Not tasselled palm or bended cypress wooing
The languid wind on temple-crownÈd heights,
Not heaven’s myriad stars in lustre strewing
Smooth sapphire bays in hushed Ionian nights,
Not the clear peak of dawn-encrimsoned snow,
Or plumage-lighted wood, or gilded pile
Sparkling amid the imperial city’s glow,
Endears our Isle.
Thine the weird splendour of the restless billow
For ever breaking over lonely shores,
The reedy mere that is the wild-swan’s pillow,
The crag to whose torn spire the eagle soars,
The moorland where the solitary hern
Spreads his grey wings upon the breezes cold,
The pink sweet heather’s bloom, the waving fern,
The gorse’s gold.
And we who draw our being from thy being,
Blown by the untimely blast about the earth,
Back in love’s visions to thy bosom fleeing,
Droop with thy sorrows, brighten with thy mirth;
O, from afar, with sad and straining eyes,
Tired arms across the darkness and the foam
We stretch to thy bluff capes and sombre skies,
BelovÈd home!
The nurselings of thy moorlands and thy mountains,
Thy children tempered by thy winter gales,
Swayed by the tumult of thy headlong fountains
That clothe with pasture green thy grassy vales,
True to one love in climes’ and years’ despite,
We yearn, in our last hour, upon thy breast,
When the Great Darkness wraps thee from our sight,
To sink to rest!
George Francis Savage-Armstrong.
