The Heart of England/Chapter 44

by Edward Thomas

CHAPTER XLIV

THE MARSH

The sun has gone down. Except on one hand, the immense empty marshland expands to the sea, and where it mingles with the grey water would be uncertain, but for the clamour of the wading birds and the gleam, now and then, of a white wing. The low bent thorns, inland, now take on a strange humanity, as of men who have ventured out into the solitude and pitched their tents there and none has followed them; they are bent in alarmed and hurrying attitudes away from the sea, but cannot leave it. The sea rises steeply up like a vast ploughed field to an uncertain sky of the same hue. All that greyness takes hold upon the mind like autumn rain and lures it to we know not what desperate carelessness; and the siren, that sweet evil of the sea, chants such dissolving melodies as this:—

"The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head;
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
Where are now the warring kings,
Word be-mockers?—By the Rood
Where are now the warring kings?
An idle word is now their glory,
By the stammering schoolboy said,
Reading some entangled story:
The kings of the old time are fled.
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden, flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie…"

But at one hand lies the first house in the world, a little ark of grey stone, pierced by windows behind which a velvet darkness weaves a spell and by a gloomy doorway; knock there and at once you will be barricaded again against the annihilating sea and night. All about it a trim garden of white and gold and dying red sends up a thin tower of scent that stands bravely in the salt wind. A tower!—at such an hour, when the casements of all the senses are opened wide upon eternity, this perfume not only satisfies the desiring and aspiring sense, but, with all its unsearched, undiscovered powers, builds for us here upon the shore a specular tower and, more, a palace lovely and shadowy, where the mind roves slowly and at ease, saluting vaguely apprehended shapes, finding now long lost memories of men and things which time has locked against a thousand keys, and now bold hopes and unexpected consolations. Content herself lurks here and many a pleasant ghost that seems immortal because it has died many times, and they may be enjoyed, until suddenly the night wind, without mercy, overturns the tower and desolates the palace and leaves us forsaken. Yonder the lighthouse flashes. The ships go out with wings as of a moth that cannot leave its chrysalis behind. The church bells moan; the sea birds whimper and shriek, and the road that goes on so long as we can walk lengthens out along the marsh and up the hill.