Puck Of Pook's Hill

I've been reading Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling (now there's a poet) and the story of the Roman Centurion has set me thinking about the British Isles. Not just historically, but geographically as well. What they must have seemed to the early settlers and navigators! Perennially shrouded in mist, covered thickly with forests haunted with predators hungry and huge, the very western edge of the world, and nothing but sea beyond!

The book itself is lovely. The stories are immensely evocative. They conjure up visions of faraway days and times, and fill you with a nostalgia for sights and sounds you have never seen or heard - but still miss with all your heart. And the poems! I rarely feel jealous of peoples' talent, but I did feel a twinge when I read these. I suppose it is poems like these that make people abandon form and write their own dross in free verse. They are afraid of being compared to such delights. Here's a sample:

Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time's eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die.
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth
The Cities rise again.


This season's Daffodil,
She never hears
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year's:
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days' continuance
To be perpetual.


So Time that is o'er-kind
To all that be,
Ordains us e'en as blind,
As bold as she:
That in our very death,
And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
'See how our works endure!'