This week’s poem is by John Clare and is a celebration of the early days of autumn when you can still get lovely hot days like today has been. I am keeping is short this week as I am on holiday with friends.
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
John Clare (1793—1864)
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.
Poem 182. Autumn
The thistledown’s flying, though the winds are all still,
On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,
The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;
Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.
The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,
The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.
The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.
Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we’re eying burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.
I first heard this poem, as so many others, read by Richard Burton on an audio tape many years ago. It really makes one think of a rare hot autumn day with late seeds in the air, the ground perhaps dry and broken from a long summer of heat and the sense that this heat might go on and on.
Links
- Listen to Richard Burton reading of the poem on YouTube.