GEORGE MEREDITH

Cool was the woodside ; cool as her white dairy

Keeping sweet the cream-pan; and there the boys from

school, Cricketing below, rush'd brown and red with sunshine ;

O the dark translucence of the deep-eyed cool ! Spying from the farm, herself she fetch' d a pitcher

Full of milk, and tilted for each in turn the beak. Then a little fellow, mouth up and on tiptoe,

Said, ' I will kiss you ' : she laugh'd and lean'd her cheek.

Doves of the fir-wood walling high our red roof

Through the long noon coo, crooning through the coo. Loose droop the leaves, and down the sleepy roadway

Sometimes pipes a chaffinch ; loose droops the blue. Cows flap a slow tail knee-deep in the river,

Breathless, given up to sun and gnat and fly. Nowhere is she seen ; and if I see her nowhere,

Lightning may come, straight rains and tiger sky.

O the golden sheaf, the rustling treasure-armful !

O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced ! O the treasure-tresses one another over

Nodding ! O the girdle slack about the waist ! Slain are the poppies that shot their random scarlet

Quick amid the wheat-ears : wound about the waist, Gathered, see these brides of Earth one blush of ripeness!

O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced !

Large and smoky red the sun's cold disk drops, Clipped by naked hills, on violet shaded snow:

Eastward large and still lights up a bower of moonrise, Whence at her leisure steps the moon aglow.

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