Farewell

Chapter 22: LASSINGTON

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About This Book

A varied collection of poems and short prose pieces that celebrate the Cotswold and Gloucestershire countryside while exploring love, longing, and spiritual yearning. The poems range from concise nature lyrics—observing rivers, hedges, birds, and seasonal light—to sonnets and free-verse meditations that ask for vision, joy, and fellowship. Several pieces foreground homesickness and the solace of ritual and local customs, others offer wry or reflective commentary on mortality, vanity, and daily life. Prose poems and songs intersperse formal verse, producing a sequence that alternates celebratory rural description, quiet grief, religious petition, and gentle humour.

LASSINGTON

To Lassington the priests went out

From Gloucester long ago

To worship oaks and fool about

With mistletoe.

Now after twenty centuries

Still men and girls do go

Lassington way. To worship trees?

You ask,—ah no!

They laugh the magic boughs beneath,

Catch hands, and kiss the while:

And the dead Druids grind their teeth

Below, or smile

To see (ah, fair beneath the bough

The fretted moonlight lies!)

How readily come the victims now

To sacrifice.

How, robed in moonlight’s ancient gold,

Another god doth reign,

Tormenting men as did their old

Grey gods of Pain.