Born in the Cotswolds in eighteen-forty or so,
Bred on a hill-top that seemed the most of the world
Until he travelled the valleys, and found what a wonder
Of leagues from Gloucester lay to Stroud or Ciceter,
John Heritage was a tiler. He split the stone,
After the frosts, and learnt the laying of tiles,
And was famous about the shire. And he was friendly
With Cotswold nature, hearing the hidden rooks
In Golden Vale, and the thin bleat of goats,
And the rattling harness of Trilly’s teams at plough,
And Richard Parker’s scythe for many years,
As he went upon his tiling; and the great landmarks,
As loops of the Severn seen from Bisley Hill,
Were his familiars, something of his religion.
And he prospered, as men do. His little wage
Yet left a little over his wedded needs,
And here a cottage he bought, and there another,
About the Cotswolds, built of the royallest stone
That’s quarried in England, until he could think of age
With an easy mind; and an acre of land was his
Where at hay-harvest he worked a little from tiling,
Making his rick maturely or damning the wind
That scattered the swathes beyond his fork’s controlling.
And he trotted ajog to the town on market Thursdays,
Driving a stout succession of good black geldings,
That cropped his acre some twenty years apiece.
And he was an honest neighbour; and so he grew old,
And five strong sons, grizzled and middle-aged,
Carried him down the hill, and on a stone
The mason cut—“John Heritage, who died,
Fearing the Lord, at the age of seventy-six.”
And I know that some of us shatter our hearts on earth,
With mightier aims than ever John Heritage knew,
And think such things as never the tiler thought,
Because of our pride and our eagerness of mind ...
But a life complete is a great nobility,
And there’s a wisdom biding in Cotswold stone,
While we in our furious intellectual travel
Fall in with strange foot-fellows on the road.
THOMAS YARNTON OF TARLTON
One of those old men fearing no man,
Two hundred broods his eaves have known
Since they cut on a Sapperton churchyard stone—
“Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton, Yeoman.”
At dusk you can hear the yeomen calling
The cattle still to Sapperton stalls,
And still the stroke of the woodman falls
As Thomas of Tarlton heard it falling.
I walked these meadows in seventeen-hundred,
Seed of his loins, a dream that stirred
Beyond the shape of a yeoman’s word,
So faint that but unawares he wondered.
And now, from the weeds of his tomb uncomely,
I travel again the tracks he made,
And walks at my side the yeoman shade
Of Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton dumbly.