The Midlands

Black in the summer night my Cotswold hill      Aslant my window sleeps, beneath a sky     Deep as the bedded violets that fill      March woods with dusky passion. As I lie     Abed between cool walls I watch the host      Of the slow stars lit over Gloucester plain,     And drowsily the habit of these most      Beloved of English lands moves in my brain,     While silence holds dominion of the dark,     Save when the foxes from the spinneys bark.     I see the valleys in their morning mist      Wreathed under limpid hills in moving light,     Happy with many a yeoman melodist:      I see the little roads of twinkling white     Busy with fieldward teams and market gear      Of rosy men, cloth-gaitered, who can tell     The many-minded changes of the year,      Who know why crops and kine fare ill or well;     I see the sun persuade the mist away,     Till town and stead are shining to the day.     I see the wagons move along the rows      Of ripe and summer-breathing clover-flower,     I see the lissom husbandman who knows      Deep in his heart the beauty of his power,     As, lithely pitched, the full-heaped fork bids on      The harvest home. I hear the rickyard fill     With gossip as in generations gone,      While wagon follows wagon from the hill.     I think how, when our seasons all are sealed,     Shall come the unchanging harvest from the field.     I see the barns and comely manors planned      By men who somehow moved in comely thought,     Who, with a simple shippon to their hand,      As men upon some godlike business wrought;     I see the little cottages that keep      Their beauty still where since Plantagenet     Have come the shepherds happily to sleep,      Finding the loaves and cups of cider set;     I see the twisted shepherds, brown and old,     Driving at dusk their glimmering sheep to fold.     And now the valleys that upon the sun      Broke from their opal veils, are veiled again,     And the last light upon the wolds is done,      And silence falls on flock and fields and men;     And black upon the night I watch my hill,      And the stars shine, and there an owly wing     Brushes the night, and all again is still,      And, from this land of worship that I sing,     I turn to sleep, content that from my sires     I draw the blood of England's midmost shires.