The South Country

by Edward Thomas

It is perfectly still; the sun splutters out of the thick grey and white sky, the white sails shine on a sea of steel, and it is warm. And now in the luxury of the first humid warmth and quiet of the year the blackbird sings. The rain sets in at nightfall, but the wind does not blow, and still the blackbird sings and the thrushes will hardly leave the corn. That one song alone sweetens the wide vague country of evening, the cloudy oak woods, the brown mixen under the elms and the little white farm behind the unpruned limes, with its oblong windows irregularly placed and of unequal size, its white door almost at a corner, and the lawn coming right to the walls.

Day breaks and sun and wind dance together in the clouds and trees, but without rain. Larks sing over the dark heavy cornland in which the watery furrows shine. The dead drab grasses wave at the feet of the hedgerows. Little pools at meadow corners bring down the sky to the dark earth. Horses nod before the plough. A slight haze exhales from the innumerable rich spongy clods, between the hedges of oak and ash. Now and then shapeless rags of white or snow-grey clouds wander up from the west and for a little while obscure the white mountains of cloud, the blue sky, the silver sun; or the sweet smoke from the fires of hedgers and ditchers rises up against the edge of a copse. The white linen flaps and glows in cottage gardens; the dung cars go by crunching the flints into the mud; and the boots and bells of pony traps make a music forgotten since last February. It is only the twenty-second day of February, yet these delights of the soul through the eyes and ears are of spring. The children have begun to look for violets, and the youngest, being the nearest to them in stature and in nature, has found one. There she stands, four years old, with straight brown legs, her face clear and soft but brown as a new hazel nut, her hair almost of the same colour and paler where the sun has bleached it round her temples and falling over her cheeks and neck; and through it shine eyes of a deeper brown, the hue of the most exquisite flints. The eyes shine, the teeth shine through the ever parted long red lips, the chin shines, the brow shines most of all with a lustre that seems to come from the joyous brain behind.

She is beautiful and straight as the July corn, as the ash tree standing alone by the stream. She is fearless as fire, bold and restless as wind, clear-hearted, simple, bright and gay as a mountain water, in all her actions a daughter of the sun, the wind and the earth. She has loving looks for all. From her fair broad naked foot to her gleaming hair she is, to many, the dearest thing that lives.

Beside her plays a dog, with lifted ears, head on one side, rosy tongue bright against his yellow fur, waiting upon her fancies. His rest and his motion, like hers, are careless and beautiful, gifts of the sun, the wind and the earth. As I look at them I think of such a child and such a playmate that lived two thousand years ago in the sun, and once as they played each set a foot upon the soft clay of a tile that the tile maker had not yet burned hard and red. The tile fell in the ruin of a Roman city in Britain, was buried hundreds of years in ashes and flowering mould, and yesterday I saw the footprints in the dark red tile, two thousand years old.

A day follows of rain and wind, and it is the robin that is most heard among the dripping thorns, the robin and his autumnal voice. But the sky clears for sunset and the blackbird’s hour, and, as twilight ends, only the rear of the disappearing procession of day cloud is visible on the western horizon, while the procession of night has but sent up two or three dark forerunners. The sky is of palest blue, and Jupiter and Sirius are bright over the sea, Venus over the land and Mercury just over the far oaks. The sea is very dark except at the horizon which is pale with the dissolving remnant of sunset gold in it; but two ranks of breakers throw up a waving vapour of fairy foam against the dark waves behind.

Again there are roaring wet mornings and sunlit mornings, but in them all the pewits wheel over the marsh and their wild cries mingle with the sweet whimper of dunlins, the songs of larks, the glitter of the dykes, the wall of rain. All day the sky over heathery moorland is like a reduplication of the moorland, except that at the horizon the sky clears at intervals and fleets of pure white cloud sail over the dark ploughland and green pines; and the gentle sea is white only where the waves break on the sand like a line of children in white frocks advancing with wavers in the game of “Here we come gathering nuts and may.” Or the west is angry, thick and grey, the snow is horizontal and fierce, and yet the south has a bay of blue sky and in it a vast sunlit precipice of white cloud, and the missel thrushes roll out their songs again and again at the edges of many woods. Or a sun appears that brings out the songs of thrush and chaffinch and lark, and leaves a chequer of snow on pine and ploughland and on the mole hills of the meadows. Again the sun disappears and the swift heavy hail rebounds on the grass with a dancing as of sand-hoppers, and there is no other sound except a sudden hedgesparrow’s song to break in upon the beating of the pellets on hard ivy and holly and tender grass. In the frosty evening the first moth comes to the lamp.

Now the rain falls rejoicing in its power, and then the sky is sunny and the white clouds are bubble-shaped in the blue, the wet roads are azure with reflected sky, the trees are all of crystal, and the songs of thrushes can be heard even through the snorting and rumbling of a train.

HAMPSHIRE.

The beeches on the beech-covered hills roar and strain as if they would fly off with the hill, and anon they are as meek as a great horse leaning his head over a gate. If there is a misty day there is one willow in a coombe lifting up a thousand silver catkins like a thousand lamps, when there is no light elsewhere. Another day, a wide and windy day, is the jackdaw’s, and he goes straight and swift and high like a joyous rider crying aloud on an endless savannah, and, underneath, the rippled pond is as bright as a peacock, and millions of beech leaves drive across the open glades of the woods, rushing to their Acheron. The bush harrow stripes the moist and shining grass; the plough changes the pale stubble into a ridgy chocolate; they are peeling the young ash sticks for hop poles and dipping them in tar. At the dying of that windy day the wind is still; there is a bright pale half-moon tangled in the pink whirl of after-sunset cloud, a sound of blackbirds from pollard oaks against the silver sky, a sound of bells from hamlets hidden among beeches.

Towards the end of March there are six nights of frost giving birth to still mornings of weak sunlight, of an opaque yet not definitely misty air. The sky is of a milky, uncertain pale blue without one cloud. Eastward the hooded sun is warming the slope fields and melting the sparkling frost. In many trees the woodpeckers laugh so often that their cry is a song. A grassy ancient orchard has taken possession of the visible sunbeams, and the green and gold of the mistletoe glows on the silvered and mossy branches of apple trees. The pale stubble is yellow and tenderly lit, and gives the low hills a hollow light appearance as if they might presently dissolve. In a hundred tiers on the steep hill, the uncounted perpendicular straight stems of beech, and yet not all quite perpendicular or quite straight, are silver-grey in the midst of a haze, here brown, there rosy, of branches and swelling buds. Though but a quarter of a mile away in this faintly clouded air they are very small, aërial in substance, infinitely remote from the road on which I stand, and more like reflections in calm water than real things.