The South Country

by Edward Thomas

After ten miles the road crosses the river and wanders even farther from the highway. Here there are more woods of hazel and oak, and borders where sloe and blackberry shine, polished by rain, among herbage of yellow ragwort and flea-bane, purple knapweed, yellowing leaves. The gateways show steep meadows between the woods. One shows two lovers of sixteen years old gathering nuts in the warm sun, the silence, the solitude. The boy bends down and she steps quickly and carelessly upon his back to reach a cluster of six, and then descending looks away for a little while and turns her left cheek to him, softly smiling wordless things to herself, so that her lover could not but lean forward and kiss her golden skin where it is most beautiful beneath her ear and her looped black hair. There is a maid whose ways are so wonderful and desirable that it would not be more wonderful and desirable if Helen had never grown old and Demeter had kept Persephone. For a day white-throated convolvulus hides all the nettles of life. Of all the delicate passing things I have seen and heard—the slow, languid, gracious closing and unclosing of a pewit’s rounded wings as it chooses a clod to alight on; the sound of poplar leaves striving with the sound of rain in a windy summer shower; the glow of elms where an autumn rainbow sets a foot amongst them; the first fire of September lighted among men and books and flowers—not one survives to compare with this gateway vision of a moment on a road I shall never travel again. To rescue such scenes from time is one of the most blessed offices of books, and it is a book that I remember now as I think of that maiden smiling, a book[5] which says—

And I could tell thee stories that would make thee laugh at all thy trouble, and take thee to a land of which thou hast never dreamed. Where the trees have ever blossoms, and are noisy with the humming of intoxicated bees. Where by day the suns are never burning, and by night the moon-stones ooze with nectar in the rays of the camphor-laden moon. Where the blue lakes are filled with rows of silver swans, and where, on steps of lapis-lazuli, the peacocks dance in agitation at the murmur of the thunder in the hills. Where the lightning flashes without harming, to light the way to women, stealing in the darkness to meetings with their lovers, and the rainbow hangs for ever like an opal on the dark blue curtain of the clouds. Where, on the moonlit roofs of crystal palaces, pairs of lovers laugh at the reflection of each other’s lovesick faces in goblets of red wine, breathing as they drink air heavy with the fragrance of the sandal, wafted from the mountain of the south. Where they play and pelt each other with emeralds and rubies, fetched at the churning of the ocean from the bottom of the sea. Where rivers, whose sands are always golden, flow slowly past long lines of silent cranes that hunt for silver fishes in the rushes on their banks. Where men are true, and maidens love for ever, and the lotus never fades....

The great old books do the same a hundred times. Take The Arabian Nights for example. They are full of persons, places and events depicted with so strong an appeal to our eyes and to that part of our intelligence which by its swiftness and simplicity corresponds to our eyes, that no conceivable malversation by a translator can matter much. They are proof against it, just as our tables and chairs and walking-sticks are proof against the man who tears our books and cracks our glass cases of artificial grapes or stuffed kingfishers when we move to a new house. This group of women is beyond the reach of time or an indifferent style—

Ten female slaves approached with a graceful and conceited gait, resembling moons, dazzling the sight, and confounding the imagination. They stood in ranks, looking like the black-eyed damsels of Paradise; and after them came ten other female slaves, with lutes in their hands, and other instruments of diversion and mirth; and they saluted the two guests, and played upon the lutes, and sang verses; and every one of them was a temptation to the servants of God....

A hundred others flock to my mind, competing for mention like a company of doves for a mere pinch of seed—Rose-in-Bloom sitting at a lattice to watch the young men playing at ball, and throwing an apple to Ansal Wajoud, “bright in countenance, with laughing teeth, generous, wide-shouldered”; or that same girl letting herself down from her prison and escaping over the desert in her most magnificent apparel and a necklace of jewels on her neck; Sindbad returning home rich from every voyage, and as often, in the midst of the luxuries of his rest, going down to the river by Bagdad and seeing a fair new ship and embarking for the sake of profit and of beholding the countries and islands of the world.

These clear appeals come into the tales like white statues suddenly carven to our sight among green branches. But they are also something more than a satisfaction to our love of what is large, bright, coloured, in high relief. Every one knows how, at a passage like that in the Æneid, when the exiled Æneas sees upon the new walls of the remote city of Carthage pictures of that strife about Troy in which he was a great part, or at a verse in a ballad like—

“It was na in the ha’, the ha’;

It was na in the painted bower;

But it was in the good greenwood,

Amang the lily flower.”