Colombine

Chapter 6: A LETTER FROM HOME

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About This Book

Set on a windswept hill that hides ancient Roman traces and fairy rings, the fantasy play blends rustic vernacular and commedia dell'arte figures to stage scenes of memory, folklore, and romantic rivalry. A fairylike maid meets two country labourers, recounts the site's layered past, and foretells a comic, ritualized duel between Harlequin and Pierrot for her affection. Interwoven prologue poems and stage tableaux alternate lyrical reflections on time and place with light comedy, costume spectacle, and debates about love, fate, and the endurance of ritual. The piece balances pastoral atmosphere, nostalgia, and theatricality in brief, episodic scenes voiced in verse and colloquial dialogue.

A LETTER FROM HOME

I’ve a letter from home to-day;

A letter from home to say

That they’re cutting the trees in the Priory Wood,

That lambing is over and crops are good.

Quite the usual thing, be it understood,

Is my letter from home, to-day.

I’ve a letter from home, to-day;

A letter from far away,

Bidding me ever to bear in mind

The dear old friends I have left behind.

But I’m not of the quickly forgetting kind,

Dear letter from home, to-day!

In my letter from home, to-day;

Is a postscript, just to say

“No doubt you’ll be very much grieved to hear

That the girl who stayed at the Grange last year,

Is dead, and was yesterday buried here.”

And the world has ended, to-day.