By Severn

By Severn

Ivor Gurney

If England, her spirit lives anywhere

It is by Severn, by hawthorns and grand willows.

Earth heaves up twice a hundred feet in air

And ruddy clay falls scooped out to the weedy shallows.

There in the brakes of May Spring has her chambers,

Robing-rooms of hawthorn, cowslip, cuckoo flower —

Wonder complete changes for each square joy's hour,

Past thought miracles are there and beyond numbers.

If for the drab atmospheres and managed lighting

In London town, Oriana's playwrights had

Wainlode her theatre and then coppice clad

Hill for her ground of sauntering and idle waiting.

Why, then I think, our chiefest glory of pride

(The Elizabethans of Thames, South and Northern side)

Would nothing of its needing be denied,

And her sons praises from England's mouth again be outcried.