By Severn Sea and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Prose poet of the fabled West,
Ere school and railway had begun
To fuse our shires and tongues in one,
And equalize the worst and best,

While Devon vowels fluted yet
By Dart and Lynn their mellow length,
While flourished still in Saxon strength
The consonants of Somerset,

Your Exmoor epic fixed the hues
That lingered on by combe and tor,
And in the hollow vale of Oare
You found a matter for your Muse!

The brigands' den, the prisoned bride,
The giant yeoman's hero mould,
Who fought and garrulously told
The Iliad of his country-side;

You bade them live and last for us
And for our heirs, as caught erewhile
The Doric of his rocky isle
Lives in your loved Theocritus;—

Loved, for you are a child of ours,
And know and prize the scholar's home
Who learned in student days to roam
Among the cloisters and the towers

Where now my missive rhyme I pen
To greet you as in lettered ease
You move amid your birds and bees,
Old Virgil's gardener come again;

Or like Alcinous from his hall
Survey your orchards ripening fair,
Apple on apple, pear on pear,
From snowy blossom to golden ball;

Or teach your swelling vines to shape
Their tender buds and safely thrust
The spires that hold in starry dust
The promise of the purple grape.

So may they find you, may you take
These verses with a kindlier eye
And backward thoughts of sympathy
With him who writes, for memory's sake;

Who loves like you the western ground,
The wilder scene, the hills that scent
The sea, and in this inland pent
That hems our Academe around,

Must fain require his haunts of old,
Though happy here, and sometimes miss
By still and silver Tamesis
The rushing Severn's molten gold.

Oxford: April, 1896.