POPPIES
The earliest mower had not risen yet; the only sign of human life was
the light that burned all night in a cottage bedroom, here and there;
and from garden to garden went the white owl with that indolent flight
which seems ever about to cease, and he seemed to be the disembodied
soul of a sleeper, vague, homeless, wandering, softly taking a dim
joy in all the misty, dense forget-me-not, pansy, cornflower, Jacob’s
ladder, wallflower, love-in-a-mist and rose of the borders, before the
day of work once more began.
So I followed the owl across the green and past the church until I
came to the deserted farm. There the high-porched barn, the doorless
stables, the cumbered stalls, the decaying house, received something
of life from the owl, from the kind twilight or from my working mind.
Above the little belfry on the housetop the flying fox of the weather
vane was still, fixed for ever by old age in the south, recording not
the hateful east, the crude and violent north, the rainy west wind.
Whether because the buildings bore upon their surfaces the marks of
many generations of life, all harmoniously continuous, or whether
because though dead and useless they yet seemed to enjoy and could
speak to a human spirit, I do not know, but I could fancy that,
unaided, they were capable of inspiring afresh the idea of immortality
to one who desired it. Mosses grew on the old tiles and were like
moles for softness and rotundity. A wind that elsewhere made no sound
talked meditatively among the timbers. The village Maypole, transported
there a generation ago, stood now as a flagstaff in the yard, and had
it burst into leaf and flower it would hardly have surprised. Billows
of tall, thick nettle, against the walls and in every corner, were a
luxuriant emblem of all the old careless ease of the labourers who,
despite their sweat and anxiety and hopelessness, yet had time to lean
upon their plough or scythe or hoe to watch the hounds or a carriage
go by. Tall tansy and fleabane and hawkweeds and dandelions, yellow
blossoms, stood for the bright joys of the old life. The campions on
the hedge, the fumitory in the kitchen garden, meant the vague moods
between sorrow and joy, speaking of them as clearly as when from out of
the church flows the litany, charged with the emotion of those who hear
it not though lying near. Had the wise owner admitted these things and
for their sake obeyed the command of the will which bade him leave the
Green Farm untouched? He might well have done so had he seen the birth
of colour after colour in the dawn.
At first, when doves began to coo and late cuckoos to call in invisible
woods beyond, I thought that the green of grass was alive again; but
that was only because I knew it was grass and could translate its grey.
The green trees were still black above a lake of white mist far off
when the yellows of hawkweed and tansy rose up. The purple fumitory,
the blue of speedwells, came later. And then, as I turned a shadowy
corner and came out into the broad half light just before sunrise, I
saw the crimson of innumerable poppies that had a thought of mist pearl
enmeshed amongst them.
They were not fifty yards away--they were in a well-known place--and
yet there towered high walls and gloomed impassable moats between
them and me, such was the strangeness of their beauty. Had they been
reported to me from Italy or the East, had I read of them on a supreme
poet’s page, they could not have been more remote, more inaccessible,
more desirable in their serenity. Something in me desired them,
might even seem to have long ago possessed and lost them, but when
thought followed vision as, alas! it did, I could not understand their
importance, their distance from my mind, their desirableness, as of a
far-away princess to a troubadour. They were stranger than the high
stars, as beautiful as any woman new-born out of summer air, though
I could have reaped them all in half an hour. A book in a foreign,
unknown language which is known to be full of excellent things is a
simple possession and untantalising compared with these. They proposed
impossible dreams of strength, health, wisdom, beauty, passion--could
I but relate myself to them more closely than by wonder, as a child to
a ship at sea which, after all, he may one day sail in, or of a lover
for one whom he may some day attain. I was glad and yet I fatigued
myself by a gladness so inhuman. Did men, I asked myself, once upon a
time have simply an uplifting of the heart at a sight like this? Or
were they destined in the end to come to that--a blissful end? Had
I offended against the commonwealth of living things that I was not
admitted as an equal to these flowers? Why could they not have vanished
and left me with my first vision, instead of staying and repeating that
it would be as easy to draw near to the stars as to them?
And yet the mind is glad, if it is troubled, of an impossible, far-away
princess. She deceives the mind as Columbus deceived his weary sailors
by giving out at the end of each day fewer knots than they had truly
travelled, in order that they should not lose courage at the immensity
of the voyage.
And still the poppies shone and the blackbird sang from his tower of
ivory.