Snow Harvest

The moon that now and then last night
Glanced between clouds in flight
Saw the white harvest that spread over
The stubble fields and even roots and clover.

It climbed the hedges, overflowed
And trespassed on the road,
Weighed down fruit trees and when winds woke
From white-thatched roofs rose in a silver smoke.

How busy is the world today!
Sun reaps, rills bear away
The lovely harvest of the snow
While bushes weep loud tears to see it go

***

The Shepherd’s Hut

Now when I could not find the road
Unless beside it also flowed
This cobbled beck that through the night,
Breaking on stones, makes its own light,

Where blackness in the starlit sky
Is all I know a mountain by,
A shepherd little thinks how far
His lamp is shining like a star.

***

Nightfall on Sedgemoor

The darkness like a guillotine
Descends on the flat earth;
The flocks look white across the rhine
All but one lamb, a negro from its birth.

The pollards hold up in the gloom
Knobbed heads with long stiff hair
That the wind tries to make a broom
To sweep the moon’s faint feather from the air.

What makes the darkness fall so soon
Is not the short March day
Nor the white sheep nor brightening moon,
But long June evenings when I came this way.

***

Walking on the Cliff

But for a sleepy gull that yawned
And spread its wings and dropping disappeared
This evening would have dawned
To the eternity my flesh has feared.

For too intent on a blackcap
Perched like a miser on the yellow furze
High over Birling Gap,
That sang ‘Gold is a blessing not a curse’,

How near I was to stepping over
The brink where the gull dropped to soar beneath,
While now safe as a lover
I walk the cliff-edge arm in arm with Death.

The Evening Star

I saw a star shine in bare trees
That stood in their dark effigies;
With voices so clear and close it sang
That like a bird it seemed to hang
Rising and falling with the wind,
Twigs on its rosy breast outlined.

An obvious moon high on the night
And haloed by a rainbow light
Sounded as loud as silver bell
And trees in flight before it fell,
Their shadows straggling on the road
where glacier of soft moonlight flowed.

But moon nor star-untidy sky
Could catch my eye as that star’s eye;
For still I looked on that same star,
That fitful, fiery Lucifer,
Watching with mind as quiet as moss
Its light nailed to a burning cross.

***

The Rain

Fair mornings make false vows!
When to that wood I came
I stood beneath fast-dripping boughs
And watched the green leaves wink
Spilling their heavy drink;
Some flowers to sleeping buds returned,
Some, lit by rain, with clear flames burned;
‘Cuckoo’—again, again
A cuckoo called his name
Behind the waving veil of dismal rain.

The rain bit yellow root
And shone on the blue flints
And dangled like a silver fruit
From blackened twigs and boughs;
I watched those running rows
Splash on the sodden earth and wet
The empty snail shells marked “To let’,
And whitened worms that lay
Like stalks of hyacinths,
The last end of a children’s holiday.

I heard a dead man cough
Not twenty yards away—
(A wool-wet sheep, likely enough,
As I thought afterwards);
But O those shrieking birds!
And how flowers seemed to outstare
Some hidden sun in that dim air,
As sadly the rain soaked
To where the dead man lay
Whose cough a sudden fall of earth had choked.

***

An Evening Walk

I never saw a lovelier sky;
The faces of the passers-by
Shine with gold light as they step west
As though by secret joy possessed,
Some rapture that is not of earth
But in that heavenly climate has its birth.

I know it is the sunlight paints
The faces of these travelling saints,
But shall I hold in cold misprision
The calm and beauty of that vision
Upturned a moment from the sorrow
That makes today today, tomorrow tomorrow?

***

Mole-hills on the Downs

Here earth in her abundance spills
Hills on her hills,
Till every hill is overgrown
With small hills of its own;
Some old with moss and scorpion-grass,
Some new and bare and brown,
And one where I can watch the earth
Like a volcano at its birth
Still rise by falling down;
And as by these small hills I pass
And take them in my stride
I swell with pride,
Till the great hills to which I lift my eyes
Restore my size.

***

The Sunbeams

The tired road climbed the hill
Through trees with light-spots never still,
Gold mouths that drew apart and singled
And ran again and met and mingled,
Two, three or five or seven,
No other way than souls that love in heaven.

Sunny and swift and cool
They danced there like Bethesda’s pool;
Ah, if in those pale kissing suns
My halting feet could bathe but once
No slender stick would crack,
My footstep falling on its brittle back.

***

In Teesdale

No, not tonight,
Not by this fading light,
Not by those high fells where the forces
Fall from the mist like the white tails of horses.

From that dark slack
Where peat-hags gape too black
I turn to where the lighted farm
Holds out through the open door a golden arm.

No, not tonight,
Tomorrow by daylight;
Tonight I fear the fabulous horses
Whose white tails flash down the steep water-courses.

***

Wood and Hill

Nowhere is one alone
And in the closest covert least,
But to the small eye of bird or beast
He will be known;
Today it was for me
A squirrel that embraced a tree
Turning a small head round;
A hare too that ran up the hill,
To his short forelegs level ground,
And with tall ears stood still.
But it was birds I could not see
And larks that tried to stand on air
That made of wood and hill a market-square.

The Green Woodpecker

Whether that popinjay
Screamed now at me or at his mate
I could not rightly say,
Not knowing was it love or was it hate.

I hoped it was not love
But hate that roused that gaudy bird;
For earth I love enough
To crave of her at least an angry word.

***

Loch Luichart

Slioch and Sgurr Mor
Hang in the air in a white chastity
Of cloud and February snow
That less to earth they seem to owe
Than to the pale blue cloud-drift or
The deep blue sky.

Though high and far they stand,
Their shadows over leagues of forest come,
Here, to a purer beauty thinned
In this true mirror, now the wind,
That held it with a shaking hand,
Droops still and dumb.

As I push from the shore
And drift (beneath that buzzard) I climb now
These silver hills for miles and miles,
Breaking hard rock to gentle smiles
With the slow motion of my prow
And dripping oar.

***

In December

I watch the dung-cart stumble by
Leading the harvest to the fields,
That from cow-byre and stall and sty
The farmstead in the winter yields.

Like shocks in a reaped field of rye
The small black heaps of lively dung
Sprinkled in the grass-meadow lie
Licking the air with smoky tongue.

This is Earth’s food that man piles up
And with his fork will thrust on her,
And Earth will lie and slowly sup
With her moist mouth through half the year.

***

The Spider

A single white dewdrop
That hung free on the air sang, Stop!
From twig to twig a speckled spider,
Legged like a hermit-crab, had tied her
Invisible web with WELCOME
For sign, and HOME SWEET HOME.

That spider would not stir,
Villain of her Greek theatre,
Till as I heedlessly brushed past her
She fled fast from her web’s disaster
And from a twig-fork watched it swing,
Wind tangling string with string.

Now she weaves in the dark
With no light lent by a star’s spark
From busy belly more than head
Geometric pattern of thin thread,
A web for wingy midge and fly,
With deadly symmetry.

***

In Moonlight

We sat where boughs waved on the Ground
But made no sound;
‘They cannot shake me off,’
Shrieked the black dwarf,
Impudent elf,
That was the shadow of myself.

I said to him, “We must go now’;
But from his bough
He laughed, securely perched,
‘Then you rise first’;
It seemed to me
He spoke in wicked courtesy.

We rose and ‘Take my hand,’ he whined,
Though like the wind
Each waving bough he leapt;
And as we stept
Down the steep track
He seemed to grow more hunched and black.