Suddenly

Over a lifetime, I have failed to give the moon the attention it deserves.  But it is patient and forgiving, despite my faithlessness. Thus, in the first week of this month, as I was out walking at twilight, I happened to glance towards the vanishing sunset, and there it was: a brilliant and pristine white crescent moon, a third of the way up the darkening, but still powder blue, southwestern sky.  How shall I describe that whiteness, that thin curve of radiance set amidst pale blue?  I'm afraid I have no words.  Now, as then, I'm left speechless.

I have been visiting Bashō's haiku in December and January.  A few weeks before my encounter with the newly-born crescent moon, I came across this:

Unlike anything

it has been compared to:

the third-day moon.

Bashō (1644-1694) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda (editor), Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford University Press 1991), page 207.  

The Japanese phrase for the first phase of the waxing crescent moon is mika no tsuki: "third-day moon."  Mika means "third day"; tsuki means "moon"; no is a particle meaning (roughly) "of."  Bashō included this headnote to the haiku: "The third day of the month." Ibid.  Ueda provides this comment: "Since olden times the crescent moon had been compared to a great many things, including a sickle, a bow, a comb, a boat, and a woman's eyebrow."  Ibid.  Bashō is absolutely correct: words are not adequate.

As so often happens with poetry, serendipity: a poem appears, and, soon after, the beautiful particulars of the World arrive, echoing it. Or vice versa.  In addition, this comes to mind:

                                     Night

That shining moon -- watched by that one faint star:

Sure now am I, beyond the fear of change,

The lovely in life is the familiar, 

And only the lovelier for continuing strange.

Walter de la Mare, Memory and Other Poems (Constable 1938).

Dudley Holland (1915-1956), "Winter Morning" (1945)

"The lovely in life is the familiar,/And only the lovelier for continuing strange" is paired in my mind with these lines from de la Mare's "Now," which appears in his final collection of poems: "Now is the all-sufficing all/Wherein to love the lovely well,/Whate'er befall." (The italics appear in the original text.)  Stumbling across the beauty of the crescent moon early this month brought home the importance of "now": a reproach to my usual state of sleepwalking.  And the serene power and charm of that beauty had an element of strangeness to it: the moon seemed impossibly lovely, beyond one's ken.

But there was something else at work as well.  The suddenness of that beauty's arrival -- as I absent-mindedly looked skyward -- startled me, took me aback, and leaves me speechless still.  Words such as "miraculous" or "revelatory" float to the surface.  But I shall restrain myself.  Relying on the circumspect William James in his final conclusions on mysticism, I will leave it at this: "higher energies filter in."  (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Longmans, Green and Co. 1902), page 519.)

Best to turn to a poem:

                         The Elm

This is the place where Dorothea smiled.

I did not know the reason, nor did she.

But there she stood, and turned, and smiled at me:

A sudden glory had bewitched the child.

The corn at harvest, and a single tree.

This is the place where Dorothea smiled.

Hilaire Belloc, Sonnets and Verse (Duckworth 1938).

Belloc's poem, and the phrase "a sudden glory" in particular, bring this to mind:

       Sudden Heaven

All was as it had ever been --

The worn familiar book,

The oak beyond the hawthorn seen,

The misty woodland's look:

The starling perched upon the tree

With his long tress of straw --

When suddenly heaven blazed on me,

And suddenly I saw:

Saw all as it would ever be,

In bliss too great to tell;

Forever safe, forever free,

All bright with miracle:

Saw as in heaven the thorn arrayed,

The tree beside the door;

And I must die -- but O my shade

Shall dwell there evermore.

Ruth Pitter (1897-1992), in Don King (editor), Sudden Heaven: The Collected Poems of Ruth Pitter (Kent State University Press 2018), page 106.  The poem was written in 1931.  Ibid, page 106

Paul Ayshford Methuen (1886-1974)

"Magnolia Soulangiana at Corsham" (c. 1963)

While I was out on my daily walk last week, a few hundred feet in front of me a dark bird with a wide wingspan flew slowly away, just above a grove of pines beside the road.  The bird banked to the left, and settled on a branch near the top of a pine.  Given the size of the bird's wings, I suspected, and hoped, that it was a bald eagle.  But I couldn't be sure from that distance: it could have been a hawk, an owl, or even a large crow.  I assumed it would be gone by the time I reached the pine. 

But, when I arrived and looked up, there it was: a bald eagle perched on a high branch, surveying the territory.  Encountering a bald eagle is not a rare occurrence in this part of the world, but I never cease to be amazed -- and grateful -- when I cross paths with one of them. I never tire of (or get over) those penetrating, unflinching eyes.  Or the sharp curve of that deep-yellow beak, unlike any other hue of yellow. Or the cry that now and then comes from the sky as one of them circles slowly overhead.

               Arrival

Not conscious

       that you have been seeking

              suddenly

       you come upon it

the village in the Welsh hills

              dust free

       with no road out

but the one you came in by.

              A bird chimes

       from a green tree

the hour that is no hour

       you know.  The river dawdles

to hold a mirror for you

where you may see yourself

       as you are, a traveller

               with the moon's halo

       above him, who has arrived

       after long journeying where he

               began, catching this

       one truth by surprise

that there is everything to look forward to.

R. S. Thomas, Later Poems (Macmillan 1983).

R. S. Thomas' poems can be spare and acerbic, especially when his subject is the modern world.  But there is no shortage of beauty.  The heart of his poetry is his lifelong attendance upon the silence of God, as he makes his way through our short time in Paradise (Wales, in Thomas' case).  At times there is a note of complaint, the merest hint of a doubt.  But withal he is patient.  He is often rewarded.

               The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it.  But that was the pearl

of great price, the one field that had

the treasure in it.  I realize now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it.  Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past.  It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R. S. Thomas, Laboratories of the Spirit (Macmillan 1975).

Ian Grant (1904-1993), "Cheshire Mill" (1939)

The beautiful particulars of the World often arrive unexpectedly and unaccountably at our doorstep, or we at theirs.  Suddenly.  There is no planning involved, nor itinerary to be followed.  We simply need to pay attention.  (So says an inveterate sleepwalker.)  And never cease to be grateful.

To a mountain village

   at nightfall on a spring day

      I came and saw this:

blossoms scattering on echoes

   from the vespers bell.

Nōin (988-1050) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 134.

James Cowie (1886-1956), "Pastoral" (c. 1938)

Fragments

Recently I've been spending time with The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation.  Published in 1938, and edited by T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra, it contains short lyric poems and epigrams, as well as excerpts from epics, long poems, and plays.  Whenever I visit the Greek world I am reminded that human nature has never changed, and never will.  Our capacities for good and evil, nobility and folly, and everything in between, remain constant. 

Another anthology of Greek verse to which I often return is F. L. Lucas' Greek Poetry for Everyman.  The epigraph of the volume consists of an untitled poem by Lucas:

Where lowlands stretch for ever,

Rank pasture, mud-banked river,

And bullocks flick and browse,

     And flies carouse;

Or the city's smoke-pall thickens

And the sullied sunlight sickens --

There the heart cries "How far

     The mountains are!"

Till, on some windless even,

Vast cloud-peaks rampart Heaven,

And sunset hues with rose

     Their timeless snows;

Above this age's shuffle,

Its buzz, and rush, and scuffle,

So towers, far off, at peace,

     The world of Greece.

F. L. Lucas (editor and translator), Greek Poetry for Everyman (J. M. Dent 1951), page vii.

By returning to the verse of ancient Greece (and of the Hellenistic world) am I abandoning the modern world, while romanticizing -- or imagining -- a world of golden light that may have never existed?  But of course.  Why not?

Leopold Rothaug (1868-1959), "Classical Landscape" (1939)

Beauty and Truth present themselves to us in fragments, not all at once in a seamless web.  If such a seamless web exists, it is beyond our ken in this World.  Now and then we glimpse scattered threads, or what might be emerging patterns.  To use a phrase from William James which I quoted in my most recent post: "higher energies filter in."  (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Longmans, Green, and Co. 1902), page 519.)  Still, fragmentary Beauty and Truth are enough to keep one occupied for a lifetime.

Such is the case with Greek verse, a great deal of which survives only in fragments: the lovely, beguiling, affecting remnants of otherwise lost poems and plays.  In returning to The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation this time around, I have been reading fragments of plays, known only by their titles (if that) and a few surviving scattered lines.  The lines quoted hereafter all come from these vanished works.  Unavoidably out of context, but, in their isolation, gemlike.

Last peaks of the world, beyond all seas,

Wellsprings of night, and gleams of opened heaven,

The old garden of the sun.

Sophocles (translated by Gilbert Murray), in T. F. Higham and C. M. Bowra, The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford University Press 1938), page 385.

Yes, of course: the golden light, wine-dark sea, and star-filled sky of Greece.  The eternal Hesperian gardens we all long for.  But there is a simpler, more down-to-earth side to this Paradise as well:

                                        Ah, what joy

Can out-joy this -- to reach the land -- and then

Safe lodged, with happy drowsing sense to hear

The raindrops pattering on the roof outside!

Sophocles (translated by Walter Headlam), Ibid, page 383.

The rainy evening described by Sophocles is part of the World of lovely commonplaces that one comes across so often in these fragments, and also, for instance, in the epigrams of The Greek Anthology.  A reminder that one of the things that enchants us about the Greek world is its day-to-day intertwining of life and art.

There is no comfort in adversity

More sweet than Art affords.  The studious mind

Poising in meditation, there is fixed,

And sails beyond its troubles unperceiving.

Amphis (4th century B.C.) (translated by T. F. Higham), Ibid, page 526.

But another thread winds in and out of the beautiful fragments as well, never out of sight or mind.

Alas, how right the ancient saying is:

We, who are old, are nothing else but noise

And shape.  Like mimicries of dreams we go,

And have no wits, although we think us wise.

Euripides (translated by C. M. Bowra), Ibid, page 455.

Hugo Darnaut (1851-1937), "Sunken Splendor" (1900)

"Mimicries of dreams."  Even an idealized Greece would not be Greece without an abiding and pervasive awareness of our evanescence.

But my fate, on some throbbing wheel of God,

Always must rise and fall, and change its being:

As the moon's image never two nights long

May in one station rest: out of the dark

The young face grows, still lovelier, still more perfect,

Then at the noblest of her shining, back 

She melts and comes again to nothingness.

Sophocles (translated by Gilbert Murray), Ibid, page 384.

It ought not to take a year of plague to remind us of our mortality.  Any good poet has death on his or her mind.  "The paradise of Flowers' and Butterflies' Spirits."  (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Kathleen Coburn (editor), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1: 1794-1804 (Pantheon Books 1957), Notebook Entry 1736 (December 1803).)  "A rainbow balanced on an empty house in a verdant combe."  (Philippe Jaccottet, The Second Seedtime: Notebooks, 1980-1994 (translated by Tess Lewis) (Seagull Books 2017), page 150.)  In this World, how could it be otherwise?  Why would we want it to be otherwise?

Mourning your dearest friends, be wise in grief,

They are not dead, but on that single road

Which all are bound to travel, gone before.

We too, in after days, shall overtake them;

One road-house shall receive us, entered in

To lodge together for the rest of time.

Antiphanes (4th century B.C.) (translated by T. F. Higham), Ibid, page 518.

There is no turning away.  Greek verse is full of touching laments and epitaphs for the departed.  And there is no shortage of contemplations upon the dark, endless silence of death, where all are shorn of memories.  "Emptily from here to Hades floats the echo,/Hushed among the dead.  My voice goes down the night."  (Erinna (4th century B.C.) (translated by C. M. Bowra), Ibid, page 522.)  The poets, in all times and in all places, tell us there can be no turning away.  "And yet we all in the end live, do we not, in a phantom dwelling?  But enough of that -- I'm off to bed."  (Bashō (1644-1694), "Record of the Hut of the Phantom Dwelling," in Burton Watson (translator), Four Huts: Asian Writings on the Simple Life (Shambhala 2002), page 95.)

No mortal is born free from suffering: --

He buries children, and begets him new,

And also dies himself.  And yet men grieve

At bringing earth to earth!  It is Fate's will

To reap Life's harvest like the fruited ear,

That one should be, one not.  Where is there cause

For grief, when only 'tis the path of Nature?

Nothing is dread that Fate makes necessary.

Euripides (translated by Walter Headlam), Ibid, page 461.

Leopold Rothaug, "Far Away" (1945)

Enchanted Or Disenchanted, Part Seven: Arrival

Last week the first crocuses appeared: two clumps of light purple, dark purple, and white flowers in the muddy far corner of a neighbor's front yard, next to the sidewalk.  This week they have arrived in earnest, blooming everywhere, increasing in number by the day.  More tentatively, a few daffodils with small yellow flowers have emerged here and there.  The tulips still bide their time.

All of this can be explained perfectly well by science, of course.  Or perhaps not.

            The Year's Awakening

How do you know that the pilgrim track

Along the belting zodiac

Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds

Is traced by now to the Fishes' bounds

And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud

Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud,

And never as yet a tinct of spring

Has shown in the Earth's apparelling;

        O vespering bird, how do you know,

                How do you know?

How do you know, deep underground,

Hid in your bed from sight and sound,

Without a turn in temperature,

With weather life can scarce endure,

That light has won a fraction's strength,

And day put on some moments' length,

Whereof in merest rote will come,

Weeks hence, mild airs that do not numb;

        O crocus root, how do you know,

                How do you know?

Thomas Hardy, Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces (Macmillan 1914).

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James is coy.  One senses that he has a certain sympathy with mysticism (which, for me, is the heart of the book), but he generally remains circumspect with respect to his own feelings until he reaches his "Conclusions."  Then, in the final paragraph, he writes:

"The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.  By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true."

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Longmans, Green, and Co. 1902), page 519.

There are those who will think that James does not go far enough. Others will think that he goes too far.  I am simply grateful for this thoughtful articulation of a reasonable way to look at, and live in, the World.  I might quibble with "consciousness" as being too intellectual, abstract, or psychological.  On the other hand, James' philosophy and writings are grounded in psychology (or so it seems to me), so I can understand why he would use the word.  I would lean more toward the presence of "other worlds" of "existence" or "being," rather than "consciousness."  Using either of those words brings immanence into consideration.  But I am far out of my depth at this point.  To wit: please don't ask me what "existence," "being," or "immanence" mean.  I will have no answer.  I have only inarticulable inklings about these things.

Edward Salter (1835-1934), "Dolerw House and Gardens" (1876)

There is one fine phrase of James' that I have no quibble with whatsoever: "higher energies filter in."  As a Wordsworthian pantheist, I find this thought to be wholly congenial, and true.  For instance: spring is here, regardless of the date on the calendar. Higher energies filter in, bearing messages.  We only need to step out the door to receive them.

          A Contemplation upon Flowers

Brave flowers -- that I could gallant it like you,

          And be as little vain!

You come abroad, and make a harmless shew,

          And to your beds of earth again.

You are not proud:  you know your birth:

For your embroidered garments are from earth.

You do obey your months and times, but I

          Would have it ever spring:

My fate would know no winter, never die,

          Nor think of such a thing.

Oh, that I could my bed of earth but view

And smile, and look as cheerfully as you!

Oh, teach me to see death and not to fear,

          But rather to take truce!

How often have I seen you at a bier,

          And there look fresh and spruce!

You fragrant flowers, then teach me, that my breath

Like yours may sweeten and perfume my death.

Henry King (1592-1669), in Norman Ault (editor), Seventeenth Century Lyrics from the Original Texts (William Sloane 1950).

William James continues the paragraph quoted above as follows:

"I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist's attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all.  But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word 'bosh!'  Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow 'scientific' bounds.  Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament, -- more intricately built than physical science allows."

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, page 519 (italics in original text).

John Knight (1842-1908), "English Landscape"

James ends the final paragraph of his "Conclusions" with these words (which immediately follow the quotation above):

"So my objective and my subjective conscience both hold me to the over-belief which I express.  Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?"

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, p. 519.

The last sentence is absolutely wonderful.  It is revealing (and moving) to see James speak of "faithfulness" in the context of the intellectually distancing term "over-belief."  And the sudden appearance of "God" is startling.  The sentence is beautiful, extraordinary. 

                              In the Fields

Lord, when I look at lovely things which pass,

     Under old trees the shadows of young leaves

Dancing to please the wind along the grass,

     Or the gold stillness of the August sun on the August sheaves,

Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?

     And if there is

Will the strange heart of any everlasting thing

     Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?

They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,

     Over the fields.  They come in Spring.

Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000).

Alfred East (1844-1913), "A Bend in the River"

Beyond Words

As human beings, we are adept (more or less) at putting things into words.  It is what we do.  Hence, for instance, poetry.  It has been argued that this trafficking in words is what sets us apart from the other creatures with whom we share the World.  Sets us apart for both good and ill, I would suggest.  Poetry, yes.  But a great deal of noisome noise as well.  There is no need to go into the particulars. You know them well.

However, there are some things that are simply unsayable, however articulate and clever we fancy ourselves to be.  Thus, as it wondrously happens, an awareness of the inexpressibility of certain fundamental elements of existence and of the World often accounts for the beauty and the truth of the poems that move us.

     'And so they came to live at Daffodil Water'

'And so they came to live at Daffodil Water.'
Such were the words that fell as by dictation
Into the cloud of my preoccupation,
And one by one they fluttered down like leaves,
Touching me with their strange illumination --
Like leaves the girls would catch at Butler's Cross
To bring themselves good luck, each leaf a year.

'And so they came to live at Daffodil Water.'
A grey-green light of depths that do not stir
Beneath the unfledged ash-bough's contemplation
Touches me now as I transcribe the words.
Such were the depths perhaps where Hylas drowned,
Such were the wreaths his temptresses would wear.
But who are they who came to shelter there
And live obscurely by that leaf-light crowned,
Patiently mending their storm-shattered minds?

Who came to live in grace at Daffodil Water,
And why they sheltered there and from what storm,
Neither the voice that speaks through my abstraction
Nor my own fantasy serves to inform.

James Reeves, The Talking Skull (Heinemann 1958).

Hylas (line 12) was a young man who was a companion to Heracles, and one of the Argonauts who accompanied Heracles and Jason in search of the Golden Fleece.  However, while on the journey, he was seduced by the temptations of the nymphs who haunted a spring and vanished beneath the water of a pond, never to be seen again.

Stanley Roy Badmin (1906-1989), "Stormy Evening, Glencoe"

The phrase "words fail me" usually carries with it a connotation of inadequacy or of frustration.  However, it may in fact represent a sign of progress.  To wit:

"There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words.  They make themselves manifest.  They are what is mystical."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 6.522, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) (translated by David Pears and Brian McGuinness) (italics in the original).  An alternative translation is: "There is indeed the inexpressible.  This shows itself; it is the mystical."  (Translated by C. K. Ogden.)

The word "mystical" (whether used by Wittgenstein or by anyone else) causes some people (ironic moderns, for example) to raise their eyebrows.  The same is true of the word "Immanence."  I don't know why this should be the case.  Perhaps the modern temper is not as "open-minded" as it believes itself to be.  In truth, it is quite doctrinaire and intolerant.  But we are each free to follow our own path.

                              Abersoch

There was that headland, asleep on the sea,
The air full of thunder and the far air
Brittle with lightning; there was that girl
Riding her cycle, hair at half-mast,
And the men smoking, the dinghies at rest
On the calm tide.  There were people going
About their business, while the storm grew
Louder and nearer and did not break.

Why do I remember these few things,
That were rumours of life, not life itself
That was being lived fiercely, where the storm raged?
Was it just that the girl smiled,
Though not at me, and the men smoking
Had the look of those who have come safely home?

R. S. Thomas, Tares (Rupert Hart-Davis 1961).

Wittgenstein was fond of William James, and of The Varieties of Religious Experience in particular.  He is said to have read it in 1912 in Cambridge, nine years before Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was published.  It was one of the books he often recommended (or gave) to friends (another such book, interestingly, was Samuel Johnson's Prayers and Meditations).  James identifies "ineffability" as one of the four defining features of mysticism, and states:

"The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative.  The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.  It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.  In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect."

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Longmans, Green 1902), page 380.

I am not attempting to pigeonhole 'And so they came to live at Daffodil Water' or "Abersoch" as "mystical" poems, or as poems about "Immanence":  they are, after all, composed of words and they do "say" something concrete.  But I think they also point to something ineffable and unsayable beyond themselves.  I am reminded of R. H. Blyth's comment (using a Buddhist saying) about how a haiku works:  "It is a single finger pointing to the moon."  R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page i.  The Buddhist lesson is that we must ultimately look beyond the pointing finger.

Robert Coventry (1855-1914), "The Haven" (1908)

In the end, there are certain things -- likely the most important things -- that are beyond the reach of words.  To think otherwise is to give ourselves too much credit and too much power.  We are forever overestimating our ability to formulate dispositive explanations of existence and of the World that rely upon words.  There are certain things that are beyond words.  Wittgenstein's well-known proposition (which I have quoted here on numerous occasions) is true:  "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 7, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (translated by David Pears and Brian McGuinness).

And where does this leave us?  Bereft of words, we may feel hopelessly lost.  Ah, but that's the beauty of letting words go, and of accepting silence:  we are exactly where we ought to be.

                 The Forest of Dean

'Now here you could not lose your way,
Although you lost it,' seemed to say
Each path that ran to left or right
Through narrowing distance out of sight.

'Not here, not here,' whistled a thrush
And 'Never, never,' sighed a thorn-bush;
Primroses looked me in the face
With, 'O too lovely is this place.'

A larch-bough waved a loose green beard
And 'Never, never,' still I heard;
'Wayfarer, seek no more your track,
It lies each side and front and back.'

Andrew Young, Winter Harvest (Nonesuch Press 1933).

"The Forest of Dean" is prefigured in an earlier poem by Young:

                  In the New Forest

With branch on sighing branch reclined
     And wild rose beckoning wild rose,
I lose my way, only to find
     That no-one here his way can lose.

Andrew Young, in Edward Lowbury and Alison Young (editors), The Poetical Works of Andrew Young (Secker & Warburg 1985).  The poem appears in a letter that Young wrote to John Freeman in August of 1927.  Ibid, page 329.  He did not publish it during his lifetime.  Freeman was an acquaintance of both Edward Thomas and Walter de la Mare.  A few of his poems have appeared here in the past.

Daffodil Water, Abersoch, the Forest of Dean, the New Forest.  Here. With nothing more to be said, are we in precisely the right place?

Dane Maw (1906-1989), "Woolverton and Peart Woods" (1970)