After night's thunder far away had
The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,
And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled,
Like the first gods before they made the
And misery, swimming the stormless
In beauty and in divine gaiety.
The smooth white empty road was lightly
With leaves - the holly's Autumn falls in June -And fir cones standing up stiff in the heat.
The mill-foot water tumbled white and
With tossing crystals, happier than any
Of children pouring out of school aloud.
And in the little thickets where a
For ever might lie lost, the nettle
And garden-warbler sang unceasingly;
While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce
The swift with wings and tail as sharp and
As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.
Only the scent of woodbine and hay new
Travelled the road.
In the field sloping down,
Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook,
Haymakers rested.
The tosser lay
Out in the sun; and the long waggon
Without its team:it seemed it never
Move from the shadow of that single yew.
The team, as still, until their task was due,
Beside the labourers enjoyed the
That three squat oaks mid-feld together
Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut,
And on the hollow, once a chalk pit,
Now brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean.
The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin,
But still.
And all were silent.
All was old,
This morning time, with a great age untold,
Older than Clare and Cobbett,
Morland and Crome,
Than, at the field's far edge, the farmer's home,
A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.
Under the heavens that know not what years
The men, the beasts, the trees, the
Uttered even what they will in times far hence -All of us gone out of the reach of change -Immortal in a picture of an old grange.
