Canto II Literary Map of Exeter & Devon connection: Dean Prior; Robert Herrick

Canto II – A Little Village

“This wall stood long

Goat-grey, red-stained, kingdoms rose and fell,

Surviving storms; high curved arch crumbled.

Now moulders…”

-        The Ruin

This earth seldom entertains

the will of its smaller citizens – but

nor does it kill that which insists to fight;

it will bite the bricks and gnaw the mortar

and salivate the timber into slime and shreds

but it will not protest the fresh stone,

hot mortar, new dead shining oak –

do not mistake father time for his scythe

when he carries only illness and it is man

and man alone who murders. Yet this

smattering of stone quarters has seen much

of man and his doings – not, perhaps,

the wars and weddings and whisking

wheels which wrack and ruin the rest

of civilization; but it has tasted love and hate

and stood quietly by, resting in the lids

of dunnocks, to watch mothers tease their

children and fathers strike their sons and

daughters plant seed after desperate seed

into a cracked and dusky soil. So often

did these circles run, so fond were these

dust puppets of their rites and ritual,

that the hares hardly noticed the arrival

of Jonson’s protégé, with his book and his quill

and his sugared dreams of God.

The land was sobered and shaken

by concertos of lyric and ligament

and found its flowers weeping

and its roots chuckling

at the flagrancy of his verse –

a man with eyes to see

the liquid silks and unplucked roses

of youthful glee. When the wigged masses

traded tradition for mouths and blades, this son

of the ancients rebelled and the bluebells wilted

to witness Herrick leave in scorn his chapelled home,

decrying his people’s primitivity. The earth shipped

many a lark to stalk the poet’s progress

and hoisted stanzas back to the grass

on the backs of feathers and fleas – until

the poet, succoured by life, traipsed home to die.

Though the slab atop his chthonic bed

lies lichened and bare, the earth remembers

the songs of Herrick and would forgive

his discontent for the chance to hear

one more melody. Today, the only sound

on that hallowed ground is the passing whine

of black-clogged cars. Distraught

and abandoned, the land cries:

gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

before you are tarred and graved

into the common man’s motorway.

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