Megalithic Poems

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Littlestone L
Littlestone Oct 9, 2006 20:59:42
Replying to chris s

...guess I do have a notebook full of'em...
Crikey chris, I'm having a job keeping up with you here - but in the nicest possible way so don't stop. How thick, actually, is that notebook of yours :-)

I'd be really surprised if the Swindon born Victorian agrarian writer Richard Jeffries hadn't penned something about Wayland Smithy &c. Almost everything by him is out of print....anyone Wiltshire based fancy a lil' research?
Ah, now yer talkin' - Richard Jefferies has set me down on a few paths. His The Old House at Coate I think may still in print - I picked up a copy at the museum in Devizes a couple of years ago (ISBN 0 9506563 8 0). Heard recently that one of his books (don't know which one I'm afraid) has recently been translated into Chinese. There's a lovely bit of prose by him @ http://megalithicpoems.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_megalithicpoems_archive.html You probably already know it but if not you're in for a treat :-)

N nigelswift
nigelswift Oct 10, 2006 05:48:23
Replying to Littlestone

I know its not a competition but let's be honest no-one is ever going to write megalithically better than that. And he's from Wilts. Can that be chance? Did it soak into him? (And its only a boring grassy mound - most poets pick on something with big mossy rocks and don't do half as well).
Anyhow, its good enough to paste back here -

Story of My Heart
Two thousand times! Two thousand times the woods grew green, and ring-doves built their nests. Day and night for two thousand years--light and shadow sweeping over the mound--two thousand years of labour by day and slumber by night. Mystery gleaming in the stars, pouring down in the sunshine, speaking in the night, the wonder of the sun and of far space, for twenty centuries round about this low and green-grown dome. Yet all that mystery and wonder is as nothing to the Thought that lies therein, to the spirit that I feel so close.

Realising that spirit, recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life. Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it. The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years it will still be only a moment. To the soul there is no past and no future; all is and will be ever, in now...

Richard Jefferies (1848-1887)