The Milking Hour

This post dedicated to our new member Simona Cola from Italy. Lovely to think that the Society is spreading its wings in another direction. Simona is of course not portrayed in the photo above - it's one from the BBC Library!

Poem 4 ~ Glinton 2009

The sun had grown on lessening day
A table large and round
And in the distant vapours grey
Seemed leaning on the ground
When Mary like a lingering flower
Did tenderly agree
To stay beyond her milking hour
And talk awhile with me

We wandered till the distant town
Had silenced nearly dumb
And lessened on the quiet ear
Small as a beetles hum
She turned her buckets upside and down
And made us each a seat
And there we talked the evening brown
Beneath the rustling wheat

And while she milked her breathing cows
I sat beside the streams
In musing o’er our evening joys
Like one in pleasant dreams
The bats and owls to meet the night
From hollow trees had gone
And e’en the flowers had shut for sleep
And still she lingered on

We mused in rapture side by side
Our wishes seemed as one
We talked of times retreating tide
And sighed to find it gone
And we had sighed more deeply still
O’er all our pleasures past
If we had known what now we know
That we had met the last.

4 comments:

Arborfield said...

... and son David and I have now set this to music. I can't help singing it in my head!

Simona said...

Thanks Roger, It is an honor that I dream not of... to have a dedication!!!

Lionel Little said...

Some of Clare's poems are so well composed that the syllables of the words become like musical notes when spoken aloud....However:-
'We mused in capture'. Shouldn't this be: 'We mused in rapture' ?

Arborfield said...

How right you are... duly altered. It's my typing finger that's to blame!

RR