The Wild Sky

Here from the corridor of an English train,
I see the landscape slide through glancing rain,
A land so personal that every leaf
Unfolds as if to witness human life,
And every aging milestone seems to know
That human hands inscribed it, long ago.

Oasthouse and garden, narrow bridge and hill—
Landscape with figures, where a change of style
Comes softened in a water-colour light
By Constable; and always, shire on shire,
The low-pitched sky sags like a tent of air
Beneath its ancient immaterial weight.

The weather in these gentle provinces
Moves like the shift of daylight in a house,
Subdued by time and custom. Sun and rain
Are intimate, complaisant to routine,
Guests in the garden. Year on country year
Has worn the edge of wildness from this air.

And I remember that unblunted light
Poured out all day from a prodigious height—
My country, where the blue is miles too high
For minds of men to graze the leaning sky.
The telegraph may rise or timber fall,
That last frontier remains, the vertical.

Men there are beanstalk climbers, all day long
Haunted by stilts they clattered on when young.
Giants no longer, now at mortal size
They stare into that upward wilderness.
The vertical reminds them what they are,
And I remember I am native there.