Ivor Gurney Poems

Little did I dream, England, that you bore me
Under the Cotswold Rills beside the water meadows
...

Few have praised the master of masters, who but I
Have right, that followed example, and did not lie
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If England, her spirit lives anywhere
It is by Severn, by hawthorns and grand willows.
Earth heaves up twice a hundred feet in air
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Lying in dug-outs, joking idly, wearily;
Watching the candle guttering in the draught;
Hearing the great shells go high over us, eerily
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After the dread tales and red yams of the Line
Anything might have come to us; but the divine
Afterglow brought us up to a Welsh colony
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I would hope for the children of West Ham
Wooden-frame houses, square with some-sort stuff
Crammed in to keep the wind away that's rough,
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O does some blind fool now stand on my hill
To see how Ashleworth nestles by the river?
Where eyes and heart and soul may drink their fill
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The hoe scrapes earth as fine in grain as sand,
I like the swirl of it and the swing in the hand
Of the lithe hoe so clever at craft and grace,
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On Cotswold edge there is a field and that
Grows thick with corn and speedwell and the mat
Of thistles, of the tall kind; Rome lived there,
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Living we loved you, yet withheld our praises
Before your faces.

And though our spirits had you high in honour!
...