Farewell

Chapter 30: SINCE I HAVE LOVED

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

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.

SINCE I HAVE LOVED

Since I have loved, I have put the world in my heart.

The great clouds scattering over Cotswold seem

But shadows of those others counterpart:

Those clouds standing over hills of dream—

Hills of dream in a country that is called

Peace—a country by my own heart walled.

Since I do love and bear you in my breast,

Who are both my beloved country and its queen,

I wonder not to see red dawn uprise.

I say no more how restful is the green

Of summer fields, for looking on your eyes

It is as though I had died and found my rest.