wandering on the headland, and watching the early vagrants, breathing the fragrance of the wild thyme that came like an old memory with the wind. Always dearly loved are the singing birds of passage, returning with such feeble wings to the land that means love and life to them, and love and life and beauty to us. Each one is dear; all the swallows returned are a sign and a token of loveliness being made manifest before our eyes. ”

“ Nowadays we do not believe in pagan deities, but the idea survives, like poetry, for ever. That something has returned [158] to this wild and lovely land by the sea there can be no doubt. In every dry ditch the nettles are springing up, and the white blossom already crests some of the clusters. The spade-shaped leaves of the celandine—a flower that usually comes in February or March, and resembles a buttercup—are among the grasses in the meadows, the cuckoo-plants are rising, a lark has two eggs in her nest, while her mate sings with vernal ecstasy high above. ”

“ To youth the world seemed bitterly cruel [173] and uncaring, for every form of life—except those idealists, the bees—survived by the death of another form. The declining days with their ebb of warmth killed the million million insects and butterflies whose hum had been so dim and happy in the summer.
By a dry mossy bank underneath a hedge of bullace in whose unleafed raggedness the sere and twisted chords of the traveller’s joy had grown, the willow herb flowers were still in bloom when October had yielded most of its blackberries. ”

“ Though all human efforts seem without avail, the song and scent and colour of summer fills the yearning heart and assuages its broken hopes. But in autumn and winter, at least for a long time, no consolation was there anywhere. Underfoot the old paths were beaten into mire by the passing of feet; these were the leaves, each so perfect and veined and shaped, that had opened from buds to the croon of wild cloves and the tap-tap of woodpeckers. Nature seemed to care nothing for the things that were created: the hand that composed so lovingly decomposed as inevitably. ”

“ In the cities, perhaps: youth storing the gold that one day will mean happiness: towards the evening of life, maybe, with sight dulled to a flower and the song of the swallow never heard. Sunlight is all to the flowers. It distils for them their scents and sweet nectars, it fashions their petals and ambrosial pollen. The sun loads the galleons of the airy fullness with the rain drawn from the ocean, unlading its cargoes upon the million wharves of the earth. ”

“ The path through the higher wood was covered with leaves, and bordered by bleached stalks of wild parsley and crumbling sorrel spires. From the tall grasses the sap went with summer, and like frail ghosts they drooped over the pathway. The sun was warm, as though it were celandine-time. Upright and pallid under the trees, and lit by the warm sunshine, the stalks of the year’s bluebells bore their skull-like caps filled with their black shining seeds. Even as the wind stirred the branches of the trees the old loved shadow lacings slipped and shuffled on the ground. ”

“ Their voices trailed to the earth and filled the heart with hope and joy. Afar, the noisy rooks fed their young in the colony in the elm-tops; at [86] hand, on the ground, golden buttercup and white moon-daisy, lemon-coloured hawk-weed and obstinate charlock, beloved of the visiting bee for its great dowry of honey. The sunbeams had flooded the cold earth during the springtide of the year, and now the earth had sent its flowers and its grasses with their faces turned above, whence came the light that was life, the light that was truth to the birds and the bees, the flowers and the grasses. ”

“ By night a mouse would consume its body—beautiful with the bar of tawny velvet on its duskiness. From the time of early spring, when first the willow wren had called by the stream, the bee had climbed over the flowers, bartering the gold grains of the pollen for the honey that it desired so eagerly. In April it had gone to the apple blossom in the orchard and heavy-odoured nettles filling the ditches; invaded the sanctities of all the flowers of summer’s lavishing. ”

“ Swifts and house-martins are not scarce, but they keep to the inland villages.
The prolonged drought seems to have brought to life several rare butterflies, but even the interest that one may find in these is small. Even the blue sky and the blue sea produce an intolerable weariness. Wherever I go there sound those pitiful cries of the sheep; there is the slippery grass, and the glare of the sun on the sward. The wheat is yellow in the flag, dried and rustling; the poppies are sickly, though usually the fiercer the sun the more sultry their bloom. ”

“ Primroses grow with them, and the white blossom of the wild strawberry, and in places the stitchwort is in bloom. A flock of linnets sings in a hawthorn, a silver twittering of song coming as the wind rests; with a rustling of wings the flock leaves for the bloom of the gorse which everywhere is scenting the air. The apple trees in the orchard close below are beginning to bud, already goldfinches haunt their lichened branches, now fighting with gold-barred wings aflutter, now pausing to pipe sweet whispers of coming vernal glory, when the blossoms shall spill in showers of loveliness. ”

“ This north coast of Devon is mocked by the vision of the bluest of seas, calm and shining under the summer sun. The fields stretching down to the sands are parched and brown, the grasses mere ghosts, dry and sapless. Even the sea-breeze has little of refreshment in its motion; it is merely heated air.
Many of the sheep are dead. Jackdaws, gulls, carrion crows, and rooks are feasting on the bloated carcases which remain; the shimmering hum of flies innumerable gives to our English midsummer a tropical semblance. Nor are there any swallows to decimate these pests. ”

“ Behind her the corn seemed to sigh as the wind swept over, as though it knew of coming midsummer, with its hum over the fields, for that meant that August would follow, and the reapers come with the horses and machines.
Then she wondered if the sun loved the brook, for it shook with silvery flashes, and sang a sweet song where it ran into an eddy just by her feet. She was always wondering things. She turned on her back and tried to see a lark in the sky. It was so warm lying there in the sun, and the bees from her Great-uncle Sufford’s hives went over to the clover fields. ”

“ For years I pondered the higher meaning of life, studying in a city, amid the smoke and clattering hum of traffic; the wild ones have never needed to seek—they have been happy by the brook with its lanced sunpoints and swallowy song of summer over the pebbles and the mossy boulders; they have had no illusions. Nor have they needed philosophies or discarnate paradises.
Everything loved the mowing meadow. ”

“ Something with a thin, stick-like body, enamelled blue and fanned by a whirling crystal of light, alighted on the open white petals of a crowsfoot—the water-buttercup; the dragonfly folded its gauzy wings and contemplated the still deeps from which, a few hours before, it had crept—a summer thing that would fulfil its destiny so quickly, and die. Like the civilised bees that leave the security of skep and stored caves of honey to the new race, so all the wild things live but to secure the future of their species. ”

“ Scarlet soldier flies and little plain moths clung to bennet-bloom and spray-like awn, the wind sighed in the grasses as it shook the dust-pollen from the heads. The meadow grasses were timorous of the breeze, and trembled at its coming, like the heart of a maiden reluctant yet yearning: whispering to the wind to bear the seeds, for the mowers would come shortly. Over the water-meadow the lapwings wheeled and spun—the lapwing holds the secret of the swamps and boglands, and you hear it in his wild voice as his wings sough above. ”

“ The pools of gold about the oaks slowly drained away, and the sky above became a more profound blue. Three swifts passed above, wheeling in final flight before creeping to their nests of straw-speck and saliva under the tiles of the church. The songs of the warblers and thrushes as the light drains [139] away, find an echo in the heart of the poet, for they sing of the beauty of summer: the swift’s cries belong to the spectral light of the stars and the mystery of infinite space. The swift is the mystic among birds. ”

“ The faint squeak came from a rat that runs swiftly on the trail of another. The next moment his body is seized in a grip of death—he, too, screams, and is borne upward, limp and dead, to be devoured at leisure. The owl’s beak opens to a wide gape, and a deep contralto hoot, bubbling and quavering, carries to his mate who hunts in the distant copse.
Heard thus in the loneliness of the winter night, there seems infinite sadness in the deep mellow cries of these night fliers. To hear an owl hooting repeatedly around the cottage at night is supposed, in the country, to portend death. ”

“ And the sound you hear is sometimes the love-whisper of the stems as they tell one another that the baby seeds are being born. For if the seeds are born before the mowers come they are very happy. It is always so among the wild flowers, my love. All they live for is the seeds.”
“I am sad when I see the grasses cut,” said Jo, “for often the little larks are killed and the sorrel dies, and the golden buttercups, and all the sweet flowers.”
“Do not be sad, darling,” twittered the swallow, “for all beauty must die. And beauty gives itself willingly in death when it loves. ”

“ Insect life was on the wane, adventure stirred their little hearts to excitement. Every passing of the wind beckoned a forlorn following of leaves from the trees, a spider seeking hibernation threw a prospecting line of silk against the face. With a tired sound the starred sycamore leaves, each condemned by the black patch of autumn, fluttered to the earth; by listening closely it was possible to hear the stalks break from the twigs. Flittering like chafer-beetles in a dusky summer night the vaned seeds risped and whirled away from the parent trees. ”