Richard Scrace
Richard Scrace is the pen-name of Mrs J. B. Williamson ef Guelph, Ontario. England, My Dreamland, was first published m The Queen, London, England; and Venice in The Globe.
ENGLAND, MY DREAMLAND
YOU call from your chalk cliffs! But I am in a garden green, And a wide sea between, England, my dreamland!
To me your hedge flowers, daffodils
Remote as fairy gold; and yet,
The kinship-sense, that in me lives
A life unchecked by earth s regret,
Has found its closest touch with kin
Beside some ivied manor-wall.
I tread the roads of centuried dust
And dew-distilled enchantments fall.
All songs your poets sang, I hear.
In fields by undaunted legions won
I see their splendour, as the dawn
Shows my unwondering eyes the sun.
In war s sonorous litanies
I help the priest and people chant:
And on my cheek a chilly wind
Blows and the flaming candles slant. . . .
learned your story when my world Was compassed by the pasture bars: Learned as I learned the names of flowers And conned the mythics of the stars.
The fighting men! again they come Up from the plains of mystery: "hey watch above your castle heights, The passion of the world to see.
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