Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim, Clean of officious fence or hedge, The wise turf cloaks the white cliff-edge What sign of those that fought and died Here leaps ashore the full Sou'west We have no waters to delight Our broad and brookless vales Only the dewpond on the height Whereby no tattered herbage tells Only our close-bit thyme that smells Here through the strong unhampered days Or little, lost, Down churches praise But here the Old Gods guard their round, The heathen kingdom Wilfrid found Though all the rest were all my share, With equal soul I'd see Her nine-and-thirty sisters fair, Yet none more fair than she. Choose ye your need from Thames to Tweed, And I will choose instead Such lands as lie 'twixt Rake and Rye, Black Down and Beachy Head. I will go out against the sun Where the rolled scarp retires, By dry and sea-forgotten walls, I will go north about the shaws Or south where windy Piddinghoe's And red beside wide-banked Ouse So to the land our hearts we give And Memory, Use, and Love make live That deeper than our speech and thought, Clay of the pit whence we were wrought Yearns to its fellow-clay. God gives all men all earth to love, Each to his choice, and I rejoice In a fair ground-in a fair ground- SONG OF THE WISE CHILDREN WH (1902) HEN the darkened Fifties dip to the North, Far to Southward they wheel and glance, The spears of our deliverance That shine on the house where we were born. Flying-fish about our bows, Flying sea-fires in our wake: This is the road to our Father's House, We have forfeited our birthright, They that walk with shaded brows, They shall receive us and understand. SONG OF THE WISE CHILDREN We shall go back by boltless doors, To the life unaltered our childhood knew To the naked feet on the cool, dark floors, And the high-ceiled rooms that the Trade blows through: To the trumpet-flowers and the moon beyond, That talked us to sleep when we were small. The wayside magic, the threshold spells, Shall soon undo what the North has doneBecause of the sights and the sounds and the smells That ran with our youth in the eye of the sun. And Earth accepting shall ask no vows, Nor the Sea our love nor our lover the Sky. |