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Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses cover

Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses

Chapter 27: The College Pump.
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About This Book

A collection of verse that shifts between brisk depictions of modern life—motor races and city heat—and intimate lyrical sonnets exploring love, memory, and devotional longing. Classical and medieval references recur alongside pagan pastoral fantasies that imagine escape to woodland Hesperides, while formal experiments include songs, sonnets, ballades, rondeaux and a pantoum. A seasonal sequence maps moods across spring to winter, and a concluding suite treats mortality through elegy and dark humor. The poems balance energetic narrative scenes with reflective, sometimes elegiac meditations on desire, nature, and death.

The College Pump.

IN Summertide, beneath high-vaulted shade,
In Winter, frosted all with glistering rime,
In chanting Spring, or Autumn’s sullen time
When sodden leaves their tawny beds have made—
Alike when spendthrift Sun his gold afar
Downthrows, or earth lies shrouded all in cold,
By evil men and good, by young, by old,
In every season blessed thy waters are.
Grandsires and children drink with solaced eyes.
Dazed revellers early come with thirsty shame
Beneath gray glimmering of the sober skies.
All day men pause; and some, at eventide,
Poets, have hallowed with their touch thy name,
And with their lips thy waters sanctified.