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A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad

Chapter 11: SONG OF MINSTERWORTH
By F. W. Harvey
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Poetry

About This Book

This collection gathers poems composed by a soldier at the Front that alternate between affectionate dialect songs celebrating Gloucestershire landscapes, traditions and pastimes and sober battlefield reflections on comradeship, sacrifice, and homesickness. Short formal pieces—ballades, trios, sonnets—and prose poems shift between light conviviality and stark moral questioning, often anchoring wartime anxiety in images of orchards, rivers and village life. Recurring themes include longing for home, the weight of witnessing death, gratitude, defiance, and the effort to reconcile pastoral memory with the experience of combat, producing verses that balance local humor and song with solemn meditation.

SONG OF MINSTERWORTH

Air: “The Vicar of Bray”

In olden, olden centuries
On Gloucester’s holy ground, sir,
The monks did pray and chant all day,
And grow exceeding round, sir;
And here’s the reason that they throve
To praise their pleasant fortune,
“We keep our beasts”—thus quoth the priests,
“In Minsterworth—that’s Mortune!”[1]
So this is the chorus we will sing,
And this is the spot we’ll drink to,
While blossom blows and Severn flows,
And Earth has mugs to clink to.
Oh! there in sleepy Summer sounds
The drowsy drone of bees, sir,
And there in Winter paints the sun
His patterns ’neath the trees, sir;
And there with merry song doth run
A river full of fish, sir,
That Thursday sees upon the flood
And Friday on the dish, sir.
So this is the chorus we will sing
And this is the spot we’ll drink to,
While blossom blows and Severn flows,
And Earth has mugs to clink to.
The jovial priests to dust are gone,
We cannot hear their singing;
But still their merry chorus-song
From newer lips runs ringing.
And we who drink the sunny air
And see the blossoms drifting,
Will sit and sing the self-same thing
Until the roof we’re lifting.
So this is the chorus we will sing,
And this is the spot we’ll drink to,
While blossom blows and Severn flows,
And Earth has mugs to clink to.

[1] The ancient name of the parish was Mortune—that is, the village in the mere; and the name was changed to Minsterworth early in the fourteenth century because it belonged to the Minster or Abbey of Gloucester, and was the Minster’s “Worth” or farm where the cattle were kept.—F. W. H.