Winter landscape 1946

So hard, this world—
this winter world is metal-hard
the ploughlands rusty iron
the sky a bent steel plate
solid black ice.

The epochs mingle, interchange:
Ice Age and Iron Age in confusion.
Ice-plated briar and new barbed wire
both bright, cruel, flesh-tearing
implacable metal—
so hard this world, so sharp, so pitiless:
so keen the thorns, the barbs,
tearing the flesh, the mind.

Wrapped round, waist-tied, clumping knee-booted
in the timeless clumsy clothes of country winter
the farm men bulk dark against the snow-drift
in the shapeless shapes of medieval peasants
against the leaden sky of Brueghel's winter.

By the bare hedgerow
the young woodman gives a cheery greeting,
his strong hand holding now the fagging-hook
not long since a sub-machine gun—
the faded beret then an angrier red,
he in another countryside, at war.
He's home, the uncertain victor—
not here the laceration of the mind
where I avoid the pain of chance encounter,
letting my eyes meet in unguarded frankness
those in the strained face of a fair-haired youth
ploughing a field to me so known, so loved—
to him a slave's task in a conqueror's land:
the prisoner behind the lunatic bars
of a world gone mad around us.

Oh, so much easier
to have seen the captives led in ancient triumphs,
hysteria screening over the inner mind
with some pretence of victory.

But now the world, the winter,
so cold, so hard, so merciless—
mankinde is fall'n againe, shrunke a degree
a step below his very Apostacye.
And so, Sir Roger, you had seen it too
three hundred winters past: your day and mine,
in England then and now—
so hard, so cold.

Winter 1946

NOTES

Sir Roger L'Estrange (1616-1704), English pamphleteer, author and Royalist: SP has used his quotation on Beaumont's and Fletcher's plays