Tides: A Book of Poems

Chapter 8: PLOUGH

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About This Book

A sequence of lyric poems that range from intimate rural and seasonal scenes—Cotswold hills, gardens, ploughing—to meditations on love, memory, and wartime loss, with occasional civic and political reflections. The voice uses vivid pastoral imagery and simple, songlike rhythms to register everyday labour, landscape, and personal feeling, moving between quiet domestic observation and memorial or civic address. The collection is organized as short, standalone poems that juxtapose pastoral tranquility with the disruptions of modern conflict.

PLOUGH

The snows are come in early state,
And love shall now go desolate
If we should keep too close a gate.

Over the woods a splendour falls
Of death, and grey are the Gloucester walls,
And grey the skies for burials.

But secret in the falling snow
I see the patient ploughman go,
And watch the quiet furrows grow.