Preludes 1921-1922

by John Drinkwater

Full summer dusk was round him as he stood
On the hill-top, over the calling sheep
Drifting along the pastured downs. The moon
Far off was rising from the Sussex sea.
Above him, building up into the sky,
Black, and with pointing sails now skeletoned,
A windmill gathered strays of evening wind
Whispering through the splitting timbers. Still
The setting sun washed with a fuller gold
The golden sheaves patterned upon a cone
Of downland by him farther from the sea.
So still, he seemed a thing woven of earth,
A life rooted and fixed as were the oaks
Locked in the soil, their bases webbed with fleece
Of sheltering ewes, he watched across the valley,
And the hour passed, and the black mill grew and grew,
And then a light came in a far window
Of a grey farm cresting the hill beyond,
And sudden tides beat on him as he saw
A white dress moving in the distant pines.

.....

Lake Winter, a five hundred acre man,
Was English, bred far back, a part of England,
With South and North and Midland in his blood.
And somewhere Devon, somewhere Suffolk too.
He had been born of love. They had been lovers,
Who made him, and no more, but they were lovers.
She of a proud house, proud to make it prouder
With wit and beauty, and a young brain glowing,
And a swift body fearless and pitiful;
And he a Cotswold yeoman, thrift and power,
And mastery of earth and herds and flocks,
And knowledge of all seasons and their fruits,
And a heart of meditation, all his birthright;
Ten generations deep from Gloucester stone.
And those two met, and loved, and of their love
Came a new purity of blood and limb,
As of a purpose slowly moulding them.
And long they waited, and then one summer noon,
He, coming northward from his Cotswold home,
Found her by Rydal as she had bidden him,
And proudly stride to stride they took the road,
Sure youth by youth, and to Helvellyn's foot
They came, and climbed up to the brighter air,
And into the wind's ardour still went on,
Until upon the mountain top they stood,
And lake by lake was fading in the dusk.
Out of the plains they saw the moon move up
And over them the deeper blue came on,
The faint stars glowing into mastery.
And in that splendour of a summer hill,
Amid the mellow-breathing night, where yet
The poppies of the valley could not come,
There was conceived a boy....
And sorrow came
Upon their love. Before the moon again
Was full upon Helvellyn, the Cotswold lover
With a great elm was blasted in a storm,
And lay, a burnt thing, in a Cotswold grave.
And she went out, took her inheritance,
And lived apart, and the man-child was born.
She called him Lake, for those fading lakes of dusk,
And gave him her own name. And twenty years
She tended him, and died; and from her substance
Lake Winter now for fifteen years had kept
His Sussex acres in fertility.
Such was the man, so born, so passionately made,
So knit of English earth and generations,
Who now upon the summer evening watched—
His manhood full upon his middle years—
A white dress moving in the distant pines.

.....

Down to the valley from their hills they came,
Lake Winter and the woman that he loved.
He waited by a long brown garden wall,
Mottled with moss and lichen, where in the dusk
Like a great moth a late flycatcher wove,
And watched her coming down a rutted path,
Towards him. And the flowing of her body,
Sure step through fugitive cadences of limb,
Up to the little golden arch of hair,
Was lovely as a known yet wanted tale.

.....

Zell Dane, the wife of Martin Dane, who held
Tollington Manor farm, was ten years wed.
Dane was an honest man by groom and horse,
Paid pew-rent and his losing wagers, thought
The British Empire lived at Westminster,
Stood by the State and rights of property,
Drank well, and knew the barmaids of a county.
He married Zell, and neither could have said
Why it was done. Ten years had gone since then,
And he was now a half forgotten habit,
She, some queer porcelain stuff beyond his knowing.

.....

Lake Winter came and went at Tollington,
As other neighbours, a little in Dane's mind
Suspect for certain rumours of his birth,
But known for a straight rider and plain speaker,
Who meant his words and had words for his meaning.
And Lake and Zell, between the jests at table,
Where they could match the best wits of the room,
Would talk of things that Dane and the rest counted
As pointing ways not good for level minds.
Why pose about Beethoven, and Debussy,
Or these French fellows Degas and Picasso,
When there were Marcus Stone, and A Long, Long Trail,
And "A Little Grey Home in the West," that common folk
Could understand? And, however the truth might be,
It wasn't decent openly to say
That William Wordsworth was a better poet—
Though more or less in a poet was no matter—
Because it seemed that once in his flaming youth
He had loved gloriously in France....

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