In Pursuit of Spring

by Edward Thomas

The mildness, meekness, gentleness, beloved of Coleridge’s tender and effusive nature, appear with such diverse company as in “Poverty’s meek woe,” “mild and manliest melancholy,” and “mild moon-mellow’d foliage,” and repeated with variations four times in one verse of the lines written at Shurton Bars, near Bridgwater,—

“I felt it prompt the tender Dream,

When slowly sank the Day’s last gleam;

You rous’d each gentler sense,

As sighing o’er the Blossom’s bloom

Meek Evening wakes its soft perfume

With viewless influence.”

Sometimes the mildness expands to conscious luxury, as in the poem “Composed during Illness, and in Absence,” beginning,—

“Dim Hour, that sleep’st on pillowing clouds afar,

O rise and yoke the Turtles to thy car!