From the farm-house door goes a boy adrift
Down the muddy track where oak-leaves shift
And last year’s straw from the straining hedge
Romps over and over down to the edge
Of the brimming meres in great grey flood
While over his head thin fleeces scud
Like geese in a hurry, changing, fast
As shadows on woods when clouds have passed,
Spacing the pale and level light
That glints the meres and their borders white
With foam derived from melted snow,
Where branches bob and feathers blow.
Far out in the centre under the trees,
With formal shape and purest ease,
A pair of swans in mutual dream
Riding the waters always seem
To be still and moving and only apart
As a young boy’s head from a young boy’s heart,
Who watches their slender dip and rise
And walks straight on with no help from his eyes,
That are now turned up to the central air
Where the snipe drum down with throbbing tear,
Till a clattering sharp cascading sound,
As falling flints from walls rebound,
Pulls him up short and turns him round –
The castle jackdaws drop and call
In a windswept crowd of clashing brawl.
 
He passes on with a sense of fate
Through the rusty swing of the kissing-gate
And finds himself where a tempest strains
With the mighty masts of a stormship’s mains
In the noisy tops of oak and beech,
While a blackbird hops low down, in reach,
On rustling autumn stirred like ghosts.
He comes out clear by the barbed-wire posts
And, climbing a heavy hill of plough,
He bends his back as his feet tell how
Till a volley of finches lifts, at hand,
And he thankfully stops and looks at the land.
The weathercock, the calling hour,
The angled sun, the singing shower,
And the piling rooks on the grey stone tower,
The wood, the meres, and the scattered town
Where he drifts back late and writes this down,
For he takes to these passages of love
As the sailing hawk to the air above,
Where his fine transparent futures arch
Over the farm to the month of March.
 

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