The downs have another hold on this poet; not only are they good to course at a long swinging run, they have preserved huge stones, earthworks and chiselled flints that tell of prehistoric lives.
STONES
This field is almost white with stones
That cumber all its thirsty crust.
And underneath, I know, are bones
And all around is death and dust.
······
O, in these bleached and buried bones
Was neither love nor faith nor thought.
But like the wind in this bleak place
Bitter and bleak and sharp they grew,
And bitterly they ran their race,
A brutal bad unkindly crew:
Souls like the dry earth, hearts like stone.
Brains like the barren bramble-tree,
Stern, sterile, senseless, mute, unknown—
But bold, O, bolder far than we!
Against this wet, bleak, strenuous background of his predilection the young man's thought is astonishingly keen, fresh and mature.
"I," he says in the title poem, Marlborough,
"Have had my moments there, when I have been
Unwittingly aware of something more,
Some beautiful aspect, that I had seen
With mute unspeculative eyes before;
Have had my times, when, though the earth did wear
Her self-same trees and grasses, I could see
The revelation that is always there,
But somehow is not always clear to me."
Here he introduces as an image "Jacob's return from exile," and ends it:
