free-verse132 lines

Burning Bush

by John Drinkwater

From babyhood I have known the beauty of earth,

I learnt it, I think, in the strange months before birth,

I learnt it passing and passing by each moon

From the harvest month into my natal June.

My mother, the dear, the lovely I hardly knew,

Bearing me must have walked and wandered through

Stubble of silver or gold, as moon or sun

Lit earth in the days when my body was begun.

And then October with leaves splendid and blown

She watched with my little body a little grown,

And winter fell, and into our being passed

Firm frost and icy rivers and the blast

Of winds that on the iron clods of plough

Beat with an unseen charging. Then the bough

Of spring came green, and her glad body stirred

With a son's wombed leaping, and she heard

Songs of the air and woods and waterways,

And with them singing the coming of my days.

And nesting time drew on to summer flowers,

And me unborn she taught through patient hours.

Then on that first June day, with spices blown

Of roses over clover crops unmown,

And grey wind-lifted leaves and blossom of bean,

She gave her dear white beauty to the keen

Anguish of women, and brought my body to birth

Already skilled in the sculptures of the earth.

Then in the days when her breasts nourished me,

Daily she walked, that happy girl, to see

How summer prospered to bring the harvest on,

And how the gardens and how the orchards shone

With scarlet and blue and yellow flowers and fruit,

And hear with equal love the lonely flute

Of legendary satyrs in the wood,

Or the still voice of Christ in bachelorhood.

And she would come I know to me her son

With lovely secret gossip of journeys done

In fields where some day my own feet should go.

It was not gossip in words that I could not know,

Mere ease and pleasure for her mother wit,

But such as I could feel the joy of it

Beating about my baby blood and sense,

Maternal tending of intelligence

In the unwhispered rites of bosom and lip,

Divinings worded in bodily fellowship.

And every shape and colour and scent she knew,

Were intimations winding, folding, through

My infancies of flesh and thought, each one

To find its unblemished record and copy done

In little moods drawn from the suckling-breast...

That now, in manhood, when I find the nest

Of the chaffinch moulded in the elder tree,

And looking on that lichen cup can see

The images of eternity and space

Lavished upon a small bird's dwelling-place:

Or when from some blue passage of the sky

I know that also colour can prophesy:

Or, ghosted on the brushing tides of wheat,

The gossip of a Galilean street,

So many Sabbaths gone, I hear again,

And his hands plucking that immortal grain:

Or when by spectral ancestries I pass

Again to Eden, as the orchard grass

Gives out the scent of mellow apples blown

From windy boughs, all these, I know, were known

By that dear mother when the boy to come

Was the zeal and gospel of her martyrdom.

Then came the time when I could walk with her,

We pilgrims of the fields, with everywhere

Strange leaves, and spreading of earth, and hedgerow themes,

And mossy walls, and bubbling of the streams,

And the way of clouds, and the full moon to wane,

The bird-song in the lilacs after rain,

And month by month the coming of the flowers,

for me to learn in speech, as had been ours

Knowledge unspoken while she fashioned me...

And then she died; and I went on to be

Through lonely boyhood her disciple still,

A wanderer by many a Berkshire hill,

By water-meadows of the Oxford plain,

By the thick oaks of Avon, with the strain

Of an old yeoman wisdom dreaming on

New beauty ever following beauty gone,

Until I knew my earth and her raiment fair

In every difference of the seasons' wear,

Long years her scholar, with learning of her ways

To slip unleasht all singing into praise

Should learning yet by some enchantment be

Bidden to passion's better husbandry.

And the enchanted bidding fell. And you,

O Love, it was that spelt the earth anew.

O Love, you silent wayfarer,

How many years all unaware

By blackthorn hedge, and spinney green

With larch, I wandered, while unseen

You in my shadow walked, nor made

Even a whisper in the shade.

O Love, on many an evening hill

I watched the day go down, the still

Dark woods, the far great rivers wind,

Thin threads of light. And I was blind,

Or seeing knew not, for you were

Beside me still, yet hidden there.

O Love, as year by year went on,

And budding primroses were gone,

And berries fell, and still the bright

Crocuses came in the night,

You left me to my task alone,

O Love, so near me and unknown.

O Love, though she who bore me set

Earth's love for ever on me, yet

Some word withheld still troubled me,

Some presence that I could not see,

Till you, dear alien, should come,

And doctrine be no longer dumb.

O Love, one April night I heard

The doctrine's everlasting word,

And you beneath that starry sky,

Unknown, were with me suddenly,

Yet there was no new meeting then,

But some old marriage come again.

O Love, and now is earth my friend,

Telling me all, until the end

When I shall in the earth be laid

With all my maps and fancies made,

And you, Love, were the secret earth

Of my blind following from birth.

O Love, you happy wayfarer,

Be still my fond interpreter,

Of all the glory that can be

As once on starlit Winchelsea,

Finding upon my pilgrim way

A burning bush for every day.