Nature selects the longest way, And winds about in tortuous grooves;A thousand years the oaks decay; The wrinkled glacier hardly moves. But here the whetted fangs of change Daily devour the old demesne –The busy farm, the quiet grange, The wayside inn, the village green. In gaudy yellow brick and red, With rooting pipes, like creepers rank,The shoddy terraces o’erspread Meadow, […]
When the pods went pop on the broom, green broom,And apples began to be golden-skinn’d,We harbour’d a stag in the Priory coomb,And we feather’d his trail up-wind, up-wind,We feather’d his trail up-wind—A stag of warrant, a stag, a stag,A runnable stag, a kingly crop,Brow, bay and tray and three on top,A stag, a runnable stag. […]
I couldn’t touch a stop and turn a screw,And set the blooming world a-work for me,Like such as cut their teeth — I hope, like you —On the handle of a skeleton gold key;I cut mine on a leek, which I eat it every week:I’m a clerk at thirty bob as you can see. But […]
And from above
One curse be hurled
With scorn, with love
Affront the world…
FHAIRSHON swore a feudAgainst the clan M’Tavish—March’d into their landTo murder and to rafish;For he did resolveTo extirpate the vipers,With four-and-twenty men,And five-and-thirty pipers. But when that he had goneHalf-way down Strath-Canaan,Of his fighting tailJust three there were remainin’.They were all he hadTo back him in ta battle:All the rest had goneOff to drive ta […]
Love, forget me when I’m gone,When the tree is overthrown,Let its place be digg’d and sownO’er with grass ;—when that is grown,The very place shall be unknown,So court I oblivion.So I charge thee, by our love,Love, forget me when I’m gone. Love of him that lies in clayOnly maketh life forlorn—Clouding o’er the new-born dayWith […]
Though he that ever kind and true
/ Kept stoutly step by step with you
/ Your whole long gusty lifetime through,
/ Be gone awhile…
A child should always say what’s true
/ And speak when he is spoken to,
/ And behave mannerly at table;
/ At least as far…
In rigorous hours, when down the iron lane
/ The redbreast looks in vain
/ For hips and haws,
/ Lo, shining flowers upon my window…
As from the house your mother sees
/ You playing round the garden trees,
/ So you may see, if you will look
/ Through the…
By lone St. Mary’s silent lake:
/ Thou know’st it well,—nor fen nor sedge
/ Pollute the pure lake’s crystal edge;
/ Abrupt and sheer, the…
The twinkling Earn, like a blade in the snow,
The low hills scalloped against the high,
The high hills leaping upon the low
