It seems wrong that out of this bi
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should
Such rich music, as though the not
Ore were changed to a rare metal

There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl call
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening

For the first twenty years you are
Bodily that is: as a poet, of cour
You are not born yet. It’s the ne
You cut your teeth on to emerge sm
For your brash courtship of the mu

Hers is the clean apron, good for
Or lamp to embroider, as we talk s
In the long kitchen, while the whi
Turns to pastry in the great oven,
Sweetly and surely as hay making

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
of great price, the one field that

One night of tempest I arose and
Along the Menai shore on dreaming
The wind was strong, and savage sw
And the waves blustered on Caerna
But on the morrow, when I passed

Beasts rearing from green slime—
an illiterate country, unable to r
its own name. Stones moved into po
on the hills’ sides; snakes laid t
in their cold shadow. The earth su

The idiot goes round and around
With his brother in a bumping car
At the fair. The famous idiot
Smile hangs over the car’s edge,
Illuminating nothing. This is man

England, what have you done to mak
My fathers used a stranger to my l
An offence to the ear, a shackle o
That would fit new thoughts to an
Answer me now. The workshop where

I was vicar of large things
in a small parish. Small-minded
I will not say, there were depths
in some of them I shrank back
from, wells that the word “God”