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My drowsy cheek fast to her side,
The pail below my arm,
My thought leapt what might me betide,
And soon I was warm.
For that gave me a beating heart
And made me hot thro’,
As when you reckon, with a start,
Someone speaks of you.

vii

And all my years of farm-service
There was no dismay,
But men and maids knew nought amiss
With their work or play;
But grew amain like tree or beast,
Labouring out their lives
Till sap and milk fill’d spine and breast,
And ripen’d men and wives.

What call had we to think of war,
We growing things?
What need had we to reckon o’er
Misdoubts or threatenings?
A soldier-lad in his red coat
Show’d up then as he past
Like a lamplighted fishing-boat
Lonely in the vast.

An aeroplane in middle sky
Might bring us to our doors,
To see her like a dragon-fly
Droning as she soars.
Long before you see her come
You can hear her throbbing,
Far, far away like a distant drum,
Near, like a thresher sobbing.

Ah, in those days of wonderment,
Wonder and delight,
No thought we spent what murder meant,
Horror in the night;
Or how a hidden dreadful plan
Like a fingering weed
Was growing up in the mind of man
From a fungus-seed!

IV

i

Out of the clear how shrewdly blows
The North-West wind!
Free as he goes, how brave he shows,
The sun seems blind!
The shadows fleet upon the grass
Where the kestrels hover–
What leagues of sorrow they must pass
Before they shroud my lover!

Half-naked now, confronting cold,
The tall trees shiver,
Each with its pool of pallid gold
Draining down to the river.
‘Tis now when fret of winter wet
Warns the year she is old,
And she casts robe and coronet,
That I would loosen hold.

ii

Our lives creep on to change at last,
And change is sudden coming;
Rooted you see yourself and fast,
And then be sent roaming.
When I was come to twenty years,
Home for a spell,
Mother she brought a flush of tears
With what she had to tell.

There was a fine new place for me
Forty miles away–
And where my dream of what might be
One fine day?
The farmer’s wife she kiss’d me kindly
When I was paid;
But Ted and I said Goodbye blindly,
And no more said.

No word between us of the thought
That fill’d four years,
No fond look caught by eyes well taught,
Tho’ thick with tears!
‘Twas Goodbye, Nance, and Goodbye, Ted,
And just a clasp of the hand:
Maybe I’ll write, he might have said
For me to understand.

But poor people have need to work
Whether merry or sad,
Whatever groping thought do lurk,
Whatever dreams they’ve had!
I went my way and he kept his,
I to the county town,
He in a row of cottages
Below the hump-backt down.

iii

A town-bred girl, her hair in curl
And apron edged with lace,
She took me in, my head awhirl,
To my new place.
And there the five of us must hive
In that warm shutter’d house,
And keep our honesty alive
With none to counsel us.

The master and the mistresses,
What were they but strangers?
‘Twas no part of their businesses
To think of servants’ dangers.
They sneer at us, and we at them,
Life sunders where the stairs are:
But are the things that they condemn
In us much worse than theirs are?