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Songs
of the Common Day, and Ave!
An
Ode for the Shelley Centenary
by
Charles G.D. Roberts
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THE
WINTER FIELDS
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WINDS
here, and sleet, and frost that bites like steel.
The low bleak hill
rounds under the low sky.
Naked of flock and
fold the fallows lie,
Thin streaked with meagre drift. The gusts reveal
By fits the dim grey snakes of fence, that steal
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Through the white
dusk. The hill-foot poplars sigh,
While storm and
death with winter trample by,
And the iron fields ring sharp, and blind lights
reel.
Yet
in the lonely ridges, wrenched with pain,
Harsh solitary hillocks,
bound and dumb, |
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Grave
glebes close-lipped beneath the scourge and chain,
Lurks hid the germ
of ecstasy—the sum
Of life that waits on summer, till the rain
Whisper in April and
the crocus come. |
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