THE CENTURION'S SONG Legate, I come to you in tears-My cohort ordered home! I've served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome? Here is my heart, my soul, my mind-the only life I know. I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go! EE SEE PUCK'S SONG you the ferny ride that steals O that was whence they hewed the keels And mark you where the ivy clings See you the dimpled track that runs Out of the Weald, the secret Weald, The horse-shoes red at Flodden Field, See you our little mill that clacks, So busy by the brook? She has ground her corn and paid her tax PUCK'S SONG See you our stilly woods of oak? O that was where the Saxons broke See you the windy levels spread O that was where the Northmen fled, See you our pastures wide and lone, O there was a City thronged and known, And see you, after rain, the trace And see you marks that show and fade, Like shadows on the Downs? O they are the lines the Flint Men made, To guard their wondrous towns. Trackway and Camp and City lost, Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease, She is not any common Earth, But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye, THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS HEY shut the road through the woods Weather and rain have undone it again, It is underneath the coppice and heath, Only the keeper sees That, where the ring-dove broods, And the badgers roll at ease, There was once a road through the woods. Yet, if you enter the woods Of a summer evening late, When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools Where the otter whistles his mate (They fear not men in the woods, Because they see so few), You will hear the beat of a horse's feet, The misty solitudes, As though they perfectly knew The old lost road through the woods But there is no road through the woods. A THREE-PART SONG 'M just in love with all these three, I' The Weald and the Marsh and the Down countrie; Nor I don't know which I love the most, The Weald or the Marsh or the white chalk coast! I've buried my heart in a ferny hill, Twix' a liddle low shaw an' a great high gill. I've loosed my mind for to out and run I reckon you know what my mind needs! I've given my soul to the Southdown grass, |