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Farewell

Chapter 28: THE LANTHORN
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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.

THE LANTHORN

“I never saw a soul save in the body.”

Haply within the woods of Paradise
We see unblinded of our earthly eyes,
Kiss with unthwarted lips, and taste our one
Desired and complete communion.
There scabbards that do sheath the gleaming blade,
There globes which muffle in the naked light
Aside being cast, naked and unafraid,
Lovers may stand in one another’s sight.
Now since through fleshly glass Thy flame, O Love,
Shines clear, and nowhere else doth visibly move;
That lanthorn bright I will bow down before,
Kneeling the crystal body to adore.