Nightingales sang by day

Then broke the spring. The hedges in a day

Burgeoned to green; the drawing of the trees,

Incomparably pencilled line by line,

Thickened to heaviness, and men forgot

The intellectual austerity

Of winter, in the rich warm-blooded rush

Of growth, and mating beasts, and rising sap.

How swift and sudden strode that tardy spring,

Between a sunrise and a sunset come!

The shadow of a swallow crossed the wall;

Nightingales sang by day. The pushing blade

Parted the soil. The morning roofs and oasts

There, down the lane, beside the brook and willows,

Cast their long shadows. Pasture, ankle-wet,

Steamed to the sun. The tulips dyed their green

To red in cottage gardens. Bees astir,

Fussing from flower to flower, made war on time.

Body and blood were princes; the cold mind

Sank with Orion from the midnight sky;

The stars of spring rose visible: The Virgin;

Al Fard the solitary; Regulus

The kingly star, the handle of the Sickle;

And Venus, lonely splendour in the west,

Roamed over the rapt meadows; shone in gold

Beneath the cottage eaves where nesting birds

Obeyed love’s law; shone through the cottage panes

Where youth lay sleeping on the breast of youth,

Where love was life, and not a brief desire;

Shone on the heifer blaring for the bull

Over the hedgerow deep in dewy grass:

And glinted through the dark and open door

Where the proud stallion neighing to his mares

Stamped on the cobbles of the stable floor.

For all were equal in the sight of spring,

Man and his cattle; corn; and greening trees,

Ignorant of the soul’s perplexity,

Ignorant of the wherefore and the end,

Bewildered by no transient ecstasy,

But following the old and natural law,

Nor marred nor blazing with a royal excess;

The law of life and life’s continuance.

taken from the poem ‘The Land’ by Vita Sackville West

Photography Anne Corr.

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