O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven,
Make simpler daily the beating of man’s heart; within,
There in the ring where name and image meet,
Inspire them with such a longing as will make his thought
Alive like patterns a murmuration of starlings,
Rising in joy over wolds, unwittingly weave.
Here too on our little reef display your power,
This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp,
The mote between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea;
And make us as Newton was who, in his garden watching
The apple falling towards England, became aware
Between himself and her of an eternal tie.
For now that dream which so long had contented our will,
I mean, of uniting the dead into a splendid empire,
Under whose fertilising flood the Lancashire moss
Sprouted up chimneys, and Glamorgan hid a life
Grim as a tidal rock-pool’s in its glove-shaped valleys,
Is already retreating into her maternal shadow;
Leaving the furnaces gasping in the impossible air,
That flotsam at which Dumbarton gapes and hungers;
While upon wind-loved Rowley no hammer shakes
The cluster of mounds like a midget golf-course, graves
Of some who created these intelligible dangerous marvels,
Affectionate people, but crude their sense of glory.
Far-sighted as falcons, they looked down another future;
For the seed in their loins were hostile though afraid of their pride,
And, tall with a shadow now, inertly wait.
In bar, in netted chicken-farm, in lighthouse,
Standing on these impoverished constricted acres,
The ladies and gentlemen apart, too much alone,
Consider the years of the measured world begun,
The barren virtuous marriage of stone and water.
Yet, O, at this very moment of a hopeless sigh,
When, inland, they are thinking their thoughts but watching these islands
As children in Chester look to Moel Fammau to decide
On picnics by the clearness or withdrawal of her treeless crown.
Some possible dream, long coiled in the ammonite’s slumber
Is uncurling, prepared to lay on our talk and reflection
Its military silence, its surgeon’s idea of pain;
And out of the future into actual history,
As when Merlin, tamer of horses, and his lords to whom
Stonehenge was still a thought, the Pillars passed
And into the undared ocean swung north their prow,
Drives through the night and star-concealing dawn
For the virgin roadsteads of our hearts an unwavering keel.