Farewell

Chapter 27: IN A CATHEDRAL

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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.

IN A CATHEDRAL

From her sweet unrest and sting

Hither I come.

The cloisters like a frozen forest ring,

Echoing back more faint and faintlier

The tread of living. Home,

Home flies the spirit. Faint and faintlier

The surging waves of passion break to foam

Then like a clash of cymbals suddenly

She, slave of Time,

O’ercomes all tokens of Eternity,

Nay, rather with Eternity is made one,

One with recurrent rhyme

Of arch, with flash of window, with the sun

Yellow on lofty walls sweet echoes climb.