Littleholme

(To J.S. and A.W.S.)     In entering the town, where the bright river     Shrinks in its white stone bed, old thoughts return     Of how a quiet queen was nurtured here     In the pale, shadowed ruin on the height;     Of how, when the hoar town was new and clean     And had not grown a part of the gaunt fells     That peered down into it, the burghers wove     On their small, fireside looms green, famous webs     To cling on lissome, tower-dwelling ladies     Who rode the hills swaying like green saplings,     Or mask tall, hardy outlaws from pursuit     Down beechen caverns and green under-lights,     (The rude, vain looms are gone, their beams are broken;     Their webs are now not seen, but memory     Still tangles in their mesh the dews they swept     Like ruby sparks, the lights they took, the scents     They held, the movement of their shapes and shades);     Of how the Border burners in cold dawns     Of Summer hurried North up the high vales     Past smoking farmsteads that had lit the night     And surf of crowding cattle; and of how     A laughing prince of cursed, impossible hopes     Rode through the little streets Northward to battle     And to defeat, to be a fading thought,     Belated in dead mountains of romance.     A carver at his bench in a high gable     Hears the sharp stream close under, far below     Tinkle and rustle, and no other sound     Arises there to him to change his thoughts     Of the changed, silent town and the dead hands     That made it and maintained it, and the need     For handiwork and happy work and work     To use and ease the mind if such sweet towns     Are to be built again or live again.     The long town ends at Littleholme, where the road     Creeps up to hills of ancient-looking stone.     Under the hanging eaves at Littleholme     A latticed casement peeps above still gardens     Into a crown of druid-solemn trees     Upon a knoll as high as a small house,     A shapely mound made so by nameless men     Whose smoothing touch yet shows through the green hide.     When the slow moonlight drips from leaf to leaf     Of that sharp, plumy gloom, and the hour comes     When something seems awaited, though unknown,     There should appear between those leaf-thatched piles     Fresh, long-limbed women striding easily,     And men whose hair-plaits swing with their shagged arms;     Returning in that equal, echoed light     Which does not measure time to the dear garths     That were their own when from white Norway coasts     They landed on a kind, not distant shore,     And to the place where they have left their clothing,     Their long-accustomed bones and hair and beds     That once were pleasant to them, in that barrow     Their vanished children heaped above them dead:     For in the soundless stillness of hot noon     The mind of man, noticeable in that knoll,     Enhances its dark presence with a life     More vivid and more actual than the life     Of self-sown trees and untouched earth. It is seen     What aspect this land had in those first eyes:     In that regard the works of later men     Fall in and sink like lime when it is slaked,     Staid, youthful queen and weavers are unborn,     And the new crags the Northmen saw are set     About an earth that has not been misused.